Things that are different here

Bratislava, Wednesday 30 September

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own personal opinions, not those of the Fulbright Commission or the U.S. Department of State.

Update on deportation: Before I get into the main part of this post, I want to thank all of the readers who have commiserated with us on the documentation issues. Biggest thanks to the kind folks at the Wadena County Clerk of Court office, the Minnesota Secretary of State office, and most of all to my wonderful brother Steve and his wife Lois, who picked up the marriage documents in St. Paul and shipped them off to us via DHL. They arrived today and will be translated by tomorrow, so by the end of Thursday we will have everything we need to apply for our residency permit. The agency that is handling this part will arrange for us to visit the Foreign Police (doesn't that sound like fun?) on Monday to submit all of the paperwork. Tuesday would have been better for us because we have a Slovak language class that begins on Monday, but (of course) the Foreign Police do not accept new applications on Tuesdays.


Any time that you move to a new place, you notice things that are different from what your accustomed to at home. Not necessarily better or worse, but different. We've noticed a lot of these, which is to be expected given that Slovakia is a really long way from Portland by any metric. So this post is just a list of some of the things that have reminded us that we're a long way from home.

• The elevators at EUBA. The first time I rode up to my 5th floor office in the elevator, I really doubted that we would make it. Then when I rode down from the 5th floor in the elevator, I really thought we might get there prematurely via gravitational forces. Every time I've ridden in the elevator, it rattles, jiggles, shakes, and then eventually deposits me right where it is supposed to. I'm taking the stairs most of the time now. Ten flights of stairs. Every day. Up and down at least once. Keep telling me it's good for my waistline and my leg muscles.

• Toilet paper at EUBA. The bathrooms on the floor where the economics department is located are very nice and quite clean. There are two stalls in the men's room with full doors ... and there is one toilet paper dispenser ... located outside of the stalls near the (one and only) sink. So you take your toilet paper with you when you go into the stall. No tragedies yet, but I can't help thinking that this system presumes a degree of forecast accuracy that is far beyond the most optimistic reading of economists' track records.

• Lekáreň signs. In Slovakia, a pharmacy is a lekáreň and there are a lot of them. And as in every other country we've visited, pharmacies in Slovakia are signified by a big green-cross logo on their signs. That probably won't seem amusing to those of you from outside the Pacific Northwest, but in Oregon and Washington the green cross has become the universal sign for marijuana dispensaries (which sometimes also seem to be on every corner). It took us several weeks to stop thinking "Gee, there are a lot of marijuana shops over here."

• Graffiti. Graffiti are almost everywhere in Bratislava, and in most places no one bothers to clean them off of walls, buildings, signs, etc. Some of them are very artistic and border on being murals. (The one on the art school wall by our tram stop is nice. See below.) But most are just stupid scrawled tags, on top of other scrawled tags, on top of other scrawled tags, etc. The authorities do seem to keep the buildings pretty clean in the old city, but once you leave the tourist zones it's hard to find an unmarked surface. I wish I could think of graffiti as creative expression, but to my traditional eyes it's just vandalism.

• Pictures on packages. I expect different cultures to create different kinds of advertising that appeal to the particularities of their populations. But a few of the packages we've encountered in the last few weeks have seemed particularly strange. For example, will people really buy breakfast cereal with the promise that they might "win a cow"? 

• And why would the leading local soft-drink company (Kofola) think that putting a picture of fancy brown (women's?) underpants hanging from clothespins on their label would make me want to buy their soda? (Wait, don't answer that question...)

• And finally, it seems to be very fashionable here for men to walk around with about two days' growth of beard. (I'm not sure how one keeps the beard at the "scraggly" stage without it filling in or being shaved off, but that's a different point.) Really, could you imagine a father-son advertising duo with this look on a milk carton in the United States? (Mother and daughter are on the other side. Mom does not have a beard.)

• Travel ads on satellite TV. We have a fairly strange selection of television channels available via satellite. We get CNN, Sky News, Euronews, and a vast selection of Arabic, South Asian, and other channels. We found one (Pick) from Australia that has (among other things) an amusingly staged reality show featuring cases from the Australia customs service. (What will they find hidden in the packaging of these suspiciously heavy shirts? Will they let Giovanni into the country even though he looks like he might want to find a job?) But wherever we turn on our satellite channels, we run into advertisements for tourism to unlikely places. Macedonia is doing an advertising blitz on one channel, and we've seen multiple ads for Estonia, Indonesia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, and other places that would not be on my must-see list. They all look absolutely wonderful in the ads, of course, which is the point, I guess. So far, we haven't seen anything begging us to come to Syria or Afghanistan, though.

