Worst Jobs in History

This is not strictly travel-related, but I like it so much that I've decided it doesn't matter. We'll file it under time-travel, how about that? There is a series called "The Worst Jobs in History" that I watch pretty much every time I see it's on TV. My very favorite part is from the Tudor period and is about using woad to dye fabric. And someone has put it on Youtube! Unfortunately the segment about woad has been split into two videos, but here they are. It starts around 5:09 in the first video, and the highlight starts at 1:29 in the second. Check out the whole series if you're interested.

Tisovec Days

Tisovec Days did not meet expectations. The weather was not favorable for outdoor activities, so after a promising start, things pretty much died. They didn't have the rafting, which was the most disappointing.

In lieu of specific pictures of festivities, here are some general pictures of Tisovec from Saturday.

This picture does not do justice to the fact that this building is painted pink, peach, and seafoam green with teal railings. 9146 km=5716.25 miles

The bottom part says "You cow!"

Tisovec Days 2009 Schedule

Here is the program for Dni Mesta Tisovec! The locations are included for those of you who have been to Tisovec.

Friday
1 p.m. Volleyball match in the primary school gym
8 p.m. IMT Smile concert (contemporary Slovak band) on the stage near the bus stop

Saturday
7 a.m. Market with traditional crafts and products in the town square
9 a.m. Table tennis match[es?] in the primary school gym
10 a.m. Rafting on the Rimava river
10 a.m. - 1 p.m. Exhibition of regional gastronomy and tourism in the cultural centre
2 p.m. Performance of a version of "Faust" by the local amateur theatre club in the cultural centre
3 p.m. Performance of local amateur music bands
9 p.m. Performance of pop singer Peter Cmorik from "Slovak Idol"
11 p.m. Fireworks and video-disco at the stage near the bus stop

Sunday
10 a.m. Church service
11:30 a.m. Beach volleyball (mixed couples, friendly matches) at the primary school sports area
3 p.m. and 5 p.m. Football matches of Tisovec football club at the football field [by the cemetery]

Apparently at the concert tonight there are going to be lots of drunk students. I'm most looking forward to the market tomorrow morning, where with luck I will be buying lots of little souvenirs for people, and the rafting. The Rimava goes right through the middle of town, but I don't think that's where they'll be rafting. I wish it were, though. I'd like to raft through the middle of town some day.

I'll try to have some pictures to show after the madness has ended.

Devín

If you get on a bus from downtown Bratislava and ride northish for about 20 minutes you'll be in the town of Devín. These days, Devín is one of Bratislava's pricey suburbs (although not particularly the part shown in this picture right here), in part because it's on the confluence of the Danube and Morava Rivers. That fact also means that during the Communist era Devín and especially the castle were almost completely off-limits; Austria's on the other side of the Danube, and people tried to get across the river and into the West.We, of course, went to see the castle. It's on a bit of a hill, just as it should be, and is right at the aforementioned confluence. (The nice blue water is the Danube, while the silty water feeding into it is from the Morava.) On the castle grounds there are some assorted bits and pieces other than just the main castle ruin. There are the foundations of a fourth-century chapel, which I confess were pretty boring, as well as scattered foundations of small houses and workshops and things. It reminded me of Eddie Izzard's discussion of archaeology in "Glorious": they always find "a series of small walls" (about 1:55). So then I had that phrase stuck in my head the rest of the time we were there.

Unfortunately, the upper castle is closed, I fear indefinitely, because of structural damage from the earth shifting. In the parts that are still open you can throw water down the well and listen for the splash, which was quite amusing, and look at an exhibit on archaeology in general and the excavation of the castle site. The tower above was on the Slovak 50 halier coin. It's a symbol of the Slovak nation.

It was a very pleasant visit, and I'd be most interested in going back at a future date when the upper castle is open. The next time you're in Bratislava, head on up to Devín. I was more satisfied with its castle than with Bratislava's.

Weekend Warriors

There are several good points about the public transportation here in Slovakia. It exists; it's faster than walking; in some cases, especially the case of the tiny train from Brezno to Tisovec, it can be quite pleasant. But alas, public transportation cannot get you everywhere you want to go, at least not in a timely, efficient manner. Because of that, two of my compatriots decided to rent a car this weekend to see things that are off the bus route. I was invited to join them and we saw many things that delighted me greatly.

