Identifiably legal

Bratislava, Sunday 29 November

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

She's legal!

Finally, nearly two months after our initial ordeal at the Foreign Police, I picked up Suzanne's official Slovak residency ID card today. They got the birth date and address right and Suzanne's face appears on the front, so it seems that she is fully legal for the next two-and-a-half months. Hooray!

Thanksgiving in Bratislava

Of course, Thanksgiving is not a holiday here, so I had to give my final PhD lecture from 9-12:15 on Thursday morning. The Slovaks spread their thanks-giving across an abundance of holidays. One can interpret Struggle for Freedom Day as a day of giving thanks for the success of their independence. Likewise Constitution Day and Slovak National Uprising Day, all of which we have celebrated in the three months we have lived here.

We enjoyed American Thanksgiving with one of the young Fulbright scholars who is teaching English in a small town outside of Trnava. She is a Williams alumna of Vietnamese descent and we have gotten to know her fairly well through the Fulbright orientation and another trip she made to Bratislava. She stayed with us a couple of days this week and had Thansgiving with us before joining the other young Fulbrighters (there are nine) in Vienna for the rest of the weekend. She even has a Minnesota connection; her grandparents immigrated from Vietnam to Willmar, Minnesota, where they were the only Vietnamese people in town. Talk about culture shock!

On Thanksgiving, we had an excellent feast at the best restaurant in Central Europe---Suzanne's kitchen. The menu included baked salmon with garlic and dill (I hate to admit it, but the Atlantic salmon in the grocery stores here is as good as the best in Oregon), stuffing with artichoke hearts and sun-dried tomatoes, heaps of mashed potatoes, homemade cranberry sauce with cinnamon, zucchini sauteed with Parmesan cheese, and pumpkin pie for dessert. The wine for the evening was the local sparkler from Hubert, the first sparkling wine produced outside of France. A lovely Thanksgiving without turkey or pointy-ball!

Of course, our Thanksgiving tradition in Portland is making massive quantities of 10-15 varieties of brownies, which we then share with friends, colleagues, students, and eventually with anyone who will take them! (There are always way too many...) Most of you know the story, but we began making brownies in 1996, when Gourmet magazine had a feature on Christmas brownies. I was very excited about them and so was Sarah. One of us said "Which ones shall we made." To which the other replied "Let's make all of them!" So we decided to make (almost) all of the recipes during the Thanksgiving weekend while Suzanne was busy playing in the Singing Christmas Tree orchestra. Ten-year-old Sarah proved to be an excellent chocolate-melter and we had great fun---and some culinary success---in producing plates and plates of mouth-watering chocolate delights. The next Thanksgiving it wasn't a question of whether we would do it again, but of what new recipes we would add! I lost my brownie partner in 2003 when Sarah went to college, but soon after that Suzanne stopped playing the Tree, so she took Sarah's place and added her culinary expertise to make them even better.

But no brownies this year. We just don't know enough people to make it worthwhile, and we certainly don't need that many calories (my spreadsheet calculates 67,146.33) around the apartment!

Political advertising

Elections are due in the Slovak Republic next spring, and ever since we have arrived the streets have been filled with billboards advertising candidates' smiling faces. The polls suggest that the election won't be close, with the ruling Smer party of Robert Fico likely to win a sizable majority. We don't watch Slovak television or read the newspapers, so I can't appreciate the advertising in these media, but I find the billboards very interesting. Here's a sample of the ads in our neighborhood.

First up is SDKÚ, which stands for Slovenská demokratická a kresťanská únia, or Slovak Democratic and Christian Union. They are also known as Demokratická strana, or Democratic Party. Their campaign slogan is "Som zmena," which means "(I) am change." I've translated some of the other words on the billboards in the captions.

I AM CHANGE: health

I AM CHANGE: for advanced policy

I AM CHANGE: direction

I AM CHANGE: education

The next party is Sieť, which means "Network" in Slovak. Their slogan dobrý štát slúži means "serves a good state" or something like that.

Serves a good state: Families

Serves a good state: Hardworking

Slovenská národná strana (SNS) is a left-wing party. Their slogan means "proudly, expertly, respectably: together for our country."

I can't easily find anything about the next party online. The slogan at the top means "Stop them, brothers!" Strana obbornikou means "Expert party," which might be its name.

MOST-HID is a Hungarian minority party. The text at the bottom translates as "The corruption problem in EU funds is serious."

And finally, the ruling party, Smer, which means "Direction." Their slogan (at the bottom) means "We work for the people" and the big lettering on this sign says "Protect Slovakia."

I don't think this guy is running for anything, but it just shows how similar the political ads are to others. The text here means something like "A Slovak piece in a man's wardrobe."

And I'll add one more billboard that is next to a coffee house sporting Cuban flags, on the main road that our trams traverse to the city. I doubt that Fidel is running for office, at least in Slovakia, but clearly some people still have affection for him from the old days. The text after the name means approximately "personality of the century" and the bottom text is "We Slovaks congratulate Fidel on his jubilee." We haven't met many people with a lot of nostalgia for Communism, but then we have not talked with older, rural, and less educated people.

Bratislaviana

I have a couple of miscellaneous things to add this week. First, the weather here is getting cold, but the spaces where we live and work are very hot. We have not yet had to use our heating system, despite outside temperatures in the 20s, and we often end up opening windows to keep the temperature below about 78. 

I'm not sure exactly why our apartment is so hot. Our apartment has southeast and southwest windows, so we get sun (when it shines) all day, but it seems to be hot even on cloudy days. One possible explanation is that there seem to be hot-water pipes under the floor between the WC, the bathroom, and the water-heater room, and they exude heat from the floors. A second is that the water-heater room itself is always very hot; so much so that we hang our clothes there to dry. And I'm sure that we absorb heat from all of the neighboring apartments as well. But whatever the explanation, it's always hot. (Maybe it's because our landlord's name is LeHOTsky.) :)

My office on campus is also very hot, but that makes sense because it's on the top floor of the building. The first thing I do in the morning is open the windows to cool it off. That works well until the break between classes when students go out to smoke outside the entrance, which is five floors below my office.

The rest room on our floor of the building at the university is not particularly hot, but it is getting more and more dysfunctional by the week. I mentioned in earlier posts that the toilet paper is located outside the stalls, so you have to bring an appropriate amount with you, and that the soap dispenser has been empty since I arrived in early September. Now the light in the entry hall where the sink sits has burned out, so you enter a completely dark room and just have to hope that the motion-detecting light actually goes on when you go into the second room. So far so good, but that light goes off after about two minutes, so you have to finish your business quickly or be left in the dark. And then this week they ran out of paper towels to wipe your hands. What's next? No plumbing?

