Life in Bratislava, Part 1

Bratislava, Monday 14 September 2015

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

I must apologize for last Friday's post. No pictures, not very lively descriptions of anything, and really nothing much to describe. I'll try to do better today and going forward!

This will be the first of many posts that will try to describe interesting details about living in Bratislava and Slovakia. Be warned that it is more of a random collection of observations than a coherent narrative.

Our landlord's music

While chatting with our landlady, she mentioned that all of her family was involved in the arts. It turns out (after a little research) that her husband Ján Lehotský was a genuine Slovak "rock star" of the late 20th century. He was the leader of a band called Modus, which (judging by our small sample) seems to be well known to every Slovak. You can see some of his work on YouTube, for example, here. It's a soft rock style that is quite pleasant.

Their son Juraj, whom we met when he made an unsuccessful attempt to get our satellite TV working, is a film director who apparently does a lot of commercials and has done at least a couple of full-length films. Daughter Ela, who first showed us the apartment, is an actress on stage and screen.

A very talented family and, so far at least, very amiable landlords.

Quirks of the Slovak language

The last three days of last week we began our language instruction with a crash course provided by the Fulbright Commission. Some aspects of the grammar were familiar from other foreign languages: gendered nouns, multiple cases, formal and informal "you," etc. But there are a few things that were very different from any language either of us had experienced.

First, the easy part: The entire language is phonetically "perfect." Everything is pronounced exactly as it is spelled (or should I say spelled exactly as it is pronounced?). There are no silent letters or letters that can have multiple sounds (like the English "c" that can be soft, hard, or lots of other things). I'm not sure if this is correct, but it seems likely that this is because the current written language was not developed until the 1840s, so there has not been very much time for spoken forms to deviate from the more fixed written words. This means that once you get the idea that "c" is pronounced "ts" and č is pronounced "ch" and so on, you can reliably sound out any word that you see.

But there are a few things that are more difficult. There are no articles, so "a table" and "the table" are both just "stôl" (pronounced "stwol," like someone who can't pronounce "r" saying "stroll"). 

They also often leave out the subject pronoun, allowing the form of the verb to indicate whether it is "I," "you," "we," or "they" who is doing something. So while a literal translation of "I have a table" would be "je mám stôl," it is common to leave out the "je" and simply say "mám stôl" with the fact that it is "mám" rather than "máš" (for you) or "máme" (for we) to indicate that it is I who has the table.

And then there are the vowels, or the lack thereof. Ľudovít Štúr, who codified the language 170 years ago, was way ahead of his time. Americans didn't start having to "buy vowels" until the advent of Wheel of Fortune in 1975. But vowels must have been very expensive in Slovakia in the 1840s because Štúr seems to have avoided using them whenever possible! The word for "sun" is "slnko." That's not a typo, and it's pronounced just like it sounds. "Always" is "vždy," with the ž taking the "zh" sound. "Where" and "who" are, respectively, "kde" and "kto." "In" and "from" are even simpler: "v" and "z." Naturally, with no vowel sound to make a real syllable, these tiny words usually end up getting smushed together with the word that follows, making it a challenge to parse them aurally. But, when you think about it, why couldn't English spell "pull" as just "pl" and "skirt" as "skrt"?

We have found many online resources to help us with Slovak. Including one we found from Portland that provided the always useful "Moje vznášadlo je plné úhorov," (spoken) which translates to "My hovercraft is full of eels." I can't wait to find a way to use that! (The hilarious but now-truly-frightening Monty Python sketch from which this comes is here.)

It's fun to have a challenge. I'm catching on to the pronunciation quickly, but my vocabulary is still very, very primitive and some aspects of the grammar are way beyond me. 

Communism

I'm sure that I'll have a lot to say about Communism and its legacies in Slovakia over the next five months. As an economist, my thoughts about Communism and the transition to capitalist democracy are always first about economics: what our dear departed colleague Carl Stevens used to call "unscrambling the socialist egg." But from my early impressions, the people here think of the end of Communism as the beginning of freedom much more than a change in the method of resource allocation.

One of our new acquaintances related a story about her family when she was young in the 1980s. Her father had been something of a dissident: he once made a disparaging comment about the Communist Party that was overheard and reported. He desired to go to the university to become a geologist; the government instead sent him to work in the mines. His daughter, who was telling us the story, barely knew him growing up because he was away from home in Central Slovakia working long, back-breaking days as a miner.

She talked about the fact that Bratislava is close enough to the Austrian border that she could listen as a child to Western radio broadcasts, but only with the sound turned down low so that the neighbors could not hear through the walls lest she be turned in to the authorities. I was reminded immediately of the wonderful film The Lives of Others, but as revealing as that movie was, it's somehow much more vivid when the story is being told personally as the experience of someone you know. Slovaks have a great appreciation for the freedoms that many privileged Americans (including me) often take for granted. 

And they seem to retain a vivid antipathy for Russia. I asked her whether Slovaks typically have strong feelings of "pan-Slavism" toward other countries of the region; her response was that they were very close to the Czechs (except in international hockey competitions!) from their days as compatriots, and that they are EU partners, NATO allies, and good neighbors with the Croatians, Slovenes, Poles, etc., but that she did not think that there was much feeling of ethnic kinship, particularly not toward Russia.

Immigration crisis

Of course, the big news from this part of the world (or perhaps from the world in general) is the crisis of migrants entering the E.U. through Hungary. Even though we are only a few miles from the Hungary and Austria borders, there is simply nothing happening here that we can see. We get our news of the crisis from the New York Times, just like you do. 

Borders in Schengen-land are really the equivalent of borders between states in the U.S. There is a sign with the E.U. flag saying the name of the country you are entering, but no border-control stations or personnel on the border at all. It's hard to imagine logistically how they would re-impose restrictions without massive investment in personnel and massive delays in crossing. It would be a bit like trying to suddenly close off all of the crossings between Oregon and Idaho. Not totally impossible, but a nightmare for the governments and travelers.

Tomorrow is yet another national holiday in Slovakia---The Day of the Virgin Mary of the Seven Sorrows, but of course you probably already knew that---and we had planned to visit some restored Roman ruins just across the Austrian border. It might be better to postpone that one and confine our travels within Slovakia until we see how this all shakes out.

I'll post a first-hand account when and if this situation affects our lives. Until then, read the Times like I am!

Cinnamon rolls and other Kitchen Stories

(Note: If you don't understand the reference, follow the link and then download it from Netflix immediately!)

On Sunday/Monday, we made our first batch of cinnamon rolls in Slovakia. Lois had told the Slovak Fulbright director Nora in an email about my cinnamon rolls, and she remembered! Nora mentioned it to me as we were heading to the notary on Thursday, so Suzanne and I decided we needed to make some to take to our meeting with Nora on Monday morning. 

It was a challenge, but ultimately a success. Shopping was, once again, difficult. It's easy to translate "powdered" and "sugar," but do the Slovaks call powdered sugar by these two words? (Yes.) And where do they hide the yeast in grocery stores? And which of the several kinds of flour in the store corresponds to "all-purpose flour" in the U.S.? We probably spent an hour at Tesco assembling ingredients for this (and other recipes). 

