Square of Prancing Water

I caught the train to Kosice in eastern Slovakia for two reasons. Firstly, because trains to Lvov leave from here. Secondly, I had planned to go on a mission to the main museum in Medzillabourse, Andy Warhol’s ancestral home.

The first imperative looks like it will be satisfied easily enough. I’m catching a train to Lviv at the crack of dawn tomorrow morning. Fourteen hours later, I’ll be in Lviv. I’m busying myself collecting snacks for the train trip and trying not to fret too much about arriving in the Ukraine. Hey, I can read Cyrillic! I have a handful of useful Russian phrases at my disposal! I am developing a smile which simultaneously says, ‘I’m a woman of character and virtue, be nice to me’ and ‘It’s really not worth your while to notice me or harass me’ and ‘I am ferocious on the inside so and carrying a knife so don’t even think of messing with me.’ (Demonstrations on request.) I’ll be foiiiine. It looks like the election which took place over the weekend hasn’t resulted in any bloodshed either. *touches wood*

Alas, I wasn’t able to get my act together to see what is apparently the largest collection of Warhol personal memorabilia and ephemera on show anywhere in the world. Too many buses, all of them leaving at the wrong times. Instead, I took myself to Bardejov, allegedly the prettiest town in Slovakia. Fifteenth century town, big cathedral with with eight gothic altars intact inside, excellent town square given the nod by UNESCO, marauding teenage malcontents, all was in order.

Kosice itself has been the bonus. It’s a beautiful town full of not unattractive, not uncongenial people, rather than tourists. The first vegetarian restaurant in Czechoslovakia opened here years ago: good-bye bratwurst, hello, soy meat! Cabbages are sold out of carts in the market and all sorts of wild mushrooms are piled onto table-tops. Yea verily, an angel watches over Kosice. In Kosice you also find the easternmost Gothic cathedral in Europe, and the only one, I’d wager, whose bells toll ‘Yesterday’ on the hour. There’s lots of weird pseudo-gothic fixtures tacked onto Art Nouveau facades too. I was extremely taken by the city’s musical fountain situated right in the middle of the central square.
All day and well into the night, the fountain dances as music is pumped loudly out of speakers which encircle it. Not just any music, mind you. Imagine a saxophone-only Phil Collins number or the music for a triumphant finale to an ice-dancing pageant or the soundtrack to an interpretive dance piece called ‘The Triumph of the Self.’ If you went to primary school with me, remember the music Mrs Greenslade favoured for her percussion numbers. How does a fountain dance?, you may well ask. Jets buzz on and off, spurts shoot higher and lower, bashful showers turn into forthright water towers… Yes, well, yes. And after dark, the music and dancing water are accompanied by tasteful flashing lights. It seemed to attract quite a crowd of lovers young and old, wistful types staring into the fountain, family groups strolling. Do I need to add that I was transfixed?

And so Lviv it is, manana por la manana…

Conversion

Czech food is dangerous and wonderful. It is a perfect accompaniment to the excellent and abundant beers of the Czech Republic and an efficient remedy to the queasy states induced by consumption of said beers. Czech cooks do not fear salt, garlic, dumplings or the deep-fryer and I commend them for their fearlessness. In a warmer climate, those of a nutritionally puritanical bent might be forgiven for raising questions about the long term health benefits of such a diet. The Czech Republic is a chilly country, however, and adjectives like hearty, warming, solid and restorative are redefined by its climate-appropriate cuisine; to dwell on petty matters like cholesterol misses the point entirely.

At the back of this picture is a bowl of white sauerkraut soup, not a bad dish. In the foreground is the best potato and mushroom soup I’ve ever eaten in my life. To devote all attention to the potato (waxy) and mushrooms (wild) in this soup would be a mistake as the garlic, ‘erbs, and squall-resistant stock were actually what caused all the fuss.