Here are a couple of pictures of the classroom (lecture hall, really) in which I teach the masters macro course. The first picture shows the student seating. The wooden benches must get really hard after three hours. The second shows the combination marker-board/chalkboard in the front of the room---two panels of white marker-board on the outside when it's closed and four panels of green chalkboard in the middle when it's open. There is not much "area" on this board, so I'm constantly opening and closing, switching between markers and chalk, and trying not to cover up or fold out something important. I'm also struggling not to write too small for the students to see, although I always remind them that they can move closer if they can't read the board.

In an earlier post, I mentioned Music Forum, the wonderful sheet-music store in the old city, where proprietor Igor has been so very nice to us. Here is a picture looking up his cobblestone street Na Vŕšku (literally "On the Hill"), with the old city walls and one tower of Bratislava Castle in the background.

Finally, on the way to breakfast at Rannô Ptáča this morning, we looked in the windows of an antique and art gallery in the old city. On the table were four pointing devices: elegant short sticks ending in a tiny hand with an extended pointer finger. (Do you think they have a version with the middle finger extended?) What in the world are they used for? About the only thing I could come up with was that you could use one at an auction to make a bid without having to raise your arm. Can any of you enlighten us? If you have any answers or ideas, please leave them in a comment or send me an email.

That's all from Bratislava for now. I'll be back next week with more news, or perhaps with lots of boring stuff that's not news! We attend another orchestra concert on Thursday so I'll tell you all about that. We are also thinking of traveling to Central Slovakia next weekend if the weather is decent, so I might have some pictures of mountains and castles. You'll just have to tune back in and see!

To Sweden and back

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

Leipzig, Germany, Friday 20 November 2015

Our first day on the road. We left our apartment about 8:15 this morning and headed north toward the Czech border. There was no hurry today as we planned to spend the night in Leipzig, which Google Maps assured us was only about a 6 hour drive. The weather was chilly and wet (kind of like Portland), but it only rained hard for a few minutes all day.

We crossed into the Czech Republic without incident, stopping only to buy our motorway "vignette" on the way in. It's interesting to think about the fact that this has almost never been a border. In the last century, it was a border between two Nazi-dominated states during World War II, but otherwise not an international border at all until 1993. And soon after that, the border effectively disappeared into the Schengen aggregation. We found no border controls at all, just a sign as we crossed the Morava River.

The trip got more interesting as we turned west from Brno toward Prague. We began seeing signs on the electronic reader-boards saying that something was CLOSE (in English translation) at km-post 80. We couldn't read some of the words on the signs, so we weren't sure what to do --- until traffic came to a dead stop at about km-post 82. It was, of course, the motorway that was closed. We sat for about 40 minutes in a long line of vehicles, next to a truck from Romania and behind a car from Serbia. Finally, traffic starting moving and very quickly was back to motorway speeds (130 kph = 80 mph in the Czech Republic).

We stopped for gas outside of Prague and then for lunch at a McDonald's next door. McDonald's is everywhere here and we have only visited a couple of times, but roadside food in lands where we speak none of the language is really challenging and a Filet-O-Fish is the same thing everywhere! The blue-chip item on the Czech McDonald's menu is the Maestro Bohemia. You can see a picture below. Note that the menu is almost completely in English.

So on we went, with stomachs and gas tank full, north toward the German border, which we approached with some trepidation because of the residency question. But long before we reached Germany, we encountered a detour that took us off of the A-8 motorway (still being built) and onto a minor highway (also Highway 8) through lots of small towns. We got to see some of the Czech Republic in our trek through these towns and it reminded me a lot of Slovakia. Lots of broken-down, Soviet-era buildings alongside a lot of wonderful and well-preserved (or well-restored) historic buildings.

At some point we were supposed to go back to the A-8 motorway, but I don't think we quite found that point. We were about 5 miles from the German border when we finally decided that we had to head east and find the motorway again, having presumably missed the sign for the end of the detour.

It doesn't help that both the old highway and the motorway are numbered 8. The only way to tell the difference is by the color of the sign and we must have missed the red one for Motorway 8 and followed the white one for old Highway 8. It's like having U.S. Highway 5 right next to Interstate 5. The U.S. Department of Transportation (or whatever its predecessor was in the days when the interstate highways were designed) made a good decision when they numbered the Interstate highways high to low, in the opposite order of the old U.S. highway numbers.

So we finally got back on the motorway and headed north into Germany. Before the border are two tunnels. At the entrance to each tunnel we noticed multiple Czech police vehicles parked beside the road watching traffic. What were they looking for?

We crossed the border with no indication of any kind of border check, but about 4 km into Germany barriers routed all traffic onto what used to be a rest stop, but now is a border station. The speed limit was 10 kph, but we never actually had to stop. No document check. Presumably they would have stopped any vehicle that looked like it might be bringing in migrants, but our Volvo passed muster and we must have looked pretty innocent. In fact, no vehicle got stopped in the two or three minutes that it took us to proceed through the checkpoint.

Once we got past the border, we were back on the wonderful autobahn. No more 130 kph speed limit! Who knew that Suzanne would want to push it up to 140 or 145 when she got the chance? But the Volvo seems to like driving fast. :) We have to do it now, because that Oregon freeway speed limit of 65 mph is going to seem very, very slow!

So we've made it through the first potential trouble-spot of the trip with no problems. We'll have to get through the border stations entering Sweden, but I suspect that they won't be any more difficult than this one. We'll find out in a couple of days.

When planning our trip, I had considered trying to get tickets for a concert by the renowned Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig. Looking online, there was one pair of adjacent tickets available for Friday night, for 60 euros each. We have gotten used to paying 13 euros for concerts in Bratislava, so this seemed a bit steep. And given the uncertainty about our arrival time (with possible border delays) and the possibility that we would be too exhausted to enjoy the concert, I decided to pass. Tonight I have mixed feelings about that decision. Although we are tired from driving, it would really be a wonderful opportunity to hear an outstanding orchestra. Oh well, we'll be through here again in February on our way to drop off the car, so maybe we'll do it then. (In fact, we are thinking of a "music tour" in February from Bratislava to Sweden, hitting as many orchestras and operas as we can on the way.)

