Veselé Vianoce!

Bratislava, Friday 25 December 2015

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


We are enjoying a very quiet Christmas, our first without any family since B.C. (Before Children). It is fun to watch all of the Slovak extended families assembling in our neighborhood, but also a little sad to be by ourselves. We have a visit from dcéra Sarah coming up next week that will give us some family interaction during the holiday period.

In Slovak culture, 25 December is not the "big day." Presents are exchanged on Štedrý večer, literally "generous evening," but to us, Christmas Eve. Then the 26th is the "Second Day of Christmas" or St. Stephen's Day, which is a big holiday, bigger than the 25th. Stockings are stuffed by Svätý Mikuláš, on 6 January, the 12th day of Christmas or St. Nicholas's Day. Svätý Mikuláš wears a red costume we would identify with Santa Claus.

Suzanne has done an amazing job of decorating our apartment for Christmas despite not having a tree and not really buying any ornaments or decorations. Her latest creation is a 2-dimensional Christmas tree made from wine corks (and a couple of decorations salvaged from our desserts at the Vienna pizzeria):

Yesterday we hiked up the hill to the outdoor ping-pong table that we found a few weeks ago. It is interesting to play ping-pong outside with environmental issues such as cold (less then 40F degrees), a water hazard on the table (Suzanne improvised a squeegee from the plastic ping-pong-set packaging to make the table playable), and of course the mud and tree roots underfoot. In our outdoor ping-pong playing, we have managed to cope with everything except wind: that´s impossible!

We opened presents last night, including warm gloves for me and warm do-it-yourself wool socks (yarn and knitting needles) for Suzanne that came all the way from my sister in Illinois!

Today we celebrated Christmas by taking the tram into the old city and walking around the streets, which we expected to be deserted but turned out to be surprisingly busy. Lots of tourists, even on Christmas, and all of the souvenir shops and most of the cafés were open. We will have a dinner that I predict to be wonderful at the best restaurant in Central Europe: Suzanne's kitchen. We found crab meat for the first time this week, so she is concocting a pot pie with crab and lots of great vegetables.

I finished my grading yesterday with no surprises. The good students continue to do well and those who are weaker (or not putting in much effort) continue to do less well. We have finally (on the third try) gotten the cinnamon rolls to be as good as at home. It took experimentation to figure out that we needed to use 00 flour, that the stainless steel pans don't brown the bottoms like aluminum, that the oven temperature may not be accurate, and that the sugar does not melt in the same way. But the real key was the vanilla extract. The local product is offensive: sickly sweet with a cloying aftertaste. Suzanne has now improvised her own version by soaking vanilla beans (which are very cheap here) in vodka (also very cheap here!) for a few weeks. It is really good, and combined with the Penzey's Vietnamese cinnamon that we carried across the Atlantic, the cinnamon rolls are now back to Portland quality.

Speaking of sweet confections, the family of one of my students owns a pastry shop in Bratislava. After the final exam (and the cinnamon rolls, which were tasty but pretty ugly), he brought me a gift box of truly amazing treats that taste every bit as good as they look:

Not much else is happening in our lives these days, but I have some more pictures and thoughts of life in Bratislava that I´ll share.

Bratislaviana

Groceries

It has been interesting to see how the selection in the grocery stores changes for the holidays. Of course, there are lots of decorations and specials on candy and sparkling wine. Every store has a large tank of live Christmas carp, which the locals take home and keep alive in the bathtub before killing and eating it for Christmas dinner. Duck and goose are also very popular here for general celebrations, including Christmas.

Some of the food items are unbelievably cheap. Bread and rolls are always cheap, and this week there were huge piles of beets and radishes at ridiculous prices:

Beets are 5 euro cents per kilo = less than 3 US cents per pound

Radishes are 2 euro cents per kilo = less than a penny US per pound

One could live very cheaply this week on a diet of red root vegetables! Our salads have lots of radishes and beets as we show our elasticity of demand.

Breakfast with dogs

We love the fact that people can bring dogs along to restaurants here (and on trams, into stores, and pretty much everywhere else). We went to breakfast on Wednesday at Mon Dieu, a favorite café in the old city, in a building in which Beethoven once lived for a couple of weeks while visiting Bratislava. There were two couples at a table nearby with their two big dogs, one a black-and-white pooch and the other a sizable brown weimaraner. At one point, we looked over and the weimaraner had climbed up into the owner´s lap. Suzanne couldn't resist pulling out her phone and taking a subtle picture, pretending to show me something on the screen but with the camera pointing at the dog. I've had big dogs in my lap more times than I want to remember. I wonder how long it took for the circulation to return to the owner's legs...

Souvenirs

Bratislava, like most tourist cities, has no shortage of tacky souvenir shops. We keep looking for tasteful sweatshirts with Bratislava or Slovensko on them, but have not yet found the right one. In the meantime, there's the one in the middle here, which purports to be from the University of Bratislava, founded in 1919. Of course, there is no University of Bratislava, though the oldest university in the city (Comenius University) was founded in 1919.

Names

We've gotten used to the fact that women have different last names than their male family members, usually changing a "y" to an "a" or adding "-ova" to the end. But it's really hard to get used to them doing that to American names. Hillary Clintonova and Michelle Obamova just don't sound right!

Sunrise, Sunset

And finally, we continue to have the most amazing sunrises and sunsets from our hilltop windows. It is very foggy here much of the time, but when the fog allows a view, we get treated to an amazing display. Here are the sunrise and the sunset from 23 December, although the cell-phone camera does not do justice to the richness of the colors:

The next week will be busy, with Sarah arriving on the 29th and all of us leaving on a 4-day trip to Rome on New Year's Day. I'll try to sneak in a post sometime during that spell, but in case I don't get anything else posted in 2015, Happy New Year to all! 

Oh, and we wish you a very Merry Christmas, too!