If you have a map handy, you can follow our route. From Tisovec we drove south to Hnúšťa, then west through Kokava, Detva, Zvolen, and Žiar nad Hronom, where we turned north again. Up through Handlová and Prievidza, to Bojnice and then Čičmany, through Rajec where the water comes from to Žilina, and then Strečno; then east through Martin and Ružomberok and finally south through Banská Bystrica and the Tesco hypermarket and on to Brezno and then down, home-again-home-again-jigetty-jig to Tisovec.

Bojnice is home to the largest zoo in Slovakia, and to Bojnice Castle. Of all the castles in Slovakia, this is the one that draws comparisons to Neuschwanstein. In Slovak it's not a hrad but a zámok--not a fortress but a chateau. As with many castles, the current building was constructed on the site of earlier castles. We joined a tour that consisted of the four of us, a French (or at least francophone) couple, and a Slovak dad with two little boys. The first part that the tour went through was rooms furnished in a newer (17th to 19th century) style. There were some truly gaudy rooms, although, to their credit, gaudy in a completely unexpected way. One room, for example, had a ceiling covered in square sections, each section with a cherub's head at the center and four wings behind it, and all gold gilt. Another was done in a Turkish style, with brightly-colored panels and Arabic quotations from the Koran. The rooms had many paintings, as such places are wont to do; one painting was of two leopards attacking a moose. I did not think moose and leopards coexisted anywhere. The chapel was an enigma. The walls and ceiling were filled with 19th-century paintings, but all of the separate paintings had numbers on certain sections. It was kind of reminiscent of a paint-by-numbers, and if the guide explained the numbers, it was in Slovak, so we'll never know what they were for.

We walked through a courtyard and peered down into a deep well. Then we went into another part of the castle, and walked up a wide circular staircase and went into rooms on each floor. This part of the castle was decorated in an older style, say 16th to 17th century. It was the cooler part altogether. Most of the rooms had walls painted in elaborate designs of interlaced foliage, and some had figures of people and animals in them, too. The unpainted parts of the walls were wood-paneled, and the paneling ended in crenellations. Most of the furniture was light wood, too. This was my favorite part of the castle, and I wouldn't mind living in a place done up that way. All of the rooms smelled pleasant, like the wood they were panelled in. Lots of old houses don't smell pleasant, you know. Many of them smell like mold and stale air. Not so at Bojnice.

Next, we descended the main stairs and went into the crypt, which opened into the French garden. Ján Palffy's sarcophagus is at the center of the chapel and is made of red marble. We walked through the garden and down a set of horse stairs into another courtyard, and then further down stairs and tunnels until we were properly underground. There is a subterranean chamber at the bottom of the well. When we ascended again, we were near where the tour had started. After the tour ended we walked around the outside of the castle before we moved on.

The well from the top and from the bottom.

From Bojnice, Čičmany is just a short piece up the road. There is no castle in Čičmany, nor any spectacular natural wonders; it's a village where not too many people still live, although many of the houses are used as weekend homes. The reason to go to Čičmany is to look at those houses. There is a tradition in the village of decorating the wooden houses with white geometric designs on the dark wood. For this reason it's known as the "gingerbread village." Two of the houses have been converted into a museum, with old farm equipment, examples of the shoes that used to be made there, pretty embroidered folk costumes, and rooms set up as they would have been when families lived there. One of the women at the museum told us that four families had lived in one house: the parents in two rooms on the ground floor and the children in rooms built into the attic. This was in a house that was built in 1913. It's hard to imagine living with so many other people in such a small house. We walked around the village and admired the houses, and then moved on. I thought that perhaps all of the houses in Čičmany would be decorated, but they weren't. That did not make them less interesting, though.
Next we went to Žilina. We walked around there for a bit and got sandwiches and talked to a Mormon missionary who stopped because he heard us speaking English. Žilina has a pleasant downtown-type area to walk around in. It would be nice to go back there when I had more time.