• Getting the timing right. The Internet is wonderful. It allows us to maintain a few of the familiarities of home, albeit at far different times of the day (and night). We can stream NPR through the OPB phone app and often end up listening to Morning Edition ... at dinner. I have been enjoying Twins games (especially when they are winning), but only the day games. Night games in Minnesota start at 2am here and I'm just not that much of a Twins fan. So I get to watch on Sunday evening here (afternoon there) and the occasional mid-week day game. On the other hand, I've become so used to watching English football at 7am in Portland that I am totally disconcerted by watching it in the afternoon, the time of day when the game is actually being played. Oh well, when I watch in the afternoon then when Villa lose (as they almost always do these days) it only ruins half my day, not the whole day! (Watching English football over the Internet from Slovakia was a bit of a challenge, but I've managed to figure out a way. I use the Reed proxy server to fool NBC into thinking that I'm in the U.S., then log in through our Comcast account to get access. Slick.)

• Transportation.  One of the things that's unquestionably good here is the availability of mass transit. Any of you who have taken Econ 314 from me might remember that I use transit as an example of strategic complementaries leading to multiple equilibria. For those who have not (or, perish the thought, for students who have forgotten), the idea is that if more other people ride the transit system, it makes it more attractive for me to ride. Here's how it works. If everyone uses mass transit, then there is a steady stream of revenue from full buses and trams, which allows for a large network of routes and frequent service. And with frequent service on a large network, everyone is encouraged to use mass transit, keeping the buses full and maintaining the stream of revenue. It's an equilibrium situation. But low-transit is also an equilibrium: if no one rides, then there are empty buses, little revenue, few bus lines, and infrequent service. And these conditions mean that no one will want to ride, so the low-transit system perpetuates itself. Bratislava (like most of Europe) is definitely at the high-ridership equilibrium, and I have few complaints about getting around the city by bus and tram. Once in a while there will be a delay or a missing bus, but even if one bus is missing the next one is only a few minutes behind. And so far, only one or two maniac drivers.

• Shoes ... and slippers. We have many friends at home who take off shoes at the door and tramp around the house in stocking-feet. They would be very comfortable in Slovakia, where that is the cultural expectation. But in Slovakia, each house has a rack inside the door filled with slippers for guests (and residents) to wear inside. We were a bit embarrassed when our landlady came in during our first week, immediately shed her shoes, and kind of looked around for slippers. She didn't say anything, but the next trip to Ikea we stocked up on 99-cent slippers for our guests. Suzanne sometimes uses a pair, but I like stocking-feet.

• Wine. Well, the wine is actually somewhat the same as at home, but it has taken a long time to start getting comfortable with the local production. There have been a few local cabernet sauvignon products that I have liked a lot. And there is a local bubbly called Hubert (allegedly founded by the Napoleonic soldier who defected a few blog-posts back) that is really good (and amazingly cheap). I've been buying a fair amount of French and Italian wines here but the quality has been uneven. I guess it's time to visit a real wine shop and stock up. In the meantime, our neighborhood of Karlova Ves had its annual "feast" last weekend and we spent an enjoyable Sunday taking in the festivities, eating some more trdelník and zemiakové pľacky (go back two posts to the last festival for details), and this time sampling some of the burčiak, which is the new vintage, just fermented but not aged or filtered. We tried the "white," (green?) but not the red. It looks a bit disgusting (kind of cloudy and green), but tastes OK, more like grape cider than wine, really.

Wine?

• Latitude. Portland is pretty far north. Wadena is a little farther north. But Bratislava is even farther north, about even with Bellingham, Washington, and north of Bemidji, Minnesota. It's hard to believe, given that Bratislava is well south of the most familiar parts of Europe (England, Germany, and most of France), but it really is that far north. (One of the dialog sentences I remember from our 1980 German class is "Europa ist weiter nördlich als Amerika!") And coupled with its position in the eastern part of the time zone, it is starting to get dark really early here, even though daylight time doesn't end for another month. One advantage is that it gave us a wonderful view of the rising "supermoon" a few nights ago well before my bedtime. Suzanne woke up to see the (partial) eclipse here, but I slept right through it. I can hope that maybe I'll still be alive in 2033 for the next supermoon eclipse.