Our Leipzig hotel (the Windorf) is very nice and the dinner in the restaurant was tasty and (for Germany) affordable. (And the complimentary breakfast proved to be exceptional.) This is a bit of a relief, because when I asked Google Maps for directions I got a message saying "The business at this address has been reported to be closed." I figured that the Best Western Web site wouldn't make a reservation for us at a hotel that wasn't open, and I was correct!

The only issue with the hotel is the bathroom faucet. Very fancy! It has a sensor that turns it on when you put your hand underneath. But not when you put your toothbrush underneath. And not when you put a water glass underneath. Too fancy!

Because Germany has now been re-united for 25 years and is the "powerhouse of Europe," it's easy to forget that this was East Germany, so it has many of the same problems that we have experienced in Slovakia. This defunct factory sits just below our hotel window.

So a good first day on the road. I'll continue this post tomorrow from Denmark, assuming that we don't get detoured off the autobahn and end up in Switzerland or something!

Aabenraa, Denmark, Saturday 21 November

That's not a typo --- we really are staying in a town that starts and ends with "aa." How cool is that? After three months in the "land of no vowels," Suzanne is thrilled that we are back in a place that actually uses vowels, even wastefully!

Aabenraa is a charming little port town, located on a frigid fjord on the east coast of Denmark, just across the border from Germany. When we checked in the very sweet hotel clerk moved us to a different room than they had originally booked for us because from now until Christmas many of the 15,000 residents of Aabenraa celebrate Christmas very loudly until 1am underneath the other wing of the hotel. The entertainment tonight was "Casey Jones ... from Nashville!" I guess we didn't look like the sort of folk who would be up at that hour, so she wisely suggested that we move. (As it turned out, our room was right above where the roudy smokers go outside to pollute, so we didn't hear music but we did get a lot of noise.)

All of today's driving until the very end was in Germany and for most of the trip we made excellent time. But this seems to be a popular time of year for road construction on the autobahn. Construction is always a pain, but it is particularly annoying here. When you are cruising along at 140 kph (often in the right lane!), it seems dreadfully slow to have an 80 kph or sometimes 60 kph limit for long stretches of road. This was especially frustrating today because at only a few construction sites were they actually doing any work on Saturday.

It was fun to pass a van that, from the lettering on the outside, appeared to contain the Latvian Windsurfing Team.

As we left Magdeburg, I started wondering where the border between East and West Germany was, so I began watching for a large, unused border-control station. Sure enough, between Magdeburg and Braunschweig there was a huge border station on each side of the road. It didn't look totally abandoned, but it's certainly not a border-crossing any more.

When we arrived at a real border, crossing into Denmark was a non-event; they have not restricted entry at all. Just like Schengen before refugees. We'll see about Sweden tomorrow.

Dinner at the hotel tonight was an adventure, but one with a very happy ending. The restaurant was heavily booked, but the hotel clerk got a table for us. But when we opened the menu, the three entrees on the fixed-price menu sounded like a children's game: deer, duck, goose. Oops. Here we are 100 meters from the ocean and there is no seafood on the menu? We asked the waitress and she asked the chef, and returned to suggest that they could do a halibut dish for us. It turned out to be a wonderful halibut fillet with a tetrahedron of potatoes, leaves of brussels sprouts, a couple of long, slender oyster mushrooms, and a slab of garlic butter to melt over everything. Truly excellent! And the wine list featured several Joseph Drouhin wines, of which we drank a lovely half-bottle of 2010 Chablis. The celery soup appetizer and the baked apple dessert with cinnamon and vanilla ice cream were also very good. We didn't come on this trip for the cuisine, but so far we've had two very good dinners. Now if we could do something about the lunches on the road ...

Tomorrow we cross two long bridges into Sweden and prepare to complete our mission: winter tires for the Volvo. I'll write more from the other side of the water.


Gothenburg, Sweden, Sunday, 22 November

Guess what: It snows in Denmark! It sometimes snows a lot in Denmark!

We awoke this morning to find frost on the car windows (at a temperature of 31˚F) and the lightest of snow flurries blowing in the wind. How cool it seemed.

As we drove north and east from Aabenraa, the snow started to get heavier and the temperature rose a bit, hovering between 32 and 33. Soon we were in a full-scale blizzard, with limited visibility and snow accumulating along the sides of the road, but not in the traffic lanes as the temperature and traffic kept them clear.

Those who have refereed soccer games with me over the years might remember my standard comment on hot summer days: "It's better than 40 degrees and raining sideways." Well, this was worse than 40 degrees and raining sideways; it was 30 degrees and snowing sideways. At least I wasn't standing out in the wind wearing shorts!

Here are some photos of driving in the snow:

But by the time we got near Copenhagen there was about 6 inches of snow on the ground. It must have been very icy overnight because I counted 26 vehicles either wrecked or abandoned on the side of the road. Today, the temperature maintained at about 35 and the road was just wet. A few of the cars seemed to be damaged, especially the one that was upside down and the one whose top was collapsed, but the vast majority appeared to be just abandoned at the side of the road. I guess that it must be OK in snowstorms to just leave your car for a day on the side of the motorway until you make it back to retrieve it. Many were "plowed in" by the snow plow and we saw one man dutifully shoveling a path for his truck to get out.

Our car did very well in the snow (even without its soon-to-be-installed winter tires), but the GPS did not do so well, or at least did not do what we wanted it to do. After navigating around Copenhagen successfully, she took us north to a ferry landing at Helsingor rather than across the bridge to Malmo. We did not discover this until we were more than a half-hour out of the way. We didn't want to try out the ferry in these conditions (if they were even running in the high winds), so around we turned and backtracked to find the bridge. It is bad enough driving in the snow and wind, but driving an extra hour-plus out of the way is very annoying.

No doubt the ferry ride would have been awful, but driving across the two long bridges was terrifying! The cross-wind was very strong from the north and the snow made it hard to see far in front of us. I just slowed to 70 kph or so and concentrated on keeping the car in the lane as best I could. There was not a lot of traffic, so on the rare occasions when I got close to the lane line there was no one next door.

The toll on the bridge into Sweden is collected at the Swedish end of the bridge, and they had immigration stations located just past the toll booths. This time the agent stopped us (and had to wipe the accumulated snow off of our license plate to figure out what it was). He asked for our passports, checked the pictures, and waved us on through. Not a problem, but at least the Swedes were checking as the news reports had indicated.