Finally we drove a little further north to Strečno Castle. Strečno is nearly the polar opposite of Bojnice: it's a ruin, and it was definitely a hrad and not a zámok. According to the guidebook, we had arrived too late to start the last tour, but we decided to walk up anyway to get a closer look. Strečno is perched on top of a rather intimidating hill. The first portion is stairs, and then there's a flat place, and then an uphill road the rest of the way. From the bottom it looked like a ridiculous climb, but it really didn't take as long to get up as I thought it would. Once at the gate we managed to join a tour group and see the castle, which elicited high-fives all around. Only the kitchen, the chapel, and the central tower still have roofs; the rest of the castle is open. The views from the tower are amazing. To one side of the castle are hills covered with trees; on the other sides are farmland and the broad Vah river. The sky had cleared and it was magnificent up there.
In the chapel we read about Žofia Bosniaková, a lady who used to live at Strečno. She was a very good woman, and when she died she was buried in the crypt beneath the chapel. Some 45 years later it was discovered that her remains were preserved fairly well. They moved her, but there is a replica-mummy on display now.
When the tour was done we scrambled around the ruins for a bit, but couldn't spend too long, as they were trying to close up for the night. (We also suspected that they were having a staff barbecue there after hours, because from the tower we saw someone building a fire in some kind of grill.) More high-fives ensued, and we drove home happy with what we had been able to see.

Mjoksiglandi Presents

This is an admittedly completely dorky video I made with pictures of Tisovec. It is very simple, with no fancy animation or whatnot, just pictures (more or less in chronological order) and music. I enjoy it, and I hope you will too.

Practicalities, Issue 1

Welcome to “Practicalities,” a limited series in the Mjoksiglandi universe. (I’ve been reading a lot about comic books recently, can’t you tell?) I suppose if I’m going to discuss practical, everyday issues in a foreign country, I should start with something like public transportation or grocery shopping. But today I will be talking about something even more important: going to the movies.

Here in Tisovec there’s a cultural center where we have a lot of school events. On Tuesdays at 7 PM there’s often a movie. These aren’t brand-new movies, but they’re usually only a few months old. It’s more like Temeku than the theater at the mall. The Tisovec kino shows mostly American movies, with a Slovak, Czech, or French movie every month or so. American movies here are either dubbed or subtitled, of course. If the movie is specifically aimed at kids or families (“Madagascar 2,” for example), it’s usually dubbed; but if it’s for older audiences, it’s usually subtitled. Sometimes the dubbing/subtitling is in Czech, sometimes Slovak. The drawbacks of the kino are that it’s often cold, it occasionally smells noxious, there are no concessions, the bathrooms are usually locked, and there have to be at least ten people for them to show the movie. When I wanted to see “Death Race,” only two other people were there, so I didn’t get to see it. Enough people came to see "Max Payne," which was ridiculous, but couldn't show up to see "Death Race," which had Jason Statham in it. It makes no sense. But I digress. The good things are that there is a movie theater, and that it only costs about €1.70 (less than $2.40) for a show. I’ve seen “Wanted,” “Sex and the City,” “Max Payne,” “High School Musical 3,” and “Twilight” here. “HSM3,” for those curious, had dubbed dialogue and subtitled songs. It was hilarious.

Last week was a very important event in my life, because “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” came out. I’d been looking forward to this movie for probably close to a year, since I’d heard it was coming out. It was scheduled to be released in the US on May 1, and this was significant cause for concern for me. I wasn’t sure when it would come out in Slovakia, and I didn’t think it would still be on in July, when I got home; but I needed to see it. Imagine my surprise when IMDb told me that the movie was coming out in Slovakia on April 30. Furthermore, last Friday was some kind of national holiday, something like Labor Day, so we had no school, and even further more, “Wolverine” was playing at the theater at the mall in Banská Bystrica. So I and an intrepid coworker headed off to see it (well, M wanted to look for shoes, too).

The first thing we discovered was that the movie theater didn’t open until 2:30 on weekday afternoons. When we returned to buy our tickets, we were able to choose our seats, like you would in a real theater. That way we (by which I mean I) didn’t have to wait around and fight with people to get the seats we wanted. As at any normal cinema, there were concessions, and I bought a medium Coke, which was the size of a “small” Coke at Regal. You could also get nachos and candy and popcorn. The door to the theater was locked until maybe ten minutes before the show started. Inside there were nice stadium seats, and some music playing when we first went in. Then the lights went down and we saw three trailers, all with subtitles: “Terminator Salvation,” “17 Again,” and “Star Trek.” After that the movie started. My major problem with the theater was that there’s an extra scene at the end of the credits, and when it started, they turned the film off, so I didn’t get to see it. That was unfortunate. Other than that, it was a good experience.

So that’s my report on movie theaters in Slovakia. The next issue of “Practicalities” will be something actually practical, like why it takes ten hours to get from here to Krakow when it should only take about four.

Footnote: "Star Trek" was bomb and "17 Again" was good, too.