Super-moon rising over Bratislava

So now I'm off to class. I still haven't told you about classes, but I'll have more to say about that tomorrow, after the second meeting of the evening class and the first session with the morning class. Check back on the weekend if you want to learn more.

Trying to avoid deportation

Bratislava, Friday 25 September

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own personal opinions, not those of the Fulbright Commission or the U.S. Department of State.

This has been a busy and eventful week.

I had my first class on Wednesday evening, but actually that was pretty uneventful. I'll tell you all about it another post soon. Someone broke into the garage and lobby of our apartment building in the early hours yesterday, but that didn't really affect us.

First I need to vent about the Slovak bureaucracy and the Kafka-esque hoops we are trying to jump through in order to get our residency permits and avoid having to leave the country before our 90-day tourist visas expire on November 9.

The list of things that I need in order to get a residency permit is pretty simple: passport, pictures, statement from the Slovak Department of Education that I'm teaching here and will earn income to support myself, FBI criminal history check (with certified translation into Slovak), medical tests showing that I don't have HIV, syphilis, tuberculosis, or hepatitis B or C (likewise officially translated), a notarized copy of our lease, a document from the local registrar of deeds certifying that our landlord indeed owns the apartment, and a 6-page application that includes names, addresses, and birth dates of my spouse, parents, children, and siblings.

OK, maybe that's not simple, but Suzanne needs all of those things ... plus a notarized (in Slovak, of course) statement signed by me saying that I promise to support her financially while we are here, plus documentation that she is covered by medical insurance while she is here (with appropriate translation), and plus, of course, the marriage certificate from Wadena County, authenticated with an apostille by the Minnesota Secretary of State in St. Paul (also with official translation) documenting that she really, truly is married to me.

We have been working since June on accumulating these items. Almost every item has given us trouble of one kind or another, requiring us to go back and re-do something that we thought was already done.

On Wednesday, our landlady brought us the notarized copies of the lease (of course we need two, one for my application and one for Suzanne's)---the last piece of the puzzle! So we went on Thursday morning to the Fulbright office, where they had been accumulating all of our documents for us and arranging for translations and official local documents.

At that point, the Fulbright office turned us over to Beáta Bučeková at an organization called Enterprise Resources International (ERI) to have her shepherd us through the application process with the Foreign Police. Apparently the lines at the Foreign Police office in Bratislava start forming before 6am (and no, we don't have any Syrian refugees clogging up the process---this is normal), so ERI sends someone to get in line for us, then lets us know about what time our number will be called (if indeed we manage to get in the same day), picks us up and drives us to the office, and interprets for us during the application submission.

I was already on the bus from the Fulbright office to the university when Beáta called to say that she wanted us to bring our documents to her office so that she could check them over. Suzanne had the documents and took them to the office. And it's a good thing that she did!

Beáta found not one, not two, but three errors in our documents, all relating to my name or birthday. First, the official document from the Slovak Education Ministry had my birthday as November 13 rather than 16. The Foreign Police would have used this as an excuse not to issue a permit, so that will have to be redone. That's pretty easy because they are local and they actually want me in the country, and because it's in Slovak it won't need to be translated.

Second, the notarized letter in which I promise to support Suzanne had my name misspelled. Likewise: an excuse to reject her application for residency. But again, easy to fix: just one more trip to the notary with a corrected document.

The big one was the third error: our marriage certificate, newly obtained this summer from Wadena County and personally delivered by us to the Minnesota Secretary of State in St. Paul for an apostille in July. It also has my birthday wrong: November 11th instead of the 16th. Again, this would totally invalidate the legitimacy of Suzanne's application and result in its denial because, after all, she might be married to another Jeffrey Allen Parker who was born 5 days earlier in Wadena and who does not have any legitimate business in Slovakia.

So what to do? We are supposed to submit the applications no later than 60 days after entering the Schengen Area, which occurred on August 11, so October 10 is our deadline. If we can get everything in order by the deadline, then we can apply and stay. If not, well, Beáta suggested that we could go to Croatia (out of the Schengen Area) and then re-enter Schengen to restart our 90-day tourist visas. It's only a 4.5 hour drive to Zagreb, so that's not impossible, but we are really not thrilled about a forced trip just to step outside the borders so that we can step back in. And given the refugee situation on the borders of the Schengen Area, it seems like a really good idea to avoid this, even though we'd be entering back into Slovenia rather than Hateful Hungary.