Once we reached the Swedish side, we stopped at a rest stop in Malmo for lunch. It was snowing heavily and we still had 300 km to drive up the west coast of Sweden. I used the restaurant wi-fi to check the weather: Sunny and cold in Gothenburg. Really? Or was this the weather from a couple of days ago and my phone app hadn't updated? I typed in Malmo. It said snowing and windy. OK, so it was right and we might get better weather up nearer to the North Pole.

We headed north. Sure enough, about an hour north of Malmo, the snow quit and by the time we got close to Gothenburg there was not even any on the ground. The forecast for tomorrow doesn't look too bad, which is fortunate because we can't leave until the snow tires are installed and then we have to re-trace three days worth of steps in two long days. No time for any snow, detours, or missed directions on that trip!

Tonight we ate at a pretty lame pizza-and-falafel place near our hotel. It was edible and abundant, but compared with the wonderful, gourmet hotel meals of the last two nights it was pretty poor. The hotel is satisfactory though the room is small. This view of the hall makes it look like a cell block, but the cells are pretty nice!

Tomorrow morning we go to Volvo at 8am to have our tires changed. Then we head south as fast as we can. We have reservations in Hannover for tomorrow night, which is a nine-hour drive if we can go the speed limit and don't ever stop. Obviously that's not going to happen, so we'll just do our best and make as good time as we can. If I have any energy left tomorrow night, I'll update this post.


Hannover, Germany, Monday 23 November

Monday morning in Gothenburg the temperature was 16 degrees, Fahrenheit. That's the coldest that we Portlanders have been for a while. But our car was in the hotel garage so it stayed nice and warm and was ready to head "home" to Volvo.

We arrived at the Volvo factory delivery center a few minutes before their 8am opening. They treated us very well and had our snow tires installed in less than an hour. The snow tires are a little noisier than the original Pirellis, but they will do their job.

We headed south and made good time to Malmo and back across the bridge. This time the water was glassy smooth; no hint of the 50 mph winds of the day before.

Driving south along the Swedish coast was a fairyland on the day after the blizzard. In some places, the north wind had literally plastered snow all the way up the north side of the tree trunks. Many of the trees were crystal ice sculptures sparkling in the morning sunshine!

We have noticed over the years that it is particularly hard to drive into the sun late in the evening or early in the morning because the sun is just at the bottom of your visor. Well, at this time of year in Sweden, the sun is at the bottom of your visor all "day." I put "day" in quotes because it is only light for about seven hours, roughly 8:30 to 3:30, and the sun never gets anywhere near above you. Gothenburg is at almost 58 degrees latitude, which is closer to the Arctic Circle than it is to the latitude of Portland, Minneapolis, or anywhere else (except Alaska) in the United States. As we headed south, we were staring into the low sun for most of today's trip.

There was still a lot of snow on the landscape and on the sides of the road. Many of the cars that we saw abandoned on Sunday morning were still there on Monday morning. The crews were just starting to get caught up on clearing them.

There were no border checks today, either entering Denmark or going from Denmark into Germany. I guess the Germans aren't too worried about Viking refugees or invaders. We made good time, slowed only by a lot of construction in Northern Germany, arriving at our hotel in Hannover shortly after 7pm. The hotel is located down the street from a busy cinema and parking is truly scarce. Imagine our surprise that the one empty parking place on the entire block happened to be right in front of the hotel door! And there were three other cars coveting it when we pulled in. We are always grateful for good fortune!

After a quick dinner at a pasta joint down the street, we are ready to settle into an exhausted sleep. Another long day tomorrow brings us "home" to Bratislava. Google Maps says 8.5 hours, so if we get an early start we should be home by dinner time. It will be good to be off the road (and bring this lengthy post to an end).

Struggle for Freedom Day

Bratislava, Tuesday 17 November 2015

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

17th of November, Struggle for Freedom and Democracy Day – This day reminds Slovaks about the student demonstration against Nazi occupation in 1933. It also commemorates the demonstration in Prague in 1989 which was the beginning of the Velvet Revolution. It is one the most important days in modern Slovak history. It symbolizes the beginning of the radical transformation in each of the spheres of Slovak society.
From: http://www.slovak-republic.org/holidays/

Today is one of the seemingly countless national holidays here in Slovakia, and since I have some time and some things to talk about, I'll write another post. The next one might be a ways off because we plan to travel to Sweden this weekend, and with a full load of class work and grading to do, I'm not sure I'll have time to write any more for a while.

Not only is today, Tuesday, a holiday, but the university rector decided to give the students Monday off as well---apparently announced just at the end of last week. So we didn't have our Slovak class. I was at the office for a while and the campus was almost totally deserted except for the staff, who did not get the day off. Kind of like Reed in the summer.

Foreign Police update

As I mentioned last week, Suzanne is now supposedly legal, although we don't yet have her ID card to prove it.

But the word from everyone with whom we have spoken is that the Slovak Republic ID card is not necessary (and not even useful) as a travel document. If indeed Suzanne is registered "in the system," then she should be fully legal and ready to travel. So we are planning to head to Sweden on Friday morning, with overnight stops and possible brief sightseeing excursions in Leipzig, Germany, and in Aabenraa, Denmark, on the way, and in Hamburg on the way home. I've never slept in a city that begins and ends with "aa," so this should be exciting! It's at the beginning of the alphabet forward or backward.

Organ recital

As I mentioned in the last post, we bought tickets for an organ recital for Sunday---for 8€. Classical music must be heavily subsidized by the state here because the ticket prices are amazingly low. Even at the low price, there were only perhaps 150 people in the audience in the symphony's large auditorium that seats about 800. We sat in the second row of the largely empty balcony, dead center.

The organ was newly installed in the hall this summer, so this was one of the first performances on it. The vast array of pipes at the front of the hall is most impressive. And the organ was at times overwhelming in volume in the almost empty hall.

Organists must have a tough life having to play on "foreign" instruments most of the time. The organist on Sunday was an Austrian named Johannes Ebenbauer. The overall performance was excellent, but there were times when he seemed to be fighting the instrument just a bit. He started with two Bach works, a fantasia and fugue and then a chorale prelude. He ended the first half of the program with a Max Reger fantasia and fugue that was both technically challenging and interesting listening. The second half of the program began with a sonata by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (whom we know without the last name) and a prelude and fugue by early 20th-century Bratislavan Franz Schmidt.

