timor mortis conturbat me

Posted on December 22, 2011 by Mark Rossiter

These are the days of dying: Christopher Hitchens, Vaclav Havel, Kim Jong Il. Famous people, of whom I know nothing. Closer to home, the Saab marque died; we have had Saabs since we first married, and we still have two now. But Saab is not a person, and has no feelings, whatever its followers may feel.

The bloke next door died, too. I reported in my last post that he was grumpy; his widow tells me that he was not, and that they laughed till the end. It may be heartening that his pragmaticism overcame understandable self-pity; but to what end? I look in the glass doors that I walk through and I see grey hair. Who knows? Twenty, thirty years? He was only 70. And I throw my time away on trivialities.

What happened? the time is nearing, and the reaper stalks the halls…

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comes to all

Posted on December 12, 2011 by Mark Rossiter

The bloke next door is dying, in hospital, of cancer. Apparently he’s doing so rather grouchily.  This seems understandable; who would want to go, after all, especially when it seems inconceivable that you could have done everything you wanted to do with the time that you had? Won’t there be bound to be some resentment? Or maybe it’s just the pain…

I wonder how I will go, when I go? Will I go on right to the end, as my father and my mother did, and then drop? Or will there have to be time to face the prospect that it will end with increasing pain and sliding dignity?

The neighbour is only around 70, give or take. That’s a reminder that there is always the prospect that there may be less time than you might think. Everybody – or most people? – would like to think that they have a better than average chance of being better than average at living longer – but half the people won’t. My dad had always seemed larger than life, and that impression loomed larger than his increasingly decrepit appearance as he grew, well, older, but not that old – hence the shock that he didn’t live longer than 75. Then my mother, all set up to head for her 90s, we thought, a prejudice that survived the really quite sudden onset of feebleness in her early 80s – till she died overnight at 82, exactly average for a British woman in 2008. In spite of their specialness, not so special in that respect after all. Death does no favours.

I wonder if I will bargain?

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the end of the road (for now)

Posted on July 15, 2011 by Mark Rossiter

From Trencin, another train journey, this time across the Czech Republic to Prague. Prague was undeniably beautiful, especially the buildings:

but a tourist zoo:

I guess I arrived 15 years too late, i.e. just in time for the opening of the first Czech branch of Hooters:

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The best thing that happened was in the Old Town Square, which has to be one of the cutest urban spaces in Europe:

If also the site of a memorial to Jan Hus, burnt at the stake in 1415 for objecting to corruption in the Church:

I happened to walk through the square one evening, and stumbled on a jazz concert; the music, especially the pianist, sounded familiar, but also outstandingly brilliant. I lingered, and it finally twigged that, here in one of the most beautiful squares in Europe, under a perfect blue sky on a warm summer evening, and absolutely for free, I was listening to my second giant of black music of the summer: none other than Coltrane’s pianist in his great quartet of 50 years ago, McCoy Tyner:

I left Prague on the night train, and stopped in the morning at Cologne:

And so back to Paris, and the end of this summer’s adventure…

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trans-Slovakian

Posted on July 11, 2011 by Mark Rossiter

when I left Levoča this morning I took the bus to a quite ordinary town called Poprad – quite ordinary, that is, apart from its view of the High Tatras:

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These are the highest mountains in the whole Carpathian range, which spreads across six central and eastern European countries. Although it looks from the map below like there are more white snowcapped high peaks in Romania, the very highest ones are the little white ones in Slovakia, up near the Polish border – and those are the ones I saw today:

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Then I got on a train to go to the western end of Slovakia, which took three-and-a-half hours. The train ran through a green landscape of woods and hills and the occasional river or lake. I tried to take some pictures to give an idea of this, but it wasn’t very successful because the train moves so fast that what you are trying to shoot has already gone by the time the camera clicks, so you end up with lots of daft pictures like this:

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But I did get a few that I thought kind of worked, so here they are, for an idea of something like what Slovakia looks like:

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Finally I came to a town called Trenčín, where I am staying tonight. It is another one of those towns that is dominated by a huge castle:

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In fact of the two buildings in this picture, guess which one is my hotel?

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I had some trouble at first because they hadn’t recorded my reservation and told me I had no room, so I got mad at them and they sorted it out – but it left a bit of a bad taste in the mouth all around. Another disappointment is that I had come to see a carving in the cliff below the castle by one of the soldiers who served out here on the mad bad borderlands of the Roman Empire (as this was then) 1832 years ago, under the Emperor Marcus Aurelius (remember him?):

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but the hotel which commands access to this inscription is being gutted, so I can’t see it. And the castle only allows people in on guided tours, and that in Slovakian…plus I feel like I’ve seen all the castles I need to (especially after the mother of all castles at Spiš yesterday). Plus the people in the first bar I went in were just rude (though the rest have been much friendlier – and they’re even playing Manu Chao now, the arch-European…) Equals: my plan is to head for Prague – the last stage of my journey before heading back to Paris – as early as I can tomorrow morning…

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Levoča

Posted on July 11, 2011 by Mark Rossiter

Levoča is a sleepy little walled town in eastern Slovakia with beautiful old buildings, surrounded by rolling green hills. At 10.30 on a sunny Monday morning, the women are congregating in the parks with their strollers, and the men are congregating outside the cafes to drink beer. The cinema has two showings of movies, whether Hollywood or local: one at 7.00 on Friday, the other at 7.00 on Saturday. That’s it; end of run. Must be quite an event.