So the ideal solution is to try to get corrected marriage certificates produced in Wadena, authenticated in St. Paul with an apostille, sent to Bratislava, and translated officially into Slovak, all in time to submit the documents by October 10. We will try!

I immediately sent an email yesterday to the Wadena County Clerk of Court. Now a few of you readers (my siblings) will know that our marriage was officially recorded in Wadena County by no less a person than Florence Claydon, a naturally blue-haired, sub-5-foot spinster who served as clerk of court for decades in addition to playing the organ (very slowly) and directing the church choir (of which I was for several years a member) at the Congregational Church. How could Florence have messed up my birthday? She was known for her LoisHobbsian accuracy and efficiency!

When, in my email conversation with the current clerk, I expressed surprise that Florence could have made such an error, he responded that her lovely cursive writing was invariably accurate, but not always easy to read, and that my birth date on our certificate could equally easily be read as the 16th or the 11th. He even sent me a scan of the original ... and I have to agree. It would actually be easier to read the date as 11 than as 16.

But because I was born in Wadena County, he was able to look up my birth certificate and change the official date to the 16th. He even waived the fee for the new copies and sent them overnight to the Secretary of State in St. Paul to obtain the required apostille. No bureaucratic hassles in Wadena: Minnesota Nice strikes again. :)

Minnesota Nice even extended to the good people at the Secretary of State's office in St. Paul, Their very helpful customer service specialist will receive the certificates today and immediately get them authenticated with apostilles at no charge. But then what? They can send them to Bratislava by Fed Ex, but only if I can get them a pre-paid number to charge. Otherwise they can send them by regular mail, which takes weeks.

So all I need is a Fed Ex account number to give them, right? Well, I've never heard of "Memphis Nice," so maybe my experience with Fed Ex today should not be a surprise. I have been trying all day to get a pre-paid number or a Fed Ex account number, with no success. The Slovak office of Fed Ex does not issue accounts to individuals, only companies. The U.S. Web site gives me a user ID but won't let me create an account with a credit card: It tells me "An error has occurred and we are unable to process your request. Please try again." I've been "trying again" for 8 hours, including using the Reed proxy server and Suzanne's U.S. VPN account to try to convince Fed Ex that I am in the United States, but to no avail. And the Fed Ex online "help" has been anything but helpful. Neither the Slovak nor the U.S. help person was able to offer the slightest interest in or assistance with my plight. From now on, I'm avoiding Fed Ex whenever there is an alternative!

If I was unlucky with Fed Ex, I'm very lucky to have wonderful generous relatives who live in Minneapolis! My brother or his wife will pick up the documents on Monday morning and deliver them to a shipping office (either Fed Ex, or preferably DHL, which is less than half the price and one day faster, and which didn't earn my ire all day today!) so that they get here by the middle of next week. If all goes well and we can get them translated quickly, we'll just make our application deadline and won't have to drive the 9-hour round trip to the Croatian border and back.

I'll post again over the weekend with details of my first class session and other things about the week. Until then, enjoy the first days of autumn wherever you are, and hug an efficient American bureaucrat for me! Even if it's at the DMV or the Post Office! Really! We had no idea ...

Out amongst the natives

Bratislava, Sunday 20 September

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own personal opinions, not those of the Fulbright Commission or the U.S. Department of State.

This week has started to see us get into something of a routine. Although classes don't begin until next week, I spent three mornings in the office, getting accustomed to the work environment, meeting a couple of new people, and working on my syllabi.

The week

Commuting here is quite pleasant. I take the #6 električka (tram) from the station just below our apartment (5 minute walk down the hill). After a ride of about 10 minutes, this connects to the #88 bus, which crosses the Danube south into the district of Petržalka and winds its way to the university after about a 15-20 minute trip. Depending on the connection, it takes 30-40 minutes total. The map below is a little small, but I start at Molecova in the top left and end up at Ekonomická univerzita in the lower right, changing under the bridge at Most SNP. Driving would be a bit faster if there is no traffic, but it is so much more interesting to get out into the milieu of the locals rather than isolating myself in a car.

Petržalka, at the east end of which the university lies, was the largest "Socialist Workers' Paradise" in central Europe. Communist workers needed housing, and the state obliged by erecting this giant community of drab apartment blocks, which we have heard from those who live there were hurriedly and poorly built, some in as little as 3 months. They are now being renovated, with some color added to relieve what used to be endless gray cinder blocks and with some internal upgrades as well, but the overwhelming impression I get as we drive through them on the bus is "I'm really, really glad I don't live here!"