Every single Czech restaurant I visited had garlic soup on the menu. I approve of garlic soup as a default menu option far more than I do the ubiquitous pumpkin soup. Not that there’s anything wrong with pumpkin soup. Me voilà eating garlic soup in the biggest beer-hall in the Czech Republic, at the Pilsener Urquell brewery. Here’s what I think happened. Barley got cooked inside out for god knows how long in a thick garlicky stock made with a smoked ham hock. The chef said, ‘Gosh, it’s almost lunchtime, I’d better do something with this soup,’ and threw in a handful of smoked pork and some more chopped garlic. The chef tasted the soup and said, ‘Gosh, that tastes great, but it lacks a certain something,’ and added, as if inspired by the divine, a handful of sliced brie. The soup was brought to my table. I ate it and was very happy.

I was rendered slightly delirious by the follow-up to the garlic soup: fried blue cheese with garlic sauce. The picture isn’t totally in focus and neither was I by the time I’d cleared the plate. Fried blue cheese with garlic sauce. The description of the dish needs nothing else. It was exactly as good as it sounds and made a walk home in the rain feel like a skippety jaunt through a tropical garden. I had a snooze for dessert.

Becoming a Woman of Experience

Occasionally I behave badly and chalk up my misdemeanours to a sense of intangible deprivation. I can now give that sense of deprivation some material dimensions. Up until earlier this week, I had not encountered the following.
a) A living, breathing raccoon.
This chap I’ll call Rocky. What a snout! He is resident at the Country and Western Bar (aka Fort Raccoon) in Pilsen, a superlative theme bar replete with wagon wheels, Uncle Sam, guitar-playing locals and the flag of the Confederacy. The last is a clue to the Military Bar downstairs. Full of guns, military paraphernalia, and Nazi memorabilia the Military Bar may or may not be housed in the former headquarters of the SS in Pilsen. The clientele? Half irony-seeking youngsters, half scary military heads in uniform. I wasn’t game to take a photo. Oh yes, raccoons. Imagine an oversized hedgehog with fur who, like a young rabbit, expresses inquisitiveness through nasal gesticulation, and you are on the road to a portrait of the raccoon, possibly the cutest large rodent I have ever had the privilege to meet.

b) The film-clip for 'Total Eclipse of the Heart.'

It’s the schoolboys at the end who really confuse me.

Experiences like these are like virtual putty for chips in the shoulder area. (Sorry about the lurid simile, I’ve been reading Tom Robbins again.) No longer having missed out on the above, I now have two fewer excuses for ratbaggery.

Pedagogy

My Pilsen host teaches English to high school kids. He took me to class to be interviewed by the students. Lucky squirrels, their exciting homework is to write a story about me. If I’d been a little more on the ball, I would have dressed up like a movie-star and fabricated exotic answers.

List 2
Questions I was asked by class 6SXA at the Masarykovo Gymnazium in Pilsen on the 27th September.
1. Do you have any bad habits?
2. What are your hobbies?
3. Are you from Scotland?
4. Do you have any pets?
5. Do you have any nicknames?
6. Do you like Pilsen?
7. What is your favourite drink?
8. What is your favourite colour?

(For the curious: 1. Yes. 2. Various. 3. Not really but kinda, 4. No. 5. Yes. 6. Yes. 7. Many. 8. Orange.)

Liminal

This was stencilled on the ground near the university in Vienna. Damn students.
Did I cross the line? But of course. I’m still processing my feelings on pushing this particular boundary.

Achtung Goldilocks

Having seen enough Renaissance art to stuff a turkey in Italy and Hungary, I decided to set my sights on the twentieth century in Vienna. I worried that I was losing my appetite for Modernism. Something in the gold leaf might have addled my brain: chubby bewinged putti kept fluttering into my dreams and drawing haloes around you all as I slept. St Sebastien featured not infrequently as did the heads of Holofernes and John the Baptist. Hmm. I was considering turfing all my notes on twentieth century avant-gardes, buying some brown shoes and finding a neglected Renaissance artist to rehabilitate via ‘an adventurous, highly creative’ biography. Thankfully, this will not come to pass: the stinky, smoggy century has been redeemed. I’ve gorged myself on Dada and Expressionism and Bauhaus and Fluxus and PopArt and the Secession and, lord Almighty, die Unheimlich; the uncanny lurks under every café table in Vienna. Hurrah ! I was completely enlivened by an exhibition called Traum und Trauma, replete with broken dolls, evil children, creepy mutated butterflies, an awful chamber full of old prams tied together with fire-hoses and the obligatory installation with strobe lights and low pitch white noise. Ah, repression, depravity, inner landscapes, perversions of innocence, alles in Ordnung. I was disturbed, I was comforted. I had a Cindy Sherman moment and took a photo of myself against a sickly yellow background.I call it Untitled #77 (Wir haben kein platz für eine Tischtennisplatte).