It does seem like the whole town centre is a free wireless network, though – hence I can sit in the square and write this.

Here are some of the buildings:

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And here is the city gate:

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The church of St. James (which is the second largest in Slovakia, after the one I saw yesterday in Košice – though not that big really) has a huge golden altar which was carved by a local carving master called Paul about 500 years ago. He didn’t use a single nail to hang this together – it was all done by fitting the wood:

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That’s beautiful, but around the corner there was another church (in baroque style, not quite so old) which was full of gorgeous light and even more colorful:

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Finally, in the main square is this cage, which they used to put people in who had misbehaved themselves. I hope none of the guys drinking beer at 10.30 in the morning end up in there…

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in Arkada ego

Posted on July 11, 2011 by Mark Rossiter

Here are some photos of my luxurious room at the Hotel Arkada in Levoča in eastern Slovakia – which costs €35 (about 175 dirhams)! So cheap that kids’ allowance savings could cover it…

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forest

Posted on July 11, 2011 by Mark Rossiter

on the way up to Spiš castle there was a forest. Boys and girls, this is what a forest looks like – the depth and the colours and textures! You can click on it to get a more detailed picture..

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Spiš

Posted on July 11, 2011 by Mark Rossiter

The next stop was even better. Spiš castle completely dominates everything for miles around:

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I climbed up to it – quite a hike – and looked around the ruins, some of which go back 700 years or more:

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It has spectacular views over the surrounding countryside and villages too:

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Across the other side of the village there’s another beautiful cathedral:

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It has its own pretty little church street leading up to it:

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but somehow you can’t escape that castle…

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Košice

Posted on July 11, 2011 by Mark Rossiter

I had to get up at 5.30 in the morning to catch a train, but it was worth it – what a great day! The train on the left is the one I caught (actually the third one, after I had made two changes), right after it had crossed out of Hungary and arrived in Košice, which is the second biggest city in Slovakia.

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Last week I was in the biggest city in Slovakia, Bratislava – that was the time I wrote about crossing the Iron Curtain, and how the city is now lived in by a different group of people from the ones who built it. Well that’s true in Košice too – for example the roof on the cathedral is just like the roofs in Hungary (but that’s probably because the city was built by Hungarians, who lived here for hundreds of years):

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But Košice has none of the freaky feeling of Bratislava. Well, at least in the City Center, which the Soviets left alone. The cathedral (the biggest church in Slovakia) looks like this on the inside:

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Sunday morning, the cathedral was filling up (mostly with young people, to my surprise), though there were still plenty hanging out in the cafes and the park next door, where there is what is supposed to be a musical fountain:

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In fact it was really just a regular fountain with some cheesy muzak versions of western pop songs playing in the park (which was strange enough), at least until 11.00, when the music stopped and this bell-tree chimed out a full-length version of the Beatles’ “Yesterday” (a song which seems to be all over the place in ex-Communist Europe, amid the local folk tunes):

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I did get bugged by some Roma people wanting money, and there were a few more around clearly drunk and shouting at each other – I believe there is quite a bit of prejudice against them in this part of Europe, but judging from what I saw, at least some of them don’t help themselves too much…of course that could be a chicken-and-egg question and I don’t know enough to say…

Anyway, apart from (or along with) the generally positive atmosphere there were some nice old buildings – this gothic gingerbread house caught my eye, especially the round turret:

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into the valley

Posted on July 9, 2011 by Mark Rossiter

This morning I Ieft Budapest and got a train to a small town in the north-east of Hungary called Eger (that’s pronounced egg-air). Its main claim to fame is that it fought off a large Turkish army that was trying to capture it nearly 500 years ago – for this reason the Hungarians are very proud of it. The Turks came back 44 years later, though, in 1596, and this time they won. They ruled Eger for 91 years before the Habsburgs kicked them out, and they left behind a minaret (the mosque has gone) which is apparently the most northerly minaret in Europe, apart from those built by Muslim immigrants since 1945:

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This is a picture of the town (which was rebuilt in Baroque after the Turks left), looking down from the castle:

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And this is one of the streets in it:

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These days it is a mainly agricultural area; they seem to be having a summer festival, and as I was walking through town a celebratory tractor parade went by. This in spite of the incredible heat; a temperature monitor that I passed read 39 celsius (that’s 102 Fahrenheit) – not far away from being too hot to move. I was on my way to the Valley of Beautiful Women, though the draw was not beautiful women (I didn’t see any), rather local wine, for which the “Nice Woman Valley” (as it is called on the road signs) is the main tasting area (they obviously know their marketing…)

A famous wine called Bull’s Blood comes from Eger, and it seems that the area used to be one of the most highly-rated wine-growing areas in Europe until the Soviets made the vineyards communal and messed it all up. Apparently both quality and variety has increased in the last 20 years though. The valley doesn’t look all that beautiful:

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…but they certainly seem to know their wine. I ended up in pleasant conversation with a very average-looking guy who talked me through four or five locally grown types, most of which tasted pretty good. People came in and out carrying crates of plastic botles which they had filled from the vat – getting in supplies for a party apparently. The idea of getting your wine so locally appealed quite a lot – made me feel I was back in Pannonia again. My server and I had a long and rambling set-to about the past and future of the European Union and its legal systems, while I slowly set back the equivalent of more than a bottle of various local wines – all for less than four euros, including tip.

I call that the valley of a good bargain…

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