But it was the final work on the program that entertained and amused us most. It was Ebenbauer's own Improvizácia na danú tému ("Improvisation on a given subject"). There was more than one "given subject" in the piece, which could have been sub-titled "Peter Schickele meets the organ"!

It started out with a theme and variations on Bach's Musical Offering. For those who don't remember, this piece is built around a four-note theme: B-flat, A, C, B-natural, which spells out b-a-c-h in the German musical notation of the day. Douglas Hofsteder's magnificent book Gödel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid highlights the Musical Offering as a classic case of self-reference: Bach using his own name as the theme of a composition.

Ebenbauer begin with an extensive set of variations on this theme, but before we knew what hit us he gave us a swift segue into Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik! After noodling around with those themes for a few minutes, it was on to the Brahms Lullaby, and finally to a very familiar orchestral theme that neither Suzanne nor I can place, maybe Tchaikovsky or perhaps Beethoven. (I'm listening to every orchestral work on my hard-drive trying to find it! Want to help? The main theme is half-note C, dotted-quarter-note B, eighth-note B, quarter-note A, quarter-note G tied to a half-note G.) The coda brought back all four themes for a brief reprise. By the end we were heaving up and down in our seats with suppressed laughter. The babka and chlapec (grandma and boy) in the row behind us were probably wondering what in the world was wrong with us.

After the concert, we had dinner reservations at Zylinder, a lovely and well-reviewed restaurant in the Palffy Palace across from the U.S. Embassy on Hviezdoslavovo Námestie. Our server was a delightful young woman with excellent English and a very accommodating attitude toward vegetarian, American wine-snobs. The food was good, even if the vegetarian choices were pretty limited. And I drank a couple of glasses of a wine from a grape called andré that I've only seen in Slovakia. Both times I've drunk it (in restaurants) I have been happy with it.

All in all, a pleasant Sunday afternoon and evening that helped us forget that we were supposed to be in Sweden.

Birthday!

As some of you know, Monday was my birthday. If I were Slovak, I could now retire on full pension! Suzanne outdid herself in finding creative gifts and in making a wonderful dinner for us. The gift that I knew about in advance was a black scarf that she has been working on for several weeks, and which she finished on my birthday just in time for the cold weather that we have been promised. Among the other little things that she found for me was a set of ping-pong paddles and balls, a nice purple tie, a paper, soccer-ball lamp shade (that fits perfectly over the cheap Ikea lamp in the kitchen) and the following, which needs no description...

Birthday dinner was, of course, amazing. Suzanne made her wonderful veggie lasagna (adapted from America's Test Kitchen) and for dessert her peerless carrot cake (mrkvový colač in Slovak, in the background above, from Caprial Pence, with white-chocolate cream-cheese frosting from Williams-Sonoma). A great meal and lots of great leftovers!

The ping-pong equipment needs an explanation. We had seen a ping-pong table in the park adjacent to the waterworks museum near us and Suzanne thought it would be fun to have the equipment to take advantage. So this afternoon we headed off for a little Struggle for Freedom Day ping-pong. When we arrived at the park, the table had vanished! Apparently ping-pong is not a winter sport, so they remove the outdoor tables when the weather starts to turn chilly. :(

After coming up empty in the quest for holiday ping-pong we headed west along the Danube for an ambitious walk. We walked west for most of a mile, then we climbed a steep set of steps followed by a 12% grade to the top of the hill in the Dlhé Diely neighborhood west of Karlova Ves. We then headed back toward home through a forest of nice apartment towers mixed with crumbling Soviet-era paneláky. As we were weaving between buildings we came upon a nice little playground ... with a ping-pong table! Suzanne was still carrying the bag with the paddles and balls, so we took off our jackets and spent a fun half-hour whacking the ball back and forth across the metal table (totally dead!) with its metal net (totally unforgiving!).

We discovered that she had in fact bought "musical" ping-pong paddles. The pitch of her paddle hitting the ball was exactly (or as close as my ear can discern) one full step lower than the pitch of my paddle. Truly ping and pong. Which made me think about the possibility of creating a musical instrument based on ping-pong paddles. Kind of like hand-bells with a rack of different pitched paddles on each side of the table. But you'd have to hit the ball with the right paddle at exactly the right time to create a melody. Maybe a retirement project...

Bratislaviana

One of the little fashion quirks that has struck me in Bratislava is their love for what we in the United States used to call "letter jackets." In the 1950s and 1960s, these leather-sleeved cloth jackets in the school colors were adorned with the school's initial "letter" bearing badges showing all the sports and other activities in which one participated. By the time I left high school in the 1970s, these seemed kind of embarrassing and I haven't seen many American teens wearing them since then. But in Bratislava, they are all the rage! They don't seem to be a symbol of one's school or activities, but these leather-sleeved dinosaurs are definitely popular here.

We were walking around the Eurovea shopping mall a few days ago on a (successful) quest to find molasses (Marks & Spencer is always a good bet!) when we came across a store called Nuevo, which we had seen before and which seems to stock wonderful eccentric items of all kinds. In the window was the absolute perfect wedding gift for the woman friend whose fiancé you loathe:

I'm sure that these are probably available in the U.S., and at 115€ (including knives) I'm not going to try to bring one back, but what a great conversation piece for the kitchen! :)

While at Eurovea we ran across two fun sculptures. Bratislava is known for quirky statues, some of which have featured in previous blog posts. But there are two in Eurovea that are just wonderful. The first seems like it was made just for us, with a flute player and an adorable fuzzy dog that could almost be Eisel:

I really, really want to take the doggy home!

The second sculpture is a woman on a tight-rope (over an two-story opening down to the bottom floor of the mall) with two men at the end of the wire, one waiting to help her off the wire and the other hiding his eyes. I'd be the latter!

Very fun. I love art with a sense of humor!

Finally, when we arrived home from Eurovea, we discovered that there was some kind of run happening right outside our apartment building. The runners were coming down through the Comenius University campus and turning left at our parking lot to head down the hill toward the Botanical Gardens at the bottom, where we had disembarked the tram.

They look kind of wet. Judging from the numbers we observed on their vests, it was a small event with fewer than 350 runners, but it's always kind of fun when something like this happens by.

That's all for now. If I have time, I'll post something early next week about our trip to Sweden and any adventures (or misadventures) with border security on the way. Until then, have a great Struggle for Freedom Day, even if you don't get the day off.