Socialist Workers' Paradise

I now know my teaching schedule, which is about as research-and-travel-friendly as one could imagine, though perhaps not ideal for student learning. I teach the masters macro course on Wednesdays from 17:00 - 20:00 (that's right, 8 in the evening) and the doctoral course on Thursdays from 9:00 - 12:00. So all of my teaching occurs in a 19-hour interval in the middle of the week. Those of you who know me from Reed know that this is totally not my style. (Although I can imagine that a lot of Reed faculty would find such a schedule very attractive.) You'll doubtless hear much more about classes once they have begun, so I won't comment any more now except to say that I'll do the best I can to teach effectively on this schedule.

Saturday: The market

This weekend has been more fun. On Saturday, we took the #9 electrička from our stop directly to the large farmers' market on the other side of the city at Trhovisko Miletičova. It's not so different from the markets in Portland, except that it is many times as large and is open 6 days a week. It is good for us to get into places away from the tourist zones, where people usually do not speak English. We are beginning to be able to communicate functionally with our limited vocabulary and lots of gestures. Fingers are good for counting! (Except that the Slovaks start counting with the thumb, not with the forefinger, so even that can be misunderstood.)

Suzanne in line to buy paprika (peppers)

This is a great market and we'll be going back regularly for fresh veggies and much else. (I even won an informal bet with Suzanne: you can buy toilet paper at the farmers' market ... though we didn't.)

Sunday: Harvest Festival in Pezinok

This weekend is the annual vinobranie or vintage harvest festival in the small wine-making city of Pezinok, about 20 miles northeast of Bratislava.

Today, Sunday, we drove to Pezinok in the morning. We arrived near the end of the festival parade, which featured all manner of entries not unlike American parades: vehicles old and new, people young and old in traditional Slovak costumes, soldiers old and new (but mostly old), musicians of all sorts (even a real marching band), and various groups of archers, twirlers, youth football teams, and martial arts groups not unlike the Portland Rose Festival Junior Parade. I wish we had arrived a few minutes earlier because what we saw of the parade was really interesting.

Twirlers young and not so young (any future economists?)

The twirlers don't seem so excited up close!

Marching band sounded great!

I've never seen a camel in a U.S. parade, even with the Shriners

Grape-themed float abandoned at the end of the parade route

Some people in native (or just different) costumes

Tired soldiers after the long march!

Speaking of soldiers ... Seeing groups of Slovak soldiers of different ages in a variety of uniforms raised a question in my mind that I found intriguing. The American veterans that we see in parades, whether from World War II, the Korean war, Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, basically all served the same republic and fought on the "same side," regardless of which war it was. Over this same historical period, Slovak soldiers have represented the Nazi-Slovak state (against Russia) in World War II, the Russian-dominated Communist Czechoslovakia (against NATO) from the late 1940s through the 1980s, free Czechoslovakia for a few years after the Velvet Revolution, and the independent Slovak Republic (now a member of NATO and the EU) since 1993. I wonder how all the "changing sides" over the decades affects the patriotic solidarity of the various generations of veterans when they see all the different uniforms from the various eras. Maybe some Slovak historian or anthropologist has looked into this.

After the parade, we walked the streets of Pezinok, which were filled with an enormous array of booths offering food, crafts, and the young, unfiltered wine from the harvest. We feasted on the food and bought quite a few souvenirs, but the wine really looked disgusting. Given the attitudes of the locals toward drunk driving (and the police checkpoint on the way out of town that we saw coming in), I managed not to drink any this time. I'm waiting for opportunities to taste the real thing rather than the uncellared version.

The scope of the festival was mind-boggling. We must have walked the equivalent of 20 blocks of closed-off streets all completely filled with stalls and swarms of people. Slovakia is a small country, but it seemed like every Slovak converged on Pezinok today! Here are a few selected photos from the streets on what was a very fun day.

Seriously big loaves of bread (note woman's head on the side)

Wooden wares

Cookies with messages

Future Reedie???  Future Lois???

Glass-blower (with tacky shirt logo)

The fujara, a traditional Slovak shepherd's flute

Side view of the fujara

Wall sculpture of a shepherd playing the fujara (This one is coming home with us)

Woman in old-fashioned finery

Woman in traditional Slovak peasant dress

Trdelník (pronounced almost like "turtleneck" ): a wonderful Slovak fried pastry in shape of hollow cylinder

Lokša (pronounced loke-sha) are like Norwegian lefse, except they taste really good!