We have no electric mixer, so it was a whisk-and-elbow-grease effort to get the dough together, and likewise for the frosting. We have no rolling pin, so these cinnamon rolls were rolled out with an empty wine bottle! They tasted a little different, but we brought along a supply of Penzeys' Vietnamese cinnamon so at least the main ingredient was the same. I would rate them at 90% as good as the ones from home. 

Meanwhile, Suzanne has been making wonderful meals, just like at home. The buffalo cheese from Quattro Portoni seems to give a special and excellent new flavor to old recipes. She made a pasta with their buffalo mozzarella over the weekend that was výborný bordering on perfektný! And the gnocchi that she improvised (without her magical gnocchi tool from home, but with one of the buffalo cheeses) today was brilliant. Maybe I'll have to find a way to use buffalo cheese in the cinnamon rolls ...

Some random pictures

Over the course of the last few weeks, we have accumulated some photos that haven't made it into blog posts. So here are some pictures from our travels, mostly in Bratislava, but first one from Beaune: a statue of a man that should have been sub-titled "cut out the middle-man!"

Although the picture above is from France, Bratislava is famous for the amusing modern metal sculptures that adorn the central city. Among the most famous is a bronze statue of a man emerging from a manhole:

Another famous one is this one of a soldier in Napoleon's army who, while besieging (but never conquering) Bratislava is supposed to have fallen in love with a local woman, defected to the other side, and taken up making sparkling wine (his name was Hubert, the name of the best-known brand). An additional fun observation about this statue is that directly behind it, with his derriere protruding directly at it, is the French embassy.

This statue is of Ignac Lamar, a beloved local who was famous in the early 20th century for standing on this particular corner and complimenting young ladies on their pulchritude, handing them flowers, and tipping his hat.

Speaking of Napoleon, when he besieged the city in 1805 the local authorities offered to waive the taxes of anyone whose home was struck by a French cannonball. There are no actual recorded strikes, but quite a number of home-owners surreptitiously embedded cannonballs into their buildings, then claimed (unsuccessfully) to have suffered damage from the French. This particular one is in a narrow street and from the direction of French fire would have had to come up the street and make a 90-degree right turn to achieve this position!

A couple of interesting buildings we saw last week: First the narrowest house in Slovakia (though not in the world). It was fit in between two other buildings just inside St. Michael's gate. A kebob shop is on the ground floor with a two-story, 1.5-meter wide house above.

One the other side of the gate (which is at left in the above photo) is the executioner's house. At one time, Bratislava had the only executioner in the region, so he needed to identify his house so that anyone requiring his services could find him, hence the gruesome statue:

Another weird thing about Bratislava houses: They all have two numbers, as in the 346 and 2 on the house above. In the time of beloved Empress Maria Theresa, who had a special fondness for Bratislava, the houses were numbered chronologically. The first house in the city was #1, the second #2, etc. This was, of course, a nightmare for the postal service. So at some point they started a more logical numbering with consecutive numbers on each street, much like America. But the old numbers are still there, too. The executioner's house was the 346th address registered in the first district (the indistinct Roman I in red to the left of the 346 numeral), but is the first house on the even side of the street in modern times (so numbered 2).

Europe is known for its huge, ancient, and ornate churches and cathedrals. But one of the most interesting churches in Bratislava is the "blue church," built in the early 20th century.

That's all for now. We'll be celebrating The Day of the Virgin Mary of the Seven Sorrows tomorrow, then I need to get back to campus and finish up my reading lists. I'll try to post more at the end of the week, or whenever there is something newsy worth posting.

Getting oriented

Bratislava, Friday, 11 September

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed on this blog are my own and do not reflect those of the Fulbright Commission or the U.S. Department of State.

OK, so now you're going to see a disclaimer similar to the above on each post because I'm not the President of the United States or even the Secretary of State, and therefore I'm not allowed to speak officially on behalf of the U.S. government.

What's happened since my last post (Monday)? The first thing was a power failure! After I posted on Monday, we talked with Chad on my phone via Google Hangouts. My phone was starting to get low on power, so Suzanne plugged it into the outlet and the power promptly went out. So there we were, speaking none of the native tongue, trying to figure out how to get the power back on. First we figured out that it was just our apartment. Then we found our breaker box, which looked totally normal---nothing was tripped. What to do next? We went outside and tried communicating through a combination of pantomime and Google Translate with a couple who emerged from the building. She took us to our neighbor on our floor, who is also the building manager and speaks a bit of anglicky. He, then, took us to the garage where we found the master breakers, which were indeed tripped for our apartment. We turned the power back on, but it was back off by the time we got upstairs. So we went back down and turned in on and it immediately snapped back off. After about five iterations of on/off, it miraculously stayed on, and has been on ever since. This does not inspire confidence, but so far so good...

Tuesday morning we drove to campus and my new colleague Daniel Dujava went with me to obtain an ID to get lunches at the university, then he walked with us to the transit office where we presented our pictures and bought a three-month transit pass. The car hasn't moved since! The trams run within a couple of blocks of our apartment right to the center of the city and are so much easier than driving in traffic and worrying about parking. We'll do a lot of driving out of the city, but for getting around in Bratislava we'll probably be riding the "električka" and the buses most of the time.

Then we came home and worked on our applications for Slovak residency permits. Wow! These people are amazingly good at bureaucracy! (And the locals seem to agree with this opinion.) To get the permit that allows us to stay in the country more than three months, we need

• official certification from the Fulbright Commission that I have an appointment here and will be paid enough to survive (OK, that sounds reasonable)
• criminal history reports from the U.S. FBI on which our birth date appears (which takes three to four months, and there's another story here...)
• clearance from our physician that we do not have HIV, hepatitis B or C, syphilis, or tuberculosis
• documentation that we are covered by health insurance during our stay in the SR
• a notarized form on which I state that I will financially support Suzanne during our stay
• an original marriage license, authenticated with an apostille from the Minnesota Secretary of State attesting to the validity of the County Clerk's signature
• a certified lease contract (in both of our names) supported by an extract of the landlord's title deed

And then there's the application form. This form requires the usual stuff, plus the names, birthdates, and addresses of our parents (all four deceased!), the names, birthdates, and addresses of all of our siblings, and the names, birthdates, and addresses of our children, even though none of the above are actually going to live in Slovakia. So if you are related to us and reading this blog, the Slovaks might be getting in touch with you!

We are meeting with Nora, the Slovak Fulbright queen, on Monday to go through all of this and get ready to submit the forms, which must be done in person at the local police station. The Fulbright office will send a native speaker with us to help with this process. (Thank goodness!)

I promised you a story about the FBI, so here it is. Nora warned us that the FBI clearance typically takes 90-120 days. (Huge backlogs of gun buyers?) So we applied diligently in early May giving them our credit-card information to process the payment. Well, they don't process the payment until the end of the 90-120 days, and in the interim, our credit card was compromised and the account had to be closed. Of course, when the FBI actually processed the payment, the account number was rejected and we had to send them the new one. We did this and waited (impatiently) for the charge to clear. It didn't. A couple of days before our departure in August I called the FBI line to find out the status of our clearance. A nice lady named Pam informed me that because our payment was declined we had to go back into the 90-120 day queue for processing, so we wouldn't get the clearance until November. This would, of course, mean that we would have to leave Slovakia in mid-November because our 90-day tourist visas would have expired. At that point I tried to explain to Pam that this would mean that my students would not be able to finish their classes because I would have to leave the country a month before the semester ended. Her response? "Oh, is this for a job?" I told her it was. "Well in that case we will process your request in 7-10 days." So ... gun-buyers get to wait months but job-seekers get to jump the queue! 

