Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own personal opinions, not those of the Fulbright Commission or the U.S. Department of State.
I hate New Year retrospectives, so you will not find one here. Suffice it to say that 2015 has been an interesting year full of interesting travels. We had no New Year's Day in 2015 because we were on an airplane to New Zealand, taking off on New Year's Eve and landing on January 2. We'll have to enjoy this one twice as much, which should be easy with Sarah visiting and a flight to Rome (with no International Date Line to interfere).
In fact, this year we have stayed in a world-spanning array of places, from almost 58˚N latitude in Gothenburg, Sweden, to 41˚S latitude in Wellington, New Zealand, and from 175˚E longitude in Wellington to 94˚W in St. Cloud, Minnesota, to 17˚E in Bratislava, and a lot of places in between, we have spanned half the globe in both directions.
Christmas Dinner
Christmas dinner at Suzanne's table was truly wonderful. We found crab meat for the first time in Bratislava, so she made a crab pot pie with an amazing salad featuring the two-cents-per-pound beets, pears, pecans (also rare here) and cheese. It tasted every bit as good as it looks!
Shopping Palace
For four months we have been boarding the #4 tram near our apartment several times a week (often every day). The terminus advertised on the front of the car is Zlaté Piesky, or Golden Sands, a park surrounding a lake in the far east part of the city. So last week we decided to ride the #4 to the end of the line and explore Zlaté Piesky just to see what we could see.
It turned out that we couldn't see much of Zlaté Piesky both because of a big fence protecting the park and because of the dense fog that has been almost ever-present since the middle of December. But we did notice a large Tesco near the next-to-last stop and we needed some groceries, so we hiked back. Tesco is pretty much the same at any of the large stores, so we knew what to expect and got our groceries fairly efficiently. (We are getting better at shopping in Slovak!) But I ran across a sign I wanted to share.
Slovak nouns often form plurals by appending "y." Sometimes that can lead to some interesting combinations when used with adapted English words. In Aisle 16, you can get "chipsy," which I guess makes sense if Slovak speakers do not recognize that "chips" is already plural, but sure looks funny in English. And then there is "snacky," which is self-explanatory as written, but might sound pretty unappetizing to English speakers if pronounced in Slovak as SNOT-ski. (In fairness, I've never heard anyone pronounce this word, so they might very well say SNACK-y.)
Anyway, we needed tortilla "chipsy" so we thought we knew where to look. Ironically, the tortilla chips are in another aisle with the limited selection of Mexican items.
Tesco also offered us this wonderful purple-cow display advertising a European milk chocolate company. It caught our attention by "mooing" loudly whenever anyone walked in front of it.
We needed to find bathrooms, so we wandered next door into the adjacent Shopping Palace mall. (Slovak businesses often use English-language names, and the shopping malls almost always have a large supermarket attached. Interesting.)
At the entrance to Shopping Palace, we saw a giant Santa statue greeting entering customers. Except it wasn't a statue, it was a massive, life-sized Lego sculpture!
As we proceeded through the mall to the bathrooms, we found many more wonderful Lego displays. Suzanne walked right past this one thinking it was actually a group of girls. Her punishment was a picture sitting with her new "Lego Friends."
My personal favorite was the camel:
And the kind-of-Christmas-y animal scenes were cool.
But some of you will probably prefer the Star Wars characters.
The picture below is obviously not Lego, but it kind of seems to belong with the Star Wars theme. It's my "Darth Razor," opened for cleaning. Suzanne saw it one day and took the picture because she thought it looked like an evil Star Wars character. I guess it does evil things to my whiskers...
Sarah's here!
We are very excited to have dcéra (daughter) Sarah visiting for a little over a week. It's always fun to have guests, especially when there are interesting places to visit with them. Yesterday we walked in the old city, having lunch at Urban Bistro, one of our favorite lunch spots, and taking a stroll through the open-air market, still operating in the cold on December 30. This morning we had breakfast at our favorite breakfast stop, Rannô Ptáča, and it did not disappoint.
Then this afternoon we went to the Slovak Philharmonic's Silvester (New Year's Eve) concert, featuring both the orchestra and its choir. It was a wonderful montage of familiar overtures and short pieces from over a dozen different composers from Offenbach to Elgar to Wagner to Stravinsky to Ibert. A thoroughly enjoyable two hours! They repeat this program four times in the next two days, so I'm sure that the musicians will be sick of the music by the end of tomorrow!
Tomorrow we fly to Rome for three days, and then her boyfriend Alex flies up from Bulgaria for a few days with us. He flies out of Vienna on Thursday, a day before Sarah does, so we will probably take the bus to Vienna with him when he leaves and then stay a day there before Sarah goes to the airport on Friday.
So much to see and so little time!
That's all for now. Happy New Year! or Šťastný Nový Rok! to all of you from Bratislava. I'll post all of the pictures and adventures from our Rome excursion next week.
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