Sweden closes borders; Parkers stay home

Bratislava, Saturday 14 November 2015

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 week of great uncertainty, anticipation, anxiety, and ultimately disappointment. It culminated in the cancellation of our long-planned trip to Sweden and a weekend of staying in Bratislava ... wishing we weren't.

After receiving word that my residency permit and ID card were ready on the 4th of November, we were waiting anxiously for Suzanne's residency to be approved and her card issued. We picked up my card this week on Wednesday morning and talked with the facilitators at ERI about hers.

They could not provide any details except to say that her application had been sent to the head person for the final signature/approval. Once that approval was in place, it would take time to print the card. They said that it might be possible for the Slovak authorities to issue a letter confirming her residency status in the interim; they would request such a letter and let us know.

There was some urgency about this because we were planning to leave at noon on Thursday on a six-day trip, starting with two days in Prague, then on to Gothenburg so that the nice people at Volvo could put winter tires on our car, and then back to Bratislava in time for my Wednesday class. This was the most convenient week for us to do this because (1) Monday is my birthday, so we could kind-of celebrate by traveling and getting winter tires, (2) Tuesday is Fight for Freedom Day in the Slovak Republic, so my Tuesday office hours would be canceled anyway, and (3) the winter tires need to be on by December 1st in Austria and Sweden (and of course we need to drive into Sweden to get them), so we don't have many more weekends.

Traveling anywhere without full documents is uncomfortable, but under normal circumstances travel documents are not required when traveling with the Schengen Zone of Europe. It's just like crossing state borders in the United States; there's a sign saying "Welcome to The Next Country" but no need to stop and show documents.

But these are not normal circumstances. Because of the swarms of Syrian/Afghan refugees coming into Schengen, countries have begun to close borders, requiring people to show documents to move into their countries. As you probably know, Hungary, the south-most of the contiguous Schengen countries, has erected a wall on the border with non-Schengen Croatia. Austria has instituted border checks at the Hungarian border. And Germany has done the same with parts of the Austrian border.

None of the above would have affected us, as we would avoid Austria by going north through the Czech Republic, into Germany by a non-refugee route, and on through Denmark into Sweden. So even with Suzanne's compromised status we were hopeful that we could make the trip.

Except that on Wednesday, as we were waiting for Suzanne's permit and anticipating a next-day departure, Sweden closed its borders.

Most likely the Swedish (or German) border guards would just look at us, maybe glance at our American passports, and wave us through. After all, there aren't many refugees who look like us and drive new Volvos. In fact, I don't know of any American refugees currently looking for asylum, though that could change if any of several current contenders were to be elected president. But if the border guards just happened to go through our passports in detail and look at the visa stamp saying when we entered the Schengen Zone, they would discover that we had exceeded our allowed 90 days. We have no idea what would have happened in that case, and we didn't want to find out.

Another alternative would have been for me to drive to Sweden by myself with my precious Slovak ID card, but 30+ hours of solo driving in 4-5 days is too much even for a dedicated long-haul driver like me.

Not hearing any good news on Wednesday, we canceled the Prague reservations. But we hoped that the situation might be resolved by Friday so we could still leave on Saturday morning for Sweden.

No such luck. But we get a call from ERI on Friday with the proverbial good news and bad news.

The good news: Suzanne's residency permit has been approved, although her ID card will not be available for some days. She is now legal, but we can't prove it. The staff at ERI indicated that we should not have any trouble traveling because her residency status is officially documented in the online immigration system, so any curious border guard could look her up and find out that she is legitimately in the Schengen Zone. But we are very reluctant to travel without physical documentation of that. So the trip is off for this week.

Now the bad news: the entire staff at ERI are taking ten days off, so they cannot procure the ID card for us until the 25th even if the Foreign Police have it available.

Volvo was very gracious about postponing our installation to the following Monday morning, but we are running out of weeks to travel. If we either obtain the ID card somehow (perhaps battling the Foreign Police bureaucracy on our own?) or are satisfied that it is safe to travel without the physical ID card, we will be heading north next weekend. If not, it will have to be the last weekend in November. Stay tuned ...

Concert

Because we expected to be out of town, we hadn't arranged any activities for this weekend and had even turned down a party invitation. We knew that the Slovak Philharmonic was playing a program of some of our favorite music on Thursday night, but of course we had not gotten tickets. When we canceled our travel plans, I immediately went online to order tickets ... only to find that the hall was sold out.

But Suzanne has inside connections! 

Shortly after our arrival in Bratislava, we found a little sheet-music shop called Music Forum on a tiny cobble-stone street called Na Vŕšku in the old city near the music school. Suzanne wanted to find flute music that is unknown or unavailable in the United States, so she was anxious to explore their collection. When she went in, the owner, Igor Valentovič, adopted her like an old friend. He and his wife sat down to have coffee with her at a table at the back of the store, and engaged her in a far-ranging conversation about music in Bratislava and elsewhere. She has been back many times and has found and bought quite a bit of interesting music.

On her first visit, she asked Igor about performances in Bratislava. He gave her suggestions about concert series and said that he often is able to get special access to tickets to the Philharmonic and that she should inquire if there was a concert that was of interest. So after finding out that the concert was sold out, she went to visit Igor on Thursday. He called the orchestra office but initially didn't think that anything was going to be available. Then at 4:00 an email arrived from him: Two tickets available. Call me if you want them.

She called immediately and we had two tickets (in the back row of the balcony) reserved for us when we arrived at the hall at 6:30.

The concert lived up to our high expectations. They started with the overture from Mathilde von Guise, an opera by the most celebrated of Slovak composers.

And who would that be? Hmmm, let's see. In the Central European music world of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, Austria had Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, Strauss, and Mahler (and Beethoven and Brahms lived in Vienna for most of their music-making lives); Hungary had Bartok, Kodaly, and Liszt; the Czech Republic had Dvořák, Janáček, and Smetana; and Slovakia had ... Johann Nepomuk Hummel! Hummel's house in the old city is now the a museum in the Bratislava city system. For a mere 3€30 you can tour all two rooms and see some old instruments, a few pieces of his manuscripts, and a death mask. 

Hummel's trumpet concerto is quite well-known (at least among trumpet players, I played it in high school), but none of his other works figures regularly in the American concert repertoire. This particular overture from one of his many obscure operas was a very nice piece of music and was well played by the ensemble. A good opener.