On Wednesday morning we finally got our satellite TV hooked up. It took two hours and at the end we have almost 200 channels, but very little that is of interest. No sports or food channels at all. We have CNN and CNBC, but almost all of the rest are Arab, Asian, or religious channels. We are mustering up the courage to go back into the satellite lineup and see if there are other channels that we can add. In any event, I missed the Slovakia/Ukraine football match on Tuesday evening, which ended in a 0-0 draw that puts them through to the final tournament if they beat Belarus at home and Luxembourg away in October.

Wednesday through Friday was our official Fulbright orientation. When we arrived, we discovered that I am the only faculty Fulbright recipient who is here this fall---the other four are arriving for the spring semester. So our orientation sessions were with a delightful group of nine new college graduates who will be teaching English in high schools across Slovakia, many in tiny villages. Half of each day was Slovak language class with Maja (pronounced Maya), a wonderful language teacher who regularly works with international medical students on learning Slovak. She managed in seven hours to get us to the point where I am much less intimidated about the language. We'll need to study our notes a lot and try to build our vocabularies, but the basics are starting to make sense even if I'll never really understand all the cases.

This afternoon, the group took a tour of some of the leading Bratislava tourist attractions. Our tour guide, another Nora, turned out to be a Ph.D. in international trade who taught until a month ago at the University of Economics, and whose husband still teaches there. (We are hoping to get together with them in the coming weeks.) I'd been warned that the faculty here are grossly underpaid and often seek outside employment: she is a great tour guide and obviously loves her second job!

At the embassy reception last night, I spoke with a number of embassy staff and a few people associated with the University of Economics and with Comenius University, the big, general university in the country. One person told us that the typical salary for university faculty is 700-1200 euros/month, or about 10-15% of what a Reed faculty member earns. In fact, the student Fulbright fellows will earn more than the teachers with whom they work or even than university faculty. This makes me feel an awkward combination of lucky, rich, and embarrassed. (But not embarrassed enough to donate 90% of my salary back to Reed! Sorry, Hugh!)

So that brings you up to date on our not-very-exciting week. We are exhausted from our language-learning efforts and are re-thinking plans to head to Vienna tomorrow. We'll probably just stick around Bratislava and I may start getting serious about class preparation. I'll  try to post something next week with an update.

Getting settled

Bratislava, Monday 7 September

I have started hearing from some of my "audience," which is wonderful! I must say that I remain rather surprised (but really, really pleased) that anyone is following our adventures. I love to hear your reactions, so please comment either on the blog or by email. I miss Portland, Reed, and all of you back home very much.

Thanks for all the tips that various readers have sent on learning language. We will try a lot of them and are looking forward to the Slovak class sessions that Fulbright will offer this week. There is also a Slovak class for international students at the university starting in October, so we may sign up for that as well.

In the meantime, we have found a good language trick that helps with shopping: make our grocery lists in both English and Slovak. This not only helps us learn the words when we look them up but also gives us the Slovak words when we are at the grocery store and need to figure out if this mysterious tube or jar contains what we want. We've also begun to explore the depths of Google Translate, which is really an amazing app. With the camera option, we can point our phone cameras at any Slovak text and the English translation of the entire text will appear on our phone. Of course the translation is not always really intelligible, but who's complaining?

Wine, shopping, and restaurants

We finally opened a bottle of grocery-store Slovak wine.

The first thing that was surprising was the clear glass bottle. Most wines are, of course, bottled in green or sometimes brown glass, which (according to online sources) helps to reduce the rate of oxidation. I don't think that this wine has been in the bottle long enough for such things to matter, but it was startling to pour out the first glass and see clear glass emerge under the foil at the top.

Now to the taste. This particular wine (chosen somewhat randomly from the store shelves) is made from a grape that is called frankovka modrá (literally, "Frankish blue") in Slovak, but lemberger or blaufränkisch in Germany and America. It is a German variety that I've never tasted before but that apparently (if you trust Wikipedia) was one of the earliest plantings in the Yakima Valley of Washington. There are a lot of wineries in the Yakima Valley of which I am very fond, but I don't think Kestrel, Alexandra Nicole, or the Bunnell Family are making wine out of lemberger these days ... and the taste of this Slovak version might explain why. It's not bad, but after we each had a glass we agreed that Suzanne's wonderful dinner of genuine Italian penne pasta with an onion, garlic, tomato, and mushroom sauce and fresh buffalo mozzarella from Quattro Portoni would be much better with the Bordeaux sitting next to it on the shelf. I'm looking forward to some advice from my new colleagues about which winemakers are the best---it is certainly true that Oregon and Washington make a lot of unimpressive wine, too.

On Saturday, our ongoing shopping expeditions took us to Ikea and the adjacent Avion shopping center, both near the Bratislava Airport. We found about a dozen useful items at Ikea, including lamps, kitchen items, pillow cases, bathroom shelves, etc. The one thing we didn't find that was high on our list was a fan. Our apartment is not air conditioned, which shouldn't really be a problem as the very hot weather is probably behind us. But it is still uncomfortably warm at night without the windows open. Opening the windows at night seems obvious, but when we did that the first two nights we were besieged by a hungry family of mosquitoes. Luckily for me, Suzanne tastes a lot better to the mosquito palate than I do, so she got eaten up while I am largely intact. (This kind of reminds me of the old story with the punchline: "I don't have to run faster than the bear, I just have to run faster than you!") Anyway, not only did Ikea not have fans, but every store in the Avion mall was sold out of fans due to the brutally hot summer they have had here and, because it's the end of the season, none of the stores was planning to get any more.

While we were at Avion, we noticed a Subway restaurant in the food court and, knowing that we could get a "veggie delite" there we stopped for lunch. I'm not sure if it is company policy or if we were lucky, but both of the young women who waited on us speak excellent English. I hadn't thought about it until I was ordering, but Subway is a very language-intensive place: What veggies would you like? What kind of bread? What kind of cheese? Toasted? All these questions! I was very glad to take advantage of their good English skills after I had bravely offered "Dva veggie delite, prosim" at the counter.

Speaking of restaurants, on our last evening in the hotel we walked across the city to an Indian restaurant that had excellent online reviews. The restaurant was largely empty; there was one couple there when we entered and only one other family arrived before we left two hours later. Usually when we have been in empty restaurants, the service is very fast---sometimes too fast. But despite the lack of customers, this was probably the slowest service we have ever experienced in a restaurant. It seemed as though one young Indian man was doing all the serving, all the cooking, all the dishwashing, and maybe helping care for the baby who, with his mother, occasionally popped up the stairs and into the dining room. The food was good, though, and we're going to give them another try in hopes that maybe they were just understaffed that day. As we were leaving, we picked up a business card from the restaurant, which, when we got it home and read it, had a rather amusing language error. Now I assume that they wanted to say that they could "sit" 150-200 people for a party-"jubilee"-"reception," but they just added one unfortunate little letter that got the message all wrong. I won't go into all the mental images ....