Making lokša

Zemiakové pľacky are large, flat, fried potato and onion cakes

Making zemiakové pľacky

So that was our week. We are having a lot of great experiences and creating great memories. I hope that these blog entries give you at least a little flavor of what we're doing, though until they figure out a way to add scratch-and-sniff or scratch-and-taste to Web pages, you won't really appreciate the "flavors." I'll leave you with one final video from the festival. Maybe this is how I should spend my retirement (if I really practice a lot!) ...

(Video is 2MB large. It might be slow to load, but it's worth it! And the drinks in the background on the right are the newly harvested wine.)

Devin Castle

Bratislava, Tuesday 15 September

What better way to spend the morning of the Day of the Virgin Mary of the Seven Sorrows national holiday than to visit a nearby castle? After all, as our tour guide asserted last week, Slovakia is a country of castles, caves, and hedgehogs. And Devín Castle (Hrad Devín) is such a cool place that it warrants an entire post to itself, and one bursting with pictures. (It also has a cave, but we didn't see any hedgehogs.)

The village of Devín and its castle occupy a location that had great strategic value in the time of river travel. It lies at the confluence of the Morava River and the Danube. The Morava is a major river flowing south from extreme northeastern Czech Republic (in the north of the region of Moravia) and forming much of the western border of the Slovak Republic, with the Czech Republic in the north and with Austria further south. The Danube, of course, is the major river of central and eastern Europe, flowing east from southwestern Germany to the Black Sea in Romania. So perched high on rocks above the confluence of these two major arteries, Devín has been a fortress since Roman times and before.

It's also very close to us. To get a geographical perspective, our apartment is at the red pin in this map. The castle is marked by its Slovak name Hrad Devín on the extreme left. About a ten minute drive along the Danube.

Zooming in on the castle itself gives you an idea of the overall layout. I always tended to think of castles as single buildings, but they really are not. The outer walls enclose an area roughly the size of the Reed College campus, within which there is open land (now kept mowed by sheep and goats at Devín) and, when the castle was operational, many buildings were present including churches, defense-related structures, barracks for the troops, and housing for the castle servants. The inner walls then protected the actual place where the nobles lived, the main castle structure.

Archaeologists have found ruins on the site of Devín that date back thousands of years, and the castle itself dates from at least the 9th century. Being on two rivers, it was almost always on the border of something, as it is today. At various times, it was a northern outpost of the Roman Empire, an eastern outpost of the Great Moravian Empire, and a western outpost of the Hungarian Empire. The strategic utility of the site as a lookout and a defensive fortress is easy to imagine when looking up at its ruins from along the rivers below. The tower at the center of the picture sits on an isolated rock, and there is now no way to get there other than climbing the side of the rock. It is now called the "maiden tower" because it is exactly the kind of tower in which heroines of fairy tales seem likely to be imprisoned! Its actual use, though, was most likely military.

The castle has been in ruins since it was destroyed by Napoleon's armies in 1809. A sign along the walkway shows what it is thought to have looked like before its destruction.

Today, the ruins consist of middle castle and an upper castle. The latter is a very sad story. It was open to the public until 2008, but then was closed due to structural problems that required some restoration for tourists' safety. When they began the restoration, they discovered ancient archaeological relics that required careful extraction and analysis. But just as they were getting back to the restoration work, political changes and budget difficulties caused the project to be shut down in 2010, and it has not been restarted since. As a result, the upper castle (which looks like everything a great European castle ruin should be!) is closed to the public and we can only take pictures of it from the middle castle.

Upper castle, viewed from courtyard of middle castle

Section of middle castle, originally three stories with windows

Section of middle castle from the courtyard

Looking down on the lower castle and Virgin Tower from the middle castle
Note the brown water of the Morava (coming from the right) merging into the Blue Danube.
Also note the gothic arch halfway up the rocks to the upper castle. This is the entrance to a cave below the castle.

Town of Devín from middle castle

More of the town

A final picture shows a fast Twin City ferry boat racing down the Danube from Vienna to Bratislava. We hope to be passengers some day soon!

A wonderful morning! One that I just had to post right away even though it's not really time for another post for a few days. I hope that all of you have a good Day of the Virgin Mary of the Seven Sorrows as well. Say, why doesn't Reed take that holiday off anyway??? :)