The second work was the Čajkovskij violin concerto. Yes, that's how Slovaks spell the name of the Russian composer we know as Tchaikovsky, but since neither spelling can really claim authenticity without using the Cyrillic alphabet and since Slovak is a lot closer to Russian than English or German is, it seems appropriate to use the local spelling. (I find it amusing that although his Slovak name does not begin with the letter "T," it does begin with the Slovak word for "tea," čaj. Maybe that's a little geeky, but I'm easily amused.)

The violin soloist was a young Korean-American woman named Fabiola Kim. She rendered an extraordinary performance, bringing stunning volume and tone out of her instrument and shining in her technical virtuosity. Suzanne characterized it is a "fabiolous" performance. (It wasn't me! She actually said this!) And it was.

The final work on the program was Dvořák's Seventh Symphony. In our two Slovak Philharmonic concerts so far, we have heard them do two Dvořák symphonies, the third and the seventh. Maybe it's in their blood: they really do well with these works. It was a truly enjoyable evening, one that assuaged a bit our disappointment over not being able to travel, and we are so grateful to Igor for making it possible for us to attend.

And that isn't even our only concert of the weekend. On Sunday we are going to hear an organ recital on the brand-new organ in the Philharmonic's concert hall. I'll give you a full review in the next post.

Bratislaviana

Our latest breakfast trek took us into a neighborhood to the east of the old city that we had not much explored. We encountered a beautiful building that turned out to be a gymnasium (academic high school). And the blue flag flying to the right of the front door would bring a smile to the face of anyone mathematically inclined.

One of the things I will truly miss about our hilltop perch in Karlova Ves is the magnificent sunrises and sunsets that happen almost every day. None of our photos do them justice; we just couldn't bring ourselves to drag along a bulky SLR on this trip. But I keep trying and every once in a while I get one that will give you a taste of what we get to see every morning and afternoon.

It's not really related to Bratislava, so maybe it doesn't belong under Bratislaviana, but I got the most surprising and wonderful early birthday present on Friday: an email from my brother! That might not sound special, but it truly is. Steve takes great pride in avoiding email and the Internet, though he admits to reading these blog posts occasionally and to letting his wife Lois act as his email and Internet proxy when something important needs to be done online, like ordering more Aardvark hot sauce from Portland! But to get an email that he actually typed with his own hands is remarkably special. On top of that, he is the best letter-writer that I know. It was truly a memorable treat!

Finally, in case you forgot, I want to remind you that next Thursday is World Toilet Day! How do I know this? I just got my reminder from one of our favorite charities. SOIL is a non-profit that is doing terrific work building and installing sanitary composting toilets in parts of Haiti that have no plumbing. They collect the material from the toilets regularly and process it into compost, which they sell cheaply to support the gardening efforts of the local citizens. The organization was founded and is run by a young Reed alumna; we know enough about them to be confident that donations have a high impact on their actual mission, not just on their staff salaries or their fund-raising budget. So, when you "go" next Thursday, be thankful for your plumbing! (And if you want to send a few dollars to help those in Haiti, it will definitely go to a good cause.)

We'll all just have to wait and see when and from where the next post happens. If we're traveling to Sweden next weekend, it might be delayed; if we're here, it's bound to be pretty grumpy!

One of us is legal

Bratislava, Sunday 8 November

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

Foreign Police update

You may recall that we applied for our Slovak Residency Permits on 5 October, submitting the required dossier of items including the FBI criminal background check, the notarized documents vouching for our status, our marriage certificate with apostille from the State of Minnesota, etc. According to what we were told by the Fulbright Commission, the Foreign Police have 30 days to process our application. So after exactly 30 days, on 4 November, we were excited to receive an email message from Nora, the executive director of the Fulbright Commission, saying: 

Dear Jeff,

Both IDs are ready to be picked up at ERI. Yesterday I mailed the medical clearances and the insurance letters to the respective police office.

Welcome to my country,

Nora

Except that they weren't. When we contacted Beáta at ERI, who was shepherding us through the process, she told us that only my permit was ready and that they wouldn't process Suzanne's application until after mine had been approved. 

So we are still waiting. In the meantime, Suzanne's 90-day tourist visa status in the Schengen Zone expires this Tuesday on the 10th of November. At that point she becomes an "illegal alien" in Slovakia.

We had thought that exiting and re-entering the Schengen Zone would give us another 90 days as a tourist, but that is not the case. The tourist visa is good for 90 days within a 180-day period. We are hopeful that her permit will come through on Monday. If not, to be legal, she would have to leave the Schengen Zone, going to Croatia, England, or someplace outside of Europe, for example, and wait until she could re-enter with the permit once it is issued.

Of course, no one has asked to look at our passports (except when we applied for the permits) since we have been in Bratislava, so the likelihood of getting caught is near zero. But we are planning a trip to Sweden (inside the Schengen Zone) next week to get snow tires put on the Volvo. Even that should not present a problem because passports are not checked at borders within Schengen any more. But with the Syrian refugee crisis, some countries such as Germany are performing random (and not-so-random) border checks.

We have been in contact with the U.S. Embassy staff about this and they did not seem worried. In all likelihood, everything will go smoothly on the trek to Sweden and back even if Suzanne does not have her residency permit before we leave.

But we are still nervous and considering various options. This week is the perfect week to travel because Tuesday 17 November is Fight for Freedom Day in Slovakia, another national holiday. This means we can get the tires installed Monday morning and have until Wednesday morning to get back to Bratislava. One option would be for me to go alone, but 2,000 miles of driving in a week by myself in the car does not seem appealing or particularly safe. We might postpone the trip a week or two, though we wouldn't have the holiday and I'd have to cancel office hours on Tuesday. Or, if this drags out longer, Suzanne might have to fly back to the U.S. to await the arrival of her legitimizing document.

There is a lot that we like about the Slovak people; their immigration and visa policies are not part of that. Stay tuned for the next installment...

Vychutmajte si Ameriku Week at Lidl

Down the hill from our apartment building, where we go to board the tram every day, is a grocery store in the Lidl chain. There are Lidl markets all over Bratislava and, apparently, in other European countries as well, even in England. The Lidl stores in Slovakia are truly different from stores in the U.S. in a number of quirky ways. The grocery selection is decent, but seems different every day. And in the two aisles down the middle of the store, there is an ever-changing variety of non-food items offered at very low prices. We've seen everything from clothing (always a lot) to small furniture items to sewing machines to sledgehammers. The items in the central aisles turn over amazingly rapidly---if you want it, buy it now because it may be gone by tomorrow, or even by this afternoon.

