WATCH THIS VIDEO

This amazing video was projected on the Astronomical Clock tower in Prague for its 600th anniversary. I don't know how they did it, but it's pretty fantastic.

The 600 Years from the macula on Vimeo.

Hiking in the High Tatras

Last weekend we went up to the High Tatras to go hiking. This, as I’m sure you realize, was not my idea. I went because I’d not spent much time in that area before, and I wanted to see the beautiful nature* for which the area is famous. At first we’d arranged to meet some of the teachers from Poland, but they ran into transportation difficulties—apparently all of the trains coming into Slovakia were sold out—so it ended up just being the four of us. We’d also first planned to go on Friday afternoon, do the main hike on Saturday, and come back on Sunday, but instead left on Saturday morning so that people could get more stuff done before the trip.

We took buses to Poprad, and from there took a train to Popradské pleso. When we got to the train station in Poprad, the signs for our train listed the platform as “TEŽ” rather than a number. TEŽ stands for Tatranské Elektrické Železnice, the electric railroad that runs to the resorts and towns in the Tatras. Like many trains that go to areas frequented by tourists, this train had announcements not only in Slovak but also in German and English.

We got off at Popradské pleso and walked up a road for about an hour to get to the actual lake (a pleso is a high mountain lake) and our hotel. There are lots of chaty to stay in on hiking routes; these are cabins which often have dorm-type accommodations. On the shores of Popradské pleso, though, is an actual hotel. It was probably nicer than the one I live in, but it wasn’t greatly luxurious. We each paid about 16€ for our night’s stay in a six-bed room with bathrooms down the hall. (I didn’t see showers anywhere. Maybe if you’re a hardcore hiker you just don’t shower for as long as you’re on your trek.)

Once we’d checked in and eaten lunch, we started off on our hike. We were heading for Velké Hincovo pleso, the highest lake in Slovakia. It was a pretty hike; we crossed rivers running over rocks, and saw snow high in the mountains above us. It was also hard. For some reason I didn’t expect there to be so many rocks on the trail. In places it was like climbing stairs. After a while we were stopping every few minutes for a break, and soon I decided I couldn’t go any further. (On one of those breaks we saw one of our second years coming down with his parents. He seemed rather surprised to see us, and his father kept telling him to tell us to get a move on and not waste time if we wanted to reach the lake.) My legs were tired, and my knees were starting to ache, and it wasn’t going to be a lot easier going down than going up; so though it galled me, I admitted defeat. I was pretty frustrated for a while, since I was trying to prove that I could do it, and I hated having to give up. But being able to walk in the future was pretty important, and it’s not like I was going to miss seeing something I actually cared deeply about. If there had been an awesome castle at the end of the hike, I would have kept going. So Robin, who’d already seen the lake, didn’t care about seeing it again, and had already joked that she was a quitter, went back down the trail with me. We walked around the pleso and relaxed for a while before the other two got back.

The next morning H went up another trail and the rest of us walked the trail around the lake to the symbolic cemetery. The cemetery has plaques and memorials to people who have died in the Tatras. Most of the people were climbers and hikers, although there are two memorials for people who died in plane crashes in the mountains, too, including a group of soldiers during the Slovak National Uprising. The mountains around us kept appearing and disappearing in the fog.

Before we could get back on public transportation, we had to get down to Štrbské pleso. Originally we had planned to come up this trail on Friday evening, and it turned out to be a good thing we didn’t, since it would have been a steep, rocky, dark climb then. On Sunday morning it was beautiful, because we walked through the fog. We couldn’t always see the valley to our left. I think this trail was my favorite, and not because it was the one we were leaving by. We could actually see the fog moving around us, and quickly, too.

In towns and villages in Slovakia, people don’t always acknowledge or greet you. They may even look at you with suspicion if you say hello. But on the hiking trails there was more camaraderie, and a definite informality. People greeted us, sometimes with the formal “Dobrý deň,” but often with a simple “Ahojte” (hi, plural). Perhaps it was just because it’s hard to ignore someone on the same trail you’re using. Whatever the reason, it was nice to be greeted, and I liked observing all the different kinds of people who passed us.

So now I can strike “Hiking in the Tatras” off my list of things I never actually intended to do in life. This coming weekend is fall break, and I’ll be returning to a place I’ve already visited, with a new twist. Here’s a video clue. Get excited; I am.


* “The beautiful nature” is something we hear about all the time. People don’t spend time outdoors, they go to the nature. It’s got to the point where it’s very hard for me to even suggest any alternative phrase to “the nature.”