Our neighborhood

On Saturday we did a little exploration of our neighborhood. We are in the district of Karlova Ves, which literally means "Charles's village." Looking to the east across the street is the Comenius University Faculty of Mathematics, and just down the road (to the right in the picture) are the faculties of natural sciences. Wow, how convenient this apartment would be if I were a scientist visiting at Comenius instead of an economist visiting at the University of Economics.

Comenius University Faculty of Mathematics, from our balcony

Directly below our balcony to the south is a school for the blind, which has a large garden with lots and lots of red tomatoes. Of course, the students probably can't tell that they are red. It would be unimaginably bad karma stealing tomatoes from blind kids, but it sure is tempting!

Looking to the west from our wrap-around balcony you can see the hills of Austria across the Danube in the distance. According to Google Maps, our apartment is 1.05km from the border.

Looking southwest from the balcony

The road Staré Grunty starts near our apartment building and makes a big northbound loop up the hill (to the left in the first picture) and heads back south on the other side of the hill. We drove it on Saturday just to explore. Terrible road with more than the usual substantial quota of potholes. And as we were coming down on the other side we felt like we were in some kind of apocalypse movie. First there were abandoned and half-demolished apartment blocks on the left, perhaps crumbling leftovers from the days of central planning. Then a dozen or more large, empty, and run-down apartment buildings on the right. A little research suggests that the ones on the right are student residences and, since school does not start for a couple more weeks here, they are indeed empty. Reed students: You have very cushy dorms!!

Football!

Saturday night was one of the biggest matches in the (short) history of Slovak football. They are in the late stages of the qualification round for next summer's European Championships. As with the World Cup and most other football tournaments, the qualification round places the countries into groups, with the top couple of teams in each group advancing to the next round. Slovakia was drawn into Group C along with Spain, Ukraine, Belarus, Luxembourg, and Macedonia. The last three are minnows and, historically, Slovakia are not much better---perhaps smelt. Spain are the defending champions and Ukraine have been a very good side over the years, so prospects for Slovakia qualifying for the final rounds were not good.

But this Slovak team has stunned the world! Going into Saturday's match, only Slovakia and England (in Group E) had won all six of their matches to lead their groups with perfect 6-0-0 records. The Slovaks had opened the qualifying with two stunning victories: a 1-0 win in Kiev---the first time in history that Slovakia had beaten Ukraine---followed by an even more shocking 2-1 win over Spain at home in Žilina. Saturday was the rematch in Spain, to be followed by a Tuesday home rematch against Ukraine. Unfortunately, our satellite TV is not yet hooked up properly, so we did not get to watch. From the media accounts, Slovakia held up well despite six players being suspended, though they ended up losing to Spain by a respectable 2-0. All players will be back for the Ukraine match Tuesday, where a win or even a draw should assure the Slovaks of advancing into the final rounds next summer for the very first time.

Červený Kameň

On Sunday, we did some real sightseeing outside of Bratislava. We trekked 50 or so km northeast from the city through the district of Rača and the towns of Svetý Jur (St. George), Pezinok, Vinosady. Modra, and Dubova to the castle of Červený Kameň  (pronounced CHAIR-ven-ee Common)---literally "Red Stone"---above the tiny village of Píla. Unlike most of the castles of Central Europe, this one was never ruined, just repeatedly remodeled. Hence it is in magnificent condition.

Červený Kameň served both the fortress/defense function of a castle and the residence function of a palace. From the 13th century it was given to various families of noblemen who supported the current monarch with money or troops. In the 16th century it ended up in the hands of the Fuggers, a famous family of German financiers who were mining copper near Banská Bystrica in central Slovakia. From 1583 to 1945, it was owned and occupied by members of the wealthy Pálffy family from Hungary (of which Slovakia was a part until 1918).

The insignia of the Pálffy family is a deer standing on its back legs atop a broken wheel. The story behind it is that members of the family were returning home late at night through a dark forest when a deer leaped out in front of the carriage, causing a crash that broke a wheel. The family was forced to remain in the carriage over night, and when dawn broke they discovered that the accident with the deer had stopped them from going over a steep cliff to certain destruction. To commemorate that event, they adopted the deer and wheel (see picture below) as the family symbol.

The interior of the castle is now maintained as part of the Slovak National Museum system and contains magnificent furnishings, art, and frescoes from the 19th century and earlier. We spent almost two hours going through the interior with a Slovak-speaking guide. We did not understand what she was saying, but their four-page, small-print English handout covered each room in some detail so we really knew exactly what we were seeing at each place. Here are some views, mostly exterior, of the castle:

Castle exterior

English garden outside castle

Deer and broken wheel in the courtyard: Symbol of the Pálffy family

Lazy peacocks in the begonias of the courtyard

Stairs up from the cellars, which were built to hold copper, not wine or prisoners

In the cellars

Back to campus

Monday morning I went to the office, which was not without incident. Driving the new car without Suzanne for the first time, I made a wrong turn, then once I got back in the right place I drove right past the University and almost to Hungary before I dug out the GPS and backtracked. Oh well, I won't make that mistake again. I spent a couple of hours working in my office for the first time and had a meeting with Anetta Čaplanová, who was my original contact at the university and who is my official liaison person. I'm beginning to set up Web pages for classes, but so much is still undecided that it is difficult to get very far. I'll go back in on Tuesday and try to get things better settled, since Wednesday through Friday are going to be taken up with Fulbright committee orientation.

A couple of random pictures from the campus are below.

The first is an example of the graduates' names painted on the sidewalks. (I mentioned this in the last post.) You can only see the white one clearly, but if you look to the sides and in the distance you can see different years and different departments in a rainbow of colors.

The second is a very strange phenomenon I have observed in the parking lot. There are rows of marked spaces on both sides of an aisle, just like in the U.S. (The lot is done with blocks that have grass growing between them for drainage, which is why it looks like weeds instead of pavement.) But long before the lot is even close to full, people start parking in the middle of the aisles between the two rows of parked cars. There is only one car in the middle in this photo from Friday, but this morning there was an entire row of cars parked one behind the other down the middle of the aisle. I guess it's not an outrageous idea, but why park in the middle when there are dozens of empty marked spaces on both sides? Given the size of our car, I'm worried that we could get blocked in, so I'm parking in the outlying rows (which have foot-high thistles growing through the blocks attesting to their infrequent use, and so far no one parking in the middle) and backing into my space, just to make sure!

The car directly in front of the camera is parked!

Tomorrow (Tuesday) we are going to get our bus passes, so maybe I won't need to park on campus as often. My colleague Daniel has agreed to meet us on campus in the morning and serve as interpreter to get us through the process of applying for the transit ID card (with picture) that is required. Then we will be able to start getting around on the trams and buses rather than having to drive everywhere. I'm sure that this will be an adventure, so be sure to tune in later in the week to catch up.

Moving in

Bratislava, 4 September 2015

You might have guessed from the delay in posting this that my enthusiasm for blogging is waning. Well, yes and no. It's not so much a lack of energy for reporting as it is that we simply haven't been doing very much that would be interesting to any of you. (And apparently there are a few people out there actually reading what I write. Thanks!)