Next stop, the Freud Museum.

Bloggorhea, or, Who needs Twitter?

I keep wondering when the free wireless access is going to disappear. When that happens, I will too, for a while. You’ll all miss me and I’ll accumulate so much darn insight, your speculations as to what happens off-blog will only be able to be wildly off the mark, at best. And yet now, every time I open my laptop, I’m asked if I’d like to join a free network.

So. Anyway. Tonight I wandered around Györ a little more and realised that I had worn socks every single day since leaving Italy. Early autumn in Central Europe is chilly, my friends, too chilly for Birkenstocks and other such unclad foot-mode. I realised too that last night’s heartiness aside, I could have eaten most of my last week or so’s meals at a picnic. I needed the kind of dinner I would eat with my grandfather to reassure him I was regularly eating nutritious dinners. And so it came to pass that I ate a rare steak with wild mushrooms, garnished with a slices of orange and blood orange, sprigs of rosemary and sage, and a daisy, washed down with garlic soup and lashing of red wine served in glasses almost too heavy for my feeble wrists. I managed, just as I shall manage to watch the episode of Summer Heights High that I downloaded thanks to this embarrassing superflux of free wireless.

Really, you’ll all miss me when I’m gone…

Keeping it real

Walking down the street in Györ, I came across what I took to be a challenging and witty piece of public sculpture. Thoughts about the progressive attitude of Mitteleuropean municipal bodies towards contemporary installation art instantly flittered through my head.

I looked closer, however, and realised that we were not solidifying metaphors for the purposes of art but for those of Love and Real Life.

The heart is composed of hundreds of small padlocks onto which the names of lovers are inscribed. As far as I could tell, these locks weren’t being shackled onto a sickly pink chain in any kind of ironic fashion. I felt like I was back in Verona. The keys have been turned on an unbreakable contract and chucked into the river, kind of like a more comfortable chastity belt. How romantic! This padlock symbolises our relationship? Lock it in, Eddie! Cynical, moi?

And thus we see, true love conquers all! Except maybe bolt-cutters.

Desire thwarted, teeth rotted

I walked into a café in Györ wanting a salad and a glass of white wine.

This is what I wound up with: Hungary’s answer to the strawberry shortcake and a cappuccino mysteriously garnished with whipped cream. I’m not really sure how this happened. About fifteen of these were lined up in a display case out the front of the café, from which I deduced that they were the speciality of the house. The waiter approached, and before I knew it, I was nodding away when he said ‘mini torte of strawberry, miss?’ (which sounds like a guilty plea to a civil offence in fairyland). To be honest, this wasn’t the best cake i’ve ever eaten – the sponge was a bit dry and the strawberries weren’t up to Corsican standard – but I felt like I got off lightly when I saw the other cakes being carried past. As big as my head, they were, terrifying chocolate confections spiked with bottles of kirsch, cowsful of cream, treesful of almonds.

There might be something more sinister at play in Györ. I thought it was just an incredibly scenic Hungarian town where three rivers meet and wild birds frolic. In the foyer of my hotel (which used to be a Carmelite monastery!) I found a pamphlet advertising…dentistry travel. You can have a tooth pulled in Györ for a fraction of what it would cost in London. I thought hell might be defined by the hostel bus but I think the tooth extraction holiday - Yippee! Pack your togs! - definitely warrants a mention in the annals of earthly infernos.