Orava

The problem with having been here for two years is that by now all of the places I’d like to go are the ones that are the least easy to get to. These are the ones that it takes a bus and three trains to get to, and four buses to get home from, and that mean leaving earlier on a Saturday than one usually gets up on a weekday. I am committed to seeing as many things as I can, though, especially my castles and World Heritage Sites.

If you’re a classic cinema fan, you might recognize Orava Castle from the old black-and-white vampire film Nosferatu. (I can’t even imagine how inexpensive it was to film in Slovakia in the 1920s.) Orava is one of the country’s most famous castles, and it was only the travel time that kept me from visiting it before. But on Saturday Tika and I went up north, taking a bus from Tisovec to Banská Bystrica, then trains from Bystrica to Vrútky, then Kraľovany, and finally Oravský Podzámok. On the way home we took buses from Oravský Podzámok to Dolný Kubín, then to Ružomberok, Bystrica, and home.

From the train station in Oravský Podzámok, you walk to the left, which takes you across the Orava River. Once you’ve crossed the river, the entrance to the castle grounds is on the right side. When we first saw the castle from the train, we expected it to be up higher, because there are higher hills in the area; but it’s a tricksy castle. It doesn’t look like much of a climb, but once you’re inside, you move upward pretty steadily. From the top of the citadel it’s a fair drop pretty much straight down.
Our tour group entered the castle (through the door with the dragon handle!) at 10:50. We passed through the first two gates, then a tunnel into the lower castle area. Like Fiľakovo, Orava has three distinct levels: the lower, middle, and upper castles. When we were entering the first room, one of the armouries, I needed to clarify with the guide where I could take pictures, so I went up and did the whole 'I don't speak much Slovak but...' thing. She spoke some English, though, so not only did I get my answer about photographs, but she also gave us some information about things she'd already said, and told us that there were explanatory texts in some of the rooms.

Like other castles, Orava had been used as a defensive position for quite a while (on the high ground), and the castle has been rebuilt and expanded several times in its history. Many of the governors of the castle were from the Austro-Hungarian nobility. Some of the furnished rooms in the castle are fairly modern--that is, from the 18th century and possibly later.

In a fairly predictable fashion, my favorite room was the "Knights' Hall," which was decorated with paintings of hunters and this Davy Crockett-type dude about to kill him a bar.

Lonely Planet says the tour is "long" without being more specific. Our tour, excluding the chapel, which was an additional two euros, ran about an hour and forty minutes. It didn't feel long, though, and it covered a lot of the castle. Besides the furnished rooms, there was also an exhibit on the geography and natural life in the Orava region, with a stuffed two-faced goat kid and more normal taxidermied subjects.

I felt a bit disoriented on the tour, because we were passing through rooms and hallways, sometimes emerging into courtyards and onto balconies, and always moving up toward the highest point. I would not recommend the tour for people with serious vertigo or inner-ear imbalances; when we climbed the last set of stairs to the citadel, I was feeling a little dizzy. The citadel is the highest part, the easiest to defend, and on the back side the drop goes right down the rock face into the river. True to the Central European spirit of "If you're dumb enough to hurt/kill yourself, don't blame us," there was a window wide open in the citadel with nary a protective barrier between a visitor and highly-probable death.

Unfortunately (for me, perhaps fortunately for readers), I feel like I'm running out of things to say about castles. I liked Orava, although even now, as I'm writing about it and remembering being there, I still feel a little off-balance. The weather, as you can see, was fantastic, and the trees around the castle hill were beautiful. The one major bummer was that we didn't see any of the historical skits that are apparently sometimes performed on the grounds, although we did see a couple who'd just gotten married in the chapel. Orava Castle is definitely a cool place, but the verticality of it and the resultant physiological reaction probably rules it out of the running for my future castle home.

I Am Not Making This Up

This watertastes like Froot Loops.

How Do People Live Like This?

“That in the back yard? Oh, that’s just the castle.”

Seriously. How do you go about your everyday life with a castle ruin sitting there? I guess after a while you really would grow accustomed to it; but I know that if I moved to a place where you can see the castle from a lot of places in town, I’d spend much of my time staring at it. I was staring at this castle so much on Saturday that I might have accidentally ignored someone from the school who said hello to me in English.