To quote the Slovak Fulbright Commission's handbook: "Things generally move slower in the Slovak Republic, for good and for bad." We gained some supporting evidence in finalizing our housing arrangements. We toured apartments on Monday, made our selection Monday evening, and sent a message to the real-estate agent with our decision, thinking that maybe we could even move in Tuesday or Wednesday. He agreed to process paperwork for us on Tuesday (despite it being Constitution Day, a national holiday). So we walked down to his office in the old city, paid his commission, and signed the papers officially buying his services ... but not the actual lease. He promised to try to get in touch with the landlords and arrange the lease-signing and the "hand-over" as soon as possible.

We spent about the next two days waiting in the hotel for him to call, text, email, or anything to let us know if there was any progress. A Tuesday lease signing was not possible because the landlords were apparently gone for the holiday. Then on Wednesday we heard nothing. Finally I told the agent that our hotel stay ended at noon on Thursday and asked if we could please get things arranged to move into the apartment by then.

He finally arranged the hand-over for noon Thursday. So after waiting impatiently for two days in the hotel, we are now finally in our apartment. We met with the landlady and the real-estate agent at noon to sign the lease and get the keys. Everything went very smoothly; the landlady is very sweet and she is trying to make everything work for us. She speaks enough English for us to communicate and lives nearby.

For anyone who wants to send something to us, the apartment address is below:

Jeff (and/or Suzanne) Parker c/o Lehotsky
Staré Grunty 332
841 04 Bratislava
Slovakia

The apartment is in the Karlova Ves district of Bratislava, a bit northwest of the center of the city. The university where I will be teaching is southeast of the city, so walking to school is not going to be an option, but I can get there with just one transfer on the tram/bus and it's about a 15 minute drive. After getting our suitcases (finally!) out of the back of the car and into the apartment, we enjoyed a bottle of prosecco (surprisingly good considering we bought it at a gas station in Italy!) on the balcony. It's wonderful to have a real refrigerator/freezer and an actual kitchen again!

There are a few quirks in the apartment, or maybe it is just us adapting to European life. For one, the "bathroom" has a shower, sink, and tub, but no toilet. That's across the hall in the WC, alone with the smallest sink I've ever seen. And the floor in the bathroom is very warm making the room quite hot on these warm days. The furnishings (which are quite complete) are late-Ikea and uniformly done in light-colored woods, matching the light wood floors. Clothing storage is in a large three-part wardrobe unit in the hall. But there are no drawers, just shelves and hanging loci---no place to hide unmentionables.

We have a reserved garage parking space ... that we can't get our car into! One enters the garage from the street, then our space is immediately to the right inside a second garage door. The problem is, we haven't been able to wiggle the car into the space without about twenty back and forth sequences to make what is effectively a 90-degree turn on a dime. Suzanne actually got it in, but then could not get out of the car because she was too close to the wall! We'll try to think of a new strategy but for now we're happy parking in the outside spaces adjacent to the building.

Quirks or not, it's home for the next five months!

While it's great to be in our own place and have a bit more space, it occurred to me last night that this is the first time on our travels that we do not have an English-speaking clerk downstairs to whom we could appeal if there was a problem. This whole "not speaking Slovak" thing is really bothering me. I feel so dependent on someone else's willingness (and ability) to speak my language in his or her country. In grocery stores, we always pick the line with the youngest clerk, on the assumption that young people are more likely to know some English than older ones. It has worked reasonably well so far. If you ask most Slovaks whether they speak English they will either shake their heads vigorously or else get a shy look on their faces and say very apologetically "a little." It has usually turned out that their "little" was far more than enough for our needs and, of course, it is we who should be apologizing for not speaking the native tongue.

Our one really negative experience with the language was trying to buy monthly transit passes. (It turns out that the process is complicated, involving filling out a form and submitting a picture, but we didn't know this at the time.) We found the transit office in the city a couple of days ago and stood in a long, long line for twenty minutes before we finally got to the front. The (quite young) woman behind the counter did not speak English at all, and when we started trying to explain what we wanted by saying "card for tram," she thought we said "train" and sent us two doors down to the train ticket office. Needless to say, we did not get back into the long line again and we still don't have transit passes, though we plan to get them on Monday when one of my new colleagues has promised to help.

We paid our first visit to the University of Economics this morning. Daniel Dujava is the professor who has been coordinating my course assignments and office arrangements and he agreed to meet me at 10am. He had the key to my new office (about the size of my Reed office, but narrower and deeper). They must have known something about me because the picture above the desk in my office has a glass of (white) wine! Daniel showed me around the largely empty department a bit and introduced me to Eva Muchová, the department chair, and to the department secretary, who is not Lois Hobbs! I'll be meeting more colleagues and starting to work in the office early next week.

One of the things that we noticed walking around the campus (and had noticed near other university buildings in the city) is that each year's class of each department paints its names and year on the sidewalks outside the buildings. Maybe the Reed econ department can adopt this habit and start working its way from the doors of Vollum out into the library quad. :)

The rest of today was spent shopping at multiple supermarkets. First back to Tesco (see previous post) for most of the groceries we needed and miscellaneous other items. As per habit, we picked the youngest clerk and she not only spoke quite good English, but she noticed that one of our items would be cheaper if we had stamps of the kind that they give out with purchases. She suggested that she should ring up the other purchases first, paste the stamps we earned onto a page of a little book that she provided, then ring up the last item, which she did, saving us about 5 euros. What a sweetheart!

Tesco has a lot of non-food merchandise, but after two or three passes through the store (remember that we can't read the signs or ask people) there were several things that we could not find: pillows, hangers, and measuring cups and spoons. So after a brief rest and our first home-cooked meal in nearly a month (grilled water-buffalo cheese sandwiches), we set out on foot for the two nearest grocery stores in Karlova Ves. The closest one is Lidl, right at the bottom of our hill, and it is one of the most unusual stores we've ever entered. It has standard grocery items, but in a row down the center aisle it has a seemingly random selection of all kinds of other stuff, from clothing to wrenches to school supplies to toys to build-yourself night stands. But not pillows, hangers, or measuring cups/spoons. A little farther away is a Billa, at which we had a little better luck, finding pillows and a graduated liquid measuring cup, along with a couple of bottles of Slovak wine to try. The wines in the grocery stores are either amazing bargains or utter junk---we haven't sampled enough yet to know. Nothing is priced more than about 6 euros a bottle. I'll let you know later whether that is a bargain or whether price truly is an indicator of quality in this market.

So now you're up to date as we head into the weekend. We have no real plans except to continue the search for hangers and measuring devices and perhaps to do a little touring around the area. Devin Castle is a ruin that is just outside Bratislava in the direction of our apartment so that is a possibility, as is visiting some of the many wineries in the area. You'll just have to read the next post to see what we ended up doing. :)

Arrived in Bratislava

Bratislava, Monday 31 August

Greetings from our final destination: Bratislava! Once again, I should remind my readers that the views in this blog are only mine. They don't reflect official opinions of the Fulbright Commission, the U.S. Department of State, or even Suzanne. Just me!

