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/
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.
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