This is Fiľakovo, or Fülek if you’re Hungarian (or Falafel if you're my dad). Fiľakovo is one of the southernmost cities in central Slovakia. If you went much further south, you would be in Hungary. Because of this, a large portion of the population of Fiľakovo is ethnically Hungarian, and most people seem to be bilingual. Many signs are in both languages, although Slovak has precedence. The problem is that you never know which language someone is going to start talking to you in. Furthermore, I can't be sure if someone's just using Slovak words I don't know or actually speaking Hungarian until I've been listening for a minute. This led to me just staring at at least one person until he asked, "English?" So I guess that technique worked for me.

Early Saturday morning I got on the train, and arrived in Fiľakovo right around 8:00. The castle didn't open until 10, but I figured I'd have a look around the town first. It's not a huge place, and the biggest tourist draw is certainly the castle. I had a walk around the town park, with the "mini-zoo," and wandered around the Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary (kostol nanebovzatia Panny Márie). It's good that I went into the latter, since last week I had a dream where I said, "I need to go to a church." When I walked in, I thought, "There you are, subconscious, and you were right; this is good." The church has a monastery connected to it, and as I was walking around, a Franciscan friar came in and said something in some language to me. I just smiled and kept looking at the side altars.

I liked walking around the park. It was pleasant overall, but it also had one really pretty maple tree. Pictures do not do justice to this tree.

Finally it was time for the castle to open. The man at the ticket office tried Hungarian first, and then Slovak, whereupon I answered something like "Yes. No! Everything," while waving my hands at the castle. (I have also identified this problem: if I don't really understand what someone is saying, I tend to say yes to whatever they ask.) This is when he tried English. He was very nice and gave me the youth ticket price, even after I'd said that I was a year over the cutoff, and told me to stop by before I left and he'd show me aerial photos of the castle site.
As I'm sure you know, Slovakia used to be part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But a little bit of Slovakia also belonged to the Ottoman Empire, and that bit was around Fiľakovo. The town was the seat of the northernmost sanjak or administrative region of the empire. This is why the town's crest has a palm tree on it.

Most of the castle is in ruins now; the only part that is a complete building is "Bebek's Tower," which has an exhibition on the history of the castle (in Slovak and Hungarian). It's a little bit weird to see gold plates and pitchers with Arabic writing and Islamic designs on them in Slovakia. Even weirder was that the temporary exhibition on the top floor of the tower was of African masks, musical instruments, and dolls.

The castle used to be much bigger than the site is now. What is left is part of the old upper and middle portions. The lower castle is now part of the town. Like Edinburgh, Fiľakovo Castle was built on an extinct volcano. The rock that remains looks very different in the two places, though. When you're actually in Edinburgh Castle, you can't tell that the site is a former volcano, whereas in Fiľakovo, it's easy to see. The rock it's built on is flowy and even to my un-geologically-trained eye it just looks like metamorphic rock. The photo below contrasts the natural stone and the dressed stone of the semicircular tower there. The guide pointed out that this castle had an advantage over Šomoška, which you might recall is built on basalt. Fiľakovo is on something more like sandstone, which means that the builders were able to bore through the rock and dig wells. This is highly advantageous if you're constructing a stronghold.

(Maybe I should publish a pamphlet about how to build a castle. It'd be, like, "Captain Ahab's Guide to Your Fortress of Dreams" or something, and full of historical paraphrases. I have a bad habit of paraphrasing historical figures and events in class. My version of the Zimmermann Telegram from World War I went "Dear Mexico...Love, Germany.")

From what I understand, the castle's importance diminished after the Turks lost control of the area. Once Fiľakovo was just part of Austro-Hungary again, the castle wasn't really necessary. But it remains a symbol of the town and a good reminder of an exceptional period in the history of southern Slovakia.

The theme at church this week was thanks for the harvest, and this was one of the readings. Sometimes, when you're as spoiled as I am, you forget to be thankful. This was a pertinent reminder for me to give thanks, because I really do live in a good land.

For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land—a land with streams and pools of water, with springs flowing in the valleys and hills; a land with wheat and barley, vines and fig trees, pomegranates, olive oil and honey; a land where bread will not be scarce and you will lack nothing; a land where the rocks are iron and you can dig copper out of the hills.

When you have eaten and are satisfied, praise the Lord your God for the good land he has given you.

Deuteronomy 8:7-10

Čau, September

Photos from around Tisovec two weeks ago.

the sheep farm

I don't know what these are, but they are definitely my favorite plants here. I think of them as "balloon plants," although the bulbs are more like Chinese lanterns than actual balloons. I always collect some and take them home in the fall. I've only ever seen them in shades of orange.

putting a new roof on CSM

the best hand-lettered "Beware of dog" sign