On Saturday, we drove the 400 or so miles from Padova through Austria to Bratislava. The drive was very pleasant; even the parts of Austria that do not have tall mountains are lovely.

We were also introduced to a new (to us) way to pay tolls---the "vignette"---which will be the norm for us in Central Europe. A vignette is a windshield sticker that one buys upon entering the country that entitles the car to be driven on the country's motorways. It's like tolls-by-subscription. As long as you have a current vignette, you can drive the motorways as much as you want at zero marginal cost. Not terribly efficient from the standpoint of resource allocation, but very efficient for the driver who does not need to stop at toll booths. We bought a 2-month vignette for Austria and a one-year vignette for Slovakia. Before we come home, we will no doubt have vignettes for the Czech Republic and Slovenia on our windshield as well.

After arriving Saturday (on National Uprising Day, a Slovak national holiday), we walked down the hill from our hotel and explored the old city briefly. We found a little, empty restaurant called Attila and sat down for dinner. We found no Huns there, but they did have some excellent vegetarian items on the menu (which had English translations) and a delightful waiter who helped us understand everything we needed to know. Among the highlights were two Slovak cheese that we will enjoy adding to our cheese menu while we are here. One was a rather hard, white cheese not unlike haloumi but presented as a braided set of narrow strings about the gauge of a cell-phone cord. The other was softer little gnocchi-like balls that were almost coated with delicious paprika.

Sunday was a "down day" with nothing special planned. (It was also our 41st wedding anniversary, which we celebrated without ceremony.) In the morning, we found our way to FlipperWash, apparently the only laundromat in Slovakia, and did our accumulated laundry. Then we decided to explore shopping opportunities, looking for something like a Target or Fred Meyer where we could get various food and non-food items that we wanted. We also wanted to start looking for a printer and some windshield-washer fluid for the car. We found success at a "mall" complex in the southern part of the city. A nice little HP printer cost us 70€, an auto supply sold us washer fluid, and Tesco across the way was perfect for everything else (and we could have bought a printer there, too). Tesco in Bratislava is very much like Portland's Fred Meyer stores in size and selection and has a variety of smaller shops and cafés around it much like the jewelry and pharmacy departments at FM. We bought lots of miscellaneous stuff from bread and crackers to printer paper and noted with delight that both of the great cheeses we had at Attila were available there. In the evening, we walked southwest from our hotel to the Hrad, or castle. It was a beautiful evening and there were dozens of people enjoying the view of the city from the castle walls.

Looking west over the old city to the new business district

Looking south over the Danube, with the UFO bridge on the left

Today, Monday, was apartment-hunting day. All of the economic literature on the Slovak labor market highlights the tightness of the apartment market in Bratislava as one of the key reasons that people from Eastern Slovakia (unemployment rate of 20%+) don't move to Bratislava (unemployment rate of 5%) to get jobs. After Communism in the 1990s, state-owned apartments were sold cheaply to their tenants, resulting in a 90% rate of home ownership and few rental units. According to the OECD, a heavy bureaucratic hand has slowed the rate of construction since then, so the market is still really tight. Looking for a fully furnished unit that will accept a 6 month lease further narrows the options.

Our real-estate agent Jakub arranged a viewing of two apartments starting at 2:15 (or 14:15, as we are beginning to say), so we had the morning free. Suzanne went shopping at a tea shop and a craft shop past which we had walked on Sunday; I stayed in the room to write the beginnings of this post. We agreed to meet in front of the Falkensteiner Hotel (an easily visible landmark) at 11:30.

While I was waiting to walk down the hill to join her, an email arrived from Nora Hložeková, the Fulbright coordinator for Slovakia, saying that they had just finished moving into their new headquarters---which turned out to be right around the corner from the Falkensteiner Hotel! After meeting up, we went to introduce ourselves and had a truly lovely and helpful meeting with Nora. She seems to be one of those people who is just on top of everything, with a hundred balls in the air at once but knowing exactly where each one is going to fall. I am very much looking forward to working with her this year as a Fulbright fellow.

Of the two apartments we saw today, we decided that the first is nearly perfect, the only problem being that it is a clear across the city from the university. (It would be like living in Northwest Portland or Beaverton and teaching at Reed, not impossible, but less convenient than Eastmoreland.) It is on the second (third by U.S. reckoning) floor of a new building at the top of a large hill on the northwest side of the city in an area called Karlova Ves. It has a wrap-around balcony that affords nice views toward the city. (Bratislava looks so flat on the map, but it's not!) Until they take the listing down, you can see some photos of the apartment at this site.

The other apartment we saw was in many ways so very appealing. It was the upstairs of a suburban house with the landlord couple (and their rambunctious big dog!) living downstairs. The apartment was very, very nicely furnished and we would have access to their huge garden and pool, but it was even farther away from the university (in the same direction), had access only via a narrow and steep spiral staircase, and we would have basically been living with the lovely landlord couple, sharing the same entrance. Very tempting, but we decided in favor of the more formal place that is closer to the city.

After our apartment search ended with, we hope and assume, success, and we dropped off Jakub in the center of the city (his car broke down today), we found ourselves adjacent to one of the two large American-style shopping malls in Bratislava, as recommended by both Jakub and Nora. We decided to go into the mall (Eurovea Galleria) to see if we could find an English-speaking agent to arrange a cell-phone plan for us. Nora recommended O2, one of the three cell-phone companies serving Slovakia. Thanks to the nice folks at O2, we now have cell-phone service in Slovakia! If you want to make very expensive phone calls to us, I'm at +421 944 404 143 (+421 is the country code) and Suzanne is at +421 944 404 877. But if you should decide to call, don't forget that we are 9 hours ahead of you if you are on the West Coast! Noon Portland time is 9pm (or 21:00) in Bratislava!

So it was a busy but productive day. Many of the nagging uncertainties that have been keeping me awake at night have started to be resolved. Now if I could just speak a little of the language...

In closing, here are a few of random observations about Slovakia and Bratislava from our first two days:

• It's really hard to get around in a country in which you don't know any of the language. While it has been true that most young people and most people in hotels and restaurants speak some English, road signs and stores are for the most part a true mystery. For example, in buying the washer fluid for the car, it took a lot of pantomime and one-word English back-and-forth to make sure that what we were buying should not be diluted with water. We know what we're looking at in grocery stores, but the big signs indicating what is in each aisle are absolutely no help at all! Our fragmentary French and German served us well in France and Germany, and even Italy where many words are similar enough to their French or English counterparts to allow us to figure out what they meant. When we see formaggio in Italian, we know what it means because we know that fromage is cheese in French. But as a Slavic language, Slovak is not similar to any language we know. I'm sure that we will establish a functional vocabulary over time, but right now we are pretty lost.
• I have known for a long time that Europeans often wear "American" t-shirts with the names of colleges or sports teams on them, and that they often get the details totally wrong: University of Harvard or the like. But at the grocery store yesterday I saw one that almost made me burst out laughing. A very heavy, older man was wearing a brown shirt emblazoned with "Chicago Lions," and between the two words, a Green Bay Packers' logo "G." As a lapsed Minnesota Vikings fan, I found it comical that he managed in one shirt to express affinity for all three of the Vikings' divisional rivals: Chicago Bears, Detroit Lions, and the Packers!
• Slovakia is a relatively recent entrant to the European Union, the Euro Zone, and the OECD. Because of its membership in these rich-country clubs, it is easy to forget that its level of development and accumulation of infrastructure are still well behind the richer and longer-established economies of Western Europe. Based on a small sample so far, the condition of the roads and streets seems to be very inconsistent, with lots of potholes on the narrow neighborhood streets. (But of course that doesn't prevent the Slovaks from driving at very high speeds on them!) There are a lot of elegant old buildings near the center of the city that are empty and crumbling. The city seems to be on its way to being a major European capital, but it is not all the way there yet. As a macroeconomist, I'll surely return to this theme in a later economic-related post.

