nawl

We took an early-morning train to Bratislava, Slovakia. I had no idea it was so close. We left at 6:20 am and got there before 9. There were six of us in total, but we split up in the morning because Diane didn't bring her passport and missed the train.

I found the train ride over rather charming. There was actual snow on the ground, lots of it. We watched snow-covered Hungarian towns pass by, and noted the transition to Slovakia by the appearance of ads on benches at the train stations written in a non-Hungarian vowel-lacking language with lots of interesting diacritical marks.

Bratislava itself is quite small and much cleaner than Budapest, though admittedly we pretty much stuck to the old (touristy) parts of town. I found out later that it only has about 500,000 inhabitants. There was actually a lot of snow on the ground, white snow in huge piles, which I found rather charming. In the morning, there were legions of men in orange vests shoveling the snow into piles in the squares, more men shoveling the snow in piles into wheelbarrows which they wheeled to other piles, and even more men shoveling the piles of snow into a truck.

They also painted their nice buildings in odd colors. There were almost no cars in the touristy bits.

There were amusing sculptures in the street.

McDonalds has a different menu than in Hungary, and is advertising a series of something-something amerikou something sendvic called "McTexas", "McNew York", "McLouisiana", and "McMontana".

In the morning, everything was dead. Cafes wouldn't open until 2 pm. We walked to several museums only to discover that many of them didn't open until 11.

We were intending for it to be a weekend trip, but we quickly realized that in Jonah-style tourism there wasn't much to last more than a day. We walked through the Primate's Palace, which has, um, a mirrored room, some English tapestries of unknown provenance, and a sizable collection of vaguely disturbing paintings of no apparent technical interest.

We walked through the national art gallery, which Jonah's guidebook called "ho-hum" and discovered that the most amusing parts were actually the slightly off-grammatical thick art-critique prose descriptions in English of the paintings we were looking at. As in Hungary, many of the major artists studied elsewhere and only came back home to find subjects to paint. There were galleries of portraits of unknown rich Slovakians through the centuries, which we used to illustrate a discussion of women's fashion from the Renaissance through the Victorian era. These were interspersed with illustrations of rather unappetizing vegetables. There was almost a whole floor of wooden statues and painted panels used in churches. Many of the wooden statues (almost exclusively along the themes of Mary and baby Jesus and Jesus nailed to a cross, with only a few varied saints to spice things up) had lost their hands or feet, and one particularly sad incarnation could only really be described as "Mary with chunk of baby".

One particular Slovakian sculptor from the late 1700s apparently made 69 character study sculptures of male heads expressing various emotions, which were rather striking for their modernity.

We were the only visitors there besides one man who was copying one of the paintings, so we were followed around constantly by the small army of women in charge of standing in museums. The lady at the coat check made a big show of checking our ticket against the number on our coats, despite the fact that there was one other coat on the wall.

We went to the museum of viniculture and viticulture, where I realized that I have no idea what the difference between viniculture and viticulture is. Apparently Slovakians are proud of their wine. We were, again, the only visitors in the whole place, and this time when we'd made it through the first floor the woman managing the place locked the front door and unlocked the basement to herd us through the exhibits there. They had a collection of iron doors with grape decorations from houses that have since been destroyed, a huge old press, and walls and walls of wine bottles.

We ran into the other half of our group entirely by chance outside of the city museum. It had rooms full of random artifacts from Slovakia starting from the stone age and leading up through the beginning of the 20th century. I got the impression that nobody bothered to write in Slovakian until quite recently, though the exhibit that I think illustrated this was only written in Slovakian. Interestingly, things from the era of the Austro-Hungarian empire were both in German and in Hungarian, but never in Slovakian. It hadn't occurred to me that people even bothered to use Hungarian outside of modern Hungary. In the basement there was an exhibit on torture, labeled the "Museum of Feudal Justice", which contained many scary metal implements for many scary purposes ("Instrument for the crushing of bones") and had blown-up woodcut illustrations of people doing horrible things to other people in great detail.

And that was that. We walked up to the castle on the hill, but it had just closed. The view from the castle over the Danube was really rather depressing, an illustration of Communism at its worst. The other side of the river was filled with identical boxy concrete high-rises, and we had a wonderful view of the UFO-bridge, for which they apparently destroyed the entire old Jewish district. This wouldn't have been such a big deal at the time, though, because the Jews had already all been killed in the Holocaust.

For dinner, we met a friend of Tobin's who is actually a minor celebrity in Slovakia, a radio dj and the host of a behind-the-scenes show on the Slovakian version of American Idol. He told us that he now gets 12-year-olds following him around for his autograph. At the dinner table, he laid out two cell phones, which rang constantly, and a pack of cigarettes, of which he smoked three. The English menu at the restaurant had some amusing translations of dishes, such as "chicken bag", which apparently meant "stuffed chicken".

Bush just came through Bratislava last week on his European tour, which I was almost entirely oblivious to thanks to the lack of news here. Apparently the entire city was full of policemen and emptied of everyone else, the Bush people reserved an entire hospital just in case, and CNN had a big map of Europe highlighting all the countries that Bush visited... with the Slovakia arrow pointing to Slovenia.

Half of us took the 9:20 train home, which got in before midnight. This was perhaps a waste, because a cafe or a night club would probably be the most interesting part of the trip, but tiredness and Diane's intense hatred (or despise) for me exiged the early exit.

I have a new goal: fill up my passport. A few more trips outside Schengen countries should do the trick. I got four stamps yesterday: one each for entering and departing Hungary and Slovakia. As of now, I have two full-page visas, one full-page carte de sejour, and stamps from: 1 Canada, 1 US, 1 England, 4 France (2 Roissy-CDG, 2 Nice-Cote d'Azur), 2 Italy, 2 Slovakia, and *6* Hungary (4 Ferihegy-3 and 2 Budapest).