Lidl has a theme every week, with a section of the store dedicated to the theme items. Since we have been here, there has been Auto Week (supplies, not cars themselves), Retro Week, Greek Week, Italian Week, Paris Week, etc. This week was American Week: Vychutmajte si Ameriku means roughly "Experience America."

Lidl from the tram stop. Our apartment building is in the distance on the right

Note the sign for American Week to the left of the green pharmacy awning

They are inviting us to "experience America" through a brand called "McEnnedy American Way." I've never heard of that brand in the U.S., but it looks the part with the Statue of Liberty on the labels and stars all over the place. This week Lidl had lots and lots of McEnnedy stuff: marshmallows, maple syrup, peanut butter (Yay! It sold out the first day but we got two jars!), Monterrey Jack cheese, cheesecakes, pulled pork, beef burgers, an "American-style snack box" with frozen onion rings, mozzarella sticks (so American!?), and chili cheese nuggets, frozen pancakes, hamburger buns, blue cheese salad dressing, ... even the McEnnedy version of Twinkies! We stocked up on the peanut butter, hamburger buns, and snack boxes, and added a few other things into our cart as well.

Next week (starting tomorrow) is Bombastické Ceny Week (Bombastic Prices). We'll have to see what strange and unexpected marvels they are offering up under that theme.

The BEAN

When my sister was visiting in early October, I took her to the wonderful open-air produce market in Bratislava. Suzanne had asked us to buy some of the unusually large beans they grow here so that she could make soup.

When Suzanne opened the large bag of beans a couple of days later, she discovered that the bag was moist inside and that a few of the beans had sprouted little roots. Never one to waste anything, she decided to plant the beans and add them to our little herb garden by the sliding doors in the kitchen. (The grocery stores here commonly sell fresh herbs as living plants rather than as cut sprigs, so we try to keep them going.) 

It seems that we might be re-enacting Jack and the Beanstalk in our kitchen. The beans started growing, and growing, and growing. I thought I heard "Fee, Fie, Foe, Fum" in my dreams last night! She bought stakes for them to climb on. Then she had to add strings to the top of the stakes. In less than a week they will reach the curtain rod from which the strings are hanging. Then what? 

I'll keep you posted...

Exams

In the last two weeks, I have given the first exams in each of my classes. 

I hate exams; they starkly identify all of my failures in educating my students. I always wish that every student would answer every question perfectly, but if that ever happened I would just conclude that my exam had been much too easy. Somehow I always seem to see exams as "glass half empty," though I am usually pretty positive in other situations.

The PhD class exams were the final exam for the four students who enrolled only for the first half of the class, and half of the final exam for the eight full-term students. I tried, and largely succeeded, to write an exam that everyone could pass, even if they did not understand the details of the math in the course. And everyone who had attended class regularly did pass the exam. A few students did better than that and a couple stood out with very strong performances. I guess that's what an exam is supposed to do.

The masters class was just a short midterm to give them a guide about how well they were doing. The final exam, in December and January (I'm expected to give it twice with students choosing which sitting to attend) is 60% of their grade, so the midterm is only 15%. We had the exam during the second half of our three-hour class on Wednesday evening. First we talked about empirical evidence on economic growth, with lots of tables and graphs on the screen. Then, after a break, Suzanne arrived with the cinnamon rolls fresh out of the oven and we started the exam at 6:30. 

The room seemed quite empty when we started; there were only 19 students out of the 25+ who had turned in at least some of the assignments. Three students had emailed and said that they were sick or out of town, so I expected a few missing, but not that many. Two students (one very sick) arrived and started the exam at about 6:45. But when I compared the pile of exams to the list of students, there were still three more who had not taken the exam. I sent email messages to the three inquiring about their status in the course: had they dropped? One responded immediately with a rather lame excuse, a second indicated that he had dropped the course, and from the third I have heard nothing. Four students will take a make-up exam (not the same one, a slightly harder one) on Tuesday next week.

A striking pattern emerged as I was grading the exams this weekend. Almost one-third of the students scored between 71% and 73%, but they all missed  different questions. It wasn't like there was a hard question or two that caused everyone to struggle. 

I guess that I have become more accustomed to an almost bi-modal distribution at Reed, with a large cluster near the top and another cluster further down. This sharply-peaked uni-modal distribution seems almost "too normal."

Bratislaviana

I need a section to show bits and pieces of Bratislava that don't fit into the longer themes of the post, so here is the first installment of Bratislaviana! 

The bookstore at the University of Economics 

Yes, it's one whole room! And it's even open sometimes!

Walking in the city

We spent rainy Saturday and sunny Sunday morning walking in parts of Bratislava we hadn't explored. On Saturday we went to the eastern section near the Polus City Center shopping mall. There is a quite lovely lake there and a large sports complex including Štadión Pasienky where SK Slovan Bratislava plays football. We didn't stay for the 5pm Slovak Super Liga match against FK Senica, which they won 2-1 in the rain.

Lake Kuchajda

Ticket prices for Slovan Bratislava: 10 euros to sit in sideline seats!

This is the Slovak Bowling Association headquarters in the sports complex. Judging by the appearance, it doesn't seem like bowling is too popular here...

Crossing the Bridge

This morning we had breakfast near the Most Slovenského Národného Povstania (Most SNP), the Bridge of the Slovak National Uprising, more commonly called the UFO Bridge because of the single suspension tower with a round, flying-saucer-shaped restaurant at the top. 

Most SNP from the road (earlier picture)

After breakfast we decided to walk across the bridge and explore the large park on the south side of the river. I catch glimpses of the park every day as the bus crosses the bridge, but we'd never gone down there on foot. The fog was just lifting as we crossed the bridge and by the time we reached the other side it was a lovely sunny day. 


Walking along the south side of the river afforded great views of the old city. Then we left the river and walked through a bit of the Janko Kráľ Park, named for a 19th century Slovak poet. The colorful trees were beautiful. Until today, we had not found a big urban greenspace in Bratislava. It was wonderful!

Last traces of fog on the Danube

Two Towers: Looking back across the bridge to the cathedral and the TV tower in the distance

Reduta concert hall of the Slovak Philharmonic (left) from across the Danube

Along the south shore of the Danube

Janko Kráľ Park

Statue of Janko Kráľ, with the UFO Bridge tower in the background

That's all for now. I'll update as soon as we hear anything about Suzanne's residency permit. Otherwise you'll hear about the trip to Sweden, which we hope will be uneventful!