So tomorrow (Tuesday) is another Slovak national holiday: Constitution Day. (Yes, they do have two national holidays three days apart. Presumably the "National Uprising" of 29 August led quickly to the "Constitution" of 1 September?) It is not clear how much of the apartment arrangements can be accomplished on a holiday, but Jakub has promised to go to the office and work on the paperwork. Expect another post late in the week once our housing situation has been resolved and we have a few more experiences to report. 

Viva Italia

Padova, Italy,  Friday 8/28

We left Annecy on Wednesday morning and drove over, under, and through the Alps into Italy. The Alps are quite different than the American Rockies or particularly the Cascades. Steeper slopes and less clear-cutting. Lovely vistas and, of course, castles randomly (probably not, actually, randomly) placed in seemingly inaccessible places on the sides of the mountains.

The Alpine countries are really, really into tunnels, which I guess is a result of the steepness of the slopes. We probably went through ten tunnels in total on this leg of the trip, but the grand champion of the group was the Frejus Tunnel: 13 kilometers (and 40+ euros) under the border between France and Italy. Once out of the Alps, we had a long drive on the Italian autostrada, or motorway.

A couple of comments about the autostrada. First, the authorities are inconsistent in their method of tolling. In some places, you pay a toll every so-many miles (or kilometers). In others, you take a ticket when you get on and pay the appropriate toll when you get off. It is confusing because you never know whether you're going to get a card or pay a toll until you get to the booth.

Second, rules aren't rules in Italy. Lane markings are just a handy guide in case you want to follow them. Speed limits are likewise followed only sometimes. Turn signals are for foreigners, and if you want to keep two lanes available for yourself, you just center yourself on the line until you decide which one you want, which might be a mile to two later. And the typical following distance for some Italian drivers on the autostrada is, oh, maybe one meter.

Third, the route across northern Italy from Torino to Milano toward Venezia is totally industrial. It reminds me of driving Interstate 80 past Chicago and into Indiana and Ohio. There is no scenery, just factories lined up along the highway for hundreds of miles.

We drove past Torino and Milano in our quest to our first Italian stop:

Formaggio Quattro Portoni

As some of you may know, we have fallen in love with an Italian cheese called Casatica di Bufala, a soft water-buffalo-milk cheese we have found both at Cheese Bar and at New Seasons. The last time we were at Cheese Bar, we got more information about the cheese-maker: Quattro Portoni, We drove south of Bergamo to a little town (10,000 population) called Cologno al Serio. I had emailed them on Tuesday telling them that we had enjoyed one of their cheeses very much in Portland, were traveling across northern Italy, and would very much love to taste more of their cheeses and see their farm. A polite reply invited us to stop in the afternoon.

We arrived around 1:30pm, which was mistimed because everything except restaurants, including creameries, is closed from about 12:30 until some time between 2:30 and 4:00. We had an hour to kill before Quattro Portoni's shop (located outside the village) opened, so we decided to explore Cologno al Serio.

What an interesting town! It is a walled village with a moat outside the walls.

Walls of Cologno al Serio with moat and gate

There are four arched entries into the old city, each of which is about one car-lane wide, but cars zip through them, dodging each other and any bikes or pedestrians who happen to be in the way. The name of the creamery literally means "Four Gates" and some of their cheeses are named for the individual gates, for example, Casatica. We went into the old city through the Rocca gate. Looking up on the side of the arch as we passed through, we found a small picture of the Virgin Mary watching everyone who passed in or out.

The  Rocca gate to Cologno al Serio

Looking through the gate into the old town

Virgin Mary watching all who pass through the gate

Inside the town walls is a beautiful, large church with statues of saints all around the sides and two bell-towers, one very large and the other somewhat more modest.

Parish church from the side

Parish church from front

The larger bell tower

We walked around the streets a bit and stopped for some excellent gelato (two big scoops for 1€50 --- Italy is cheaper than France!) before heading back out of town to Quattro Portoni.

We arrived at Quattro Portoni just after their scheduled opening at 2:30, but the door to the shop was locked. One of the employees came out and opened the door. We tried to explain to him who we were and that we had sent a message the day before, but his English was fragmentary. He fetched a co-worker with a bit more English, who then called for the boss, Bruno Gritti, who owns the enterprise with his brother Alfio. Bruno greeted us warmly with better English than his employees and led us to a barn across the courtyard, where he had set up a table with all of his cheeses for us to taste. He offered us wine and water with the cheese and summoned his wife Elena, whose English was quite good. 

We spent an hour with Bruno and Elena, tasting through all of the Quattro Portoni cheeses, sipping wine and water, and asking dozens of questions about their business and how their cheese managed to make it to Portland. (We learned that we were mispronouncing the name of our favorite cheese: it's ka-ZAHT-ee-ka.) They were most gracious hosts, answering our questions (even the dumb ones) patiently in tag-team English: when one was lost for a word the other chimed in and made us understand fully. After tasting the cheeses, Elena took us on a tour to meet the stars of the show: the 1,000 water buffalo they keep out in back. 

They started using water buffalo in response to intense competition in the local market for cow cheese and restrictions on the amount of allowed production. They bought some buffalo from a farmer near Roma who was getting out of the business and soon switched entirely to making buffalo cheese. Buffalo mozzarella is known, and prized, in the United States, though rarely produced there. But Bruno did not stop with mozzarella; he has an entire line of buffalo-milk cheeses, from soft camembert-style to cheeses as hard as the cheddar we know in America. All of them are delicious, and we ended up in the shop buying about 10 pounds of assorted cheese, which Bruno kindly packed in styrofoam with an ice pack to keep it cold. We'll have a challenge keeping it cold on the road for the next few days, but it is such wonderful cheese that we are willingly taking a chance and making all accommodations to try to keep it good. (Frozen peas or carrots from a grocery store make good ice packs!) We left at 3:30 with full stomachs from the tasting, a full case of cheese in the back of the car, and having made a couple of new Italian friends in Bruno and Elena. An experience we wouldn't trade for any we have had on this trip!

One of the barns

Elena and Bruno Gritti

One of the thousand

Yum! This bar tastes great!

Some of the wonderful cheeses in their shop

Cremona

After leaving Quattro Portoni in the afternoon, we drove south to Cremona, home of the great craftsmen who defined the violin in the 16th through 18th centuries. We stayed just one night in Cremona at the Hotel Duomo, just off the cathedral (duomo) square in the center of the city.