So this is how it’s looking to me at the moment. They lure you here with promises of views and aspects and prospects and all of that baloney AND THEN they feed you cakes that will rot your teeth AND THEN…? Hello, emergency dental care.

I’m having garlic soup for dinner just in case I’m dragged into a dental chair against my will. Ha!

Grounding food

Eat a good Hungarian meal, said Anne, and make sure you drink some tokay. So I ate this veal stew with noodles at Gotti on Raday Utca in Budapest and thereby redefined hearty.
The veal was falling apart, just like me in essay marking season, but luckily it was falling into a rich creamy garlicky sauce laced with paprika. Why did that never happen to me? When the dish arrived, I thought to myself, ho hum, more noodles than stew, that’d be right, that's the price of an English language menu. The noodles deserved better than such dismissal. Sturdy yet soft, stern yet tender, the potato noodles wallowed decadent in their dish of hot egg, carbonara style. You could market these noodles as an edible alternative to mattresses. I’d never get out of bed. Hearty Hungarian was a success, such a success that I didn’t have it in me to order the tricolor strudel for dessert, even though I’d walked all around Budapest during the day, even to the top of the castle. No, I took the sensible option, a really quite sizeable glass of tokay. Under normal circumstances, this much sweet wine would have made me waft home. Post hearty meal, however, I was unable to move in any way akin to the waft, the drift, or the float. Readers dear, like an errant pilot, like a starling with a broken wing, like a well-adjusted Oprah viewer, I was grounded.

Cross purposes

Sign points right.
Cyclist rides left.

State sanctioned confusion in Hosok Tere, Budapest.

Two beers

One of the luxuries of travelling alone and being quite disorganised is that rapid and frequent changes of itinerary aren’t particularly problematic. A fortnight ago, I was hellbent for Odessa. Last week, it was all about Albania. I’ve now realised that it would be folly not to detour to see my Pilsen contact for the first time in a couple of years. To get to Pilsen, near the German border of the Czech Republic, I need to go to Prague and to get to Prague from Budapest on the train, well, there’s Bratislava or Vienna. I’ve been thrilled by the new on many occasions but on this one, the lure of all that imperial regalia and secessionist art and gluhwein and late nineteenth century intellectual angst and goulash is impossible to resist. So Vienna it is, and from thence to Pilsen, home of pilsener beer, and onwards to Ukrania.

Treading this path, I am aware, will require some fortitude. My Pilsen host is a beer connoisseur of note and all of his emails have ended with some reference to the beers that will be consumed on our reunion. I need to toughen up so it’s goodbye, bellinis and champagne and martini bianco, hello, beers of Mitteleuropa.

Exhibit A
Lasko of Lasko
Union (pronounced ooo-nion) is the beer that is brewed in Ljubljana but I vastly preferred the Lasko, brewed in the wee town of Lasko. I randomly met a woman from Melbourne and even more randomly wound up carousing till the small hours with her newly discovered Slovenian cousins in Ljubljana and they all agreed, Lasko is far superior.

Exhibit B
Dreher of Budapest
One of the reasons Budapest is called the Paris of the East is, I suspect, because of the proliferation of long and endless boulevards which invite endless strolling. Just one more block. Just until we reach that square up there. No, let's keep going to the next one. (That's my internal monologue keeping me company there.) Not too many blocks away from where I’m staying is a fine establishment called the Zappa Caffe and there they serve all manner of drinks, including Dreher Classic, brewed in Budapest.
I drank this surrounded by airbrushed portraits of Frank Zappa, listening to De La Soul. I didn’t actually realise that these glasses hold half a litre of beer until I had drunk two of them and ordered another one and a Zappa salad. Gosh. I wondered, could there be anything more psychedelic than a Zappa salad? A salad with paprika! Hot Rats!


In France, you can order a gallopin of beer, which is a 100ml glass which would actually look quite like a thimble next to a Hungarian glass. Here, I haven't seen beer served in any vessel smaller than 500ml. Hmmm.

Leaps of Faith

There seem to be two grades of pedestrian crossing in Budapest.

One for harried professional folks.


And one for cute kids.