Hotel Duomo with restaurant below our room window

The cathedral itself is rather drab on the outside with a hodge-podge of different colors of stone, but it is magnificently and overwhelmingly ornate on the inside, with frescoes competing with mosaics competing with statuary competing with gold leaf everywhere for your eye. On one side wall there is a plaque with all of the bishops of Cremona ... dated going back to 326, but there are ten more before that whose dates are not shown! The bell tower or Torrazzo was of special interest because it pre-dates the convention of the 12-hour dial and clockwise movement. It is an astronomical clock that has four hands, but I wasn't able to figure out how to read it.

Façade of Cremona duomo

Torrazzo/Bell tower

Astronomical clock on Torrazzo

Pictures of interior of duomo

Bishops of Cremona

The Hotel Duomo has a restaurant that, like all restaurants in this part of the world, spills out onto the sidewalk and, because the street is closed to traffic, into the street. We were very hungry about 7:00 after walking around the area. When we walked back down our street, the Metropolitan Caffe right next door (in the distance in the hotel picture above) had dozens of patrons and very few open tables but our hotel restaurant had no customers at all, just three sad-looking waiters hoping for some action. We decided to sit down there and have a light dinner, at least partially because no one is smoking in an empty restaurant!

The food and wine were very good and by the time we left there were lots of diners. By the time we were ready to go to bed directly above the restaurant (outside our window), there were many, many diners and they were making a lot of noise. It was one of those nights that made me glad that I sleep with my time-worn little pillow over my head! And speaking of pillows, the one that the hotel provided screamed Simon and Garfunkel: "I am a rock!" And not a smooth rock, either. Oh well, I was tired and slept well despite the noise and the pillow.

On Thursday morning we headed around the corner to the Museo del Violino, a relatively recently opened museum dedicated to string instruments and the role of the great Cremonesi liutiai: Amati, Guarneri, and Stradivari. This is a modern museum at its best, using modern technology to explain and illustrate how violins are made and discussing what (to the extent that anyone knows) was technically special about the instruments of these revered makers. We learned much about what makes a violin sound the way it does and how they are put together. Then we saw dozens of old instruments from the great makers and all of the winning instruments from their triennial violin- (and viola-, cello-, and bass-) making competition, the next of which starts in September. 

Among the interesting things we learned was that Stradivari's brilliance nearly destroyed the Cremona violin industry in the early 1700s. With the Amati and Guarneri dynasties petering out, no one could compete with Stradivari, so many young luthiers picked up and moved elsewhere, particularly to Milano, where a new school of violin-making dominated the 19th century. The craft did not really take off again in Cremona until 1937, when a major celebration of the bicentennial of Stradivari's death brought the attention of great violin-makers back to Cremona. Now there are nearly 100 violin shops scattered around the city, many in the old, central district. In walking around the cathedral, we passed at least five shops. It seems that the local industry has been reborn. As we approached the end of the museum exhibits, we looked at our watches and discovered that we had spent two hours in the museum without even noticing the time that had passed!

No pictures were allowed in the museum, but we did get this interesting one of a modern sculpture in the courtyard:

Our last stop in our quick tour of Cremona was to try to find the site of Stradivari's workshop. It is now an upscale shopping mall, swarming with locals and tourists. But at least there is a plaque on the wall commemorating the city's most famous and successful citizen. (Well, there were a couple of popes, but how does one compare Heavenly Grace with heavenly music?)

Top: Stradivari plaque on site of his shop.  Bottom: The building that stands there now

Padova

On Wednesday morning we ended our short stay in Cremona and headed northeast to Padova, a famous university town only a few miles from Venice. We arrived exhausted after leaving Cremona in the early afternoon and driving through heavy traffic on the autostrada. All the energy we had for Wednesday evening was a couple of glasses of vino and some munchies in the hotel bar. 

If Stradivari is Cremona's claim to fame, then surely Galileo is Padova's. We are staying at the Hotel Galileo, on the edge of the modern university campus outside the old city walls. Thursday was a long day of walking (19,000 steps!) to and through the old city, seeing the sights, but also exploring residential neighborhoods on our way from Point A to B to C to D and back to the hotel. We started by walking past the university and into one of the gates over the canal and through the walls of the old city.

Our first stop was the justly famous Cappella degli Scrovegni, a chapel attached to the now-demolished palace of Enrico degli Scrovegni, a wealthy financier of the Middle Ages. We were lucky to get in; reservations 72 hours in advance are generally required but they happened to have an opening this morning.

Scrovegni commissioned the painter Giotto to paint frescoes depicting the lives of Mary and Jesus to completely cover the walls and ceiling of the chapel, which he completed in 1305. Of course, photos are not allowed, so I can only provide a couple of external shots and a personal review as someone with little knowledge of art history: They are fabulous! Many parts have been restored beautifully; others remain in weathered and damaged condition. 

To minimize the potential for further environmental damage, visitors now enter in groups of 25 into an "air-lock," where they remain for 15 minutes to allow the air in the room to adapt to the chapel's temperature and humidity. (During this 15 minutes, we got to watch a very informative movie with English sub-titles covering the history and significance of the frescoes.) Then we were allowed into the chapel for 15 minutes while the next group sat in the air-lock.

Two views of the Cappella degli Scrovegni

Adjacent to the Cappella, and admission-free with the same ticket, is the City Museum (Musei Civici di Padova). We spent more than an hour wandering through the exhibits and enjoying the paintings and sculptures. Again, no pictures allowed, so I can't really illustrate the interesting art that we saw.

After a quick lunch, we headed through the old city to the historic university observatory, where Galileo and Copernicus once taught and did their research on the solar system. It is only open once a day for tours and we were not at the right time, so we did not get to enter.

Padova University Obervatory

Later in the day, we walked by Galileo's home on a street now called Via Galilei:

The other "big" site in Padova is the Basilica of Saint Anthony, where the saint's remains lie in an elaborate monument in one of the transepts of the church. Many people were moved to tears by the experience of placing a hand on the back of the monument, and others knelt in prayer at its front. Signs at the entrance to the basilica clearly warned that photography was not allowed, but when we saw priests snapping flash photos, we decided we could get away with a discreet shot or two:

Basilica of St. Anthony

St. Anthony's tomb (in center)

In the piazza outside the basilica is a famous bronze statue by Donatello, another local hero:

Our final stop on the all-day walking tour was at the Botanical Garden of the university, which was originally a research facility searching for plants with curative powers. Now they aim mostly to inform people about ecosystems and to present examples of the kinds of plants that grow in different climatic zones. We thought that the most interesting were these giant water lilies:

After a busy day of walking, we treated ourselves to a nice dinner at the hotel restaurant with a lovely bottle of prosecco from Sorelle Bronca, a winery run by a pair of sisters, which won a recent award for the best prosecco in all of Italy. It was indeed yummy (and a serious bargain at 18€ for the bottle, cold and served at our table).

So tomorrow we are off to our final destination: Bratislava. It is a long drive through Italy and Austria and into Slovakia. We have a hotel booked there for a few nights while we look for more permanent housing. Given that we arrive on a Saturday evening, Sunday will be a sight-seeing day. Then Monday we have an appointment to look at apartments with a real-estate agent. I'll post news when there is some ...