Around the City, Ples, and Guests

Is it March already?  Actually, it's more than halfway through the month.  Tomorrow, Spring begins!  We thought, with visits from friends and family impending, we ought to get to know the city we live in a little better.  We've always found that the best motivation for getting out and about is the obligation to show people around!  This view is taken from Slavin, the monument to Soviet soldiers who died in the liberation of Slovakia from the Germans in World War II.  If the haze would part, you could see our flat.  At least, we can see the monument from our windows!


In Central Europe, at least in Slovakia, people and organizations sponsor formal balls instead of Mardi Gras parties as Lent approaches.  The ples sponsored by the Evanjelicke Lyceum took place on March 5.  In former years, American teachers have been asked to perform something; fortunately for us, this year the planners went for an all-student program, including everything from a string quartet to reggae dancers.  Great!  We did have to dress up, though.  The table decorations were lovely, the company was exhilarating, and (best of all) with one notable exception (the Blue Danube), other people did the dancing!

Schonbrunn, from the Glorieta

Two days later we went to Vienna to meet Dick and Sylvia. Although the weather was cool, we went to the Schonbrunn Palace, eating lunch along the way at a place with live jazz with a distinctly zydeco flavor (typical Austrian, right?).  We toured the palace where Maria Theresa ruled (she was crowned, or "coronated" as they say in Europe), in Bratislava, which was then Pressburg, but more about that later), and one of her sixteen children, Marie Antoinette (Louis XVI, revolution, let them eat cake, and all of that) grew up. Then we went up the hill to the Glorieta, a little cafe with great views, to take pictures and have a little something.

They went off to Poland, and we went home.  They came to Bratislava the Thursday after, and got a flavor of how we live, complete with staying in the flat, going to choir practice that night and going to school the next morning where they visited classes and toured the library.  We ate, went around the city some, and then took in a philharmonic concert complete with a pre-concert potluck.  The next day we went by train to Trencin, and got to tour the castle as well as the town.  On Sunday after church, we ate (again) and toured the city some more, including the Bratislava Castle.  Bratislava, then Posony or Pressburg, depending on whether you came from Hungary or Austria, became the capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire when the Turks conquered Budapest in the middle of the sixteenth century, and remained the capital until nearly the end of the eighteenth century, even though Budapest was taken back from the Turks a hundred years earlier.  I guess it was a shorter ride from Vienna, where the rulers really wanted to be.  The castle appears in the distance in this post's very first picture, and we had our group picture taken there, too, thanks to a handy gorillapod and trash bin!

Back at school, Paula's having students give a glimpse of Slovakia for her "Slovakia, My Homeland" unit.  While they can be very cynical about the country, they can also be very proud of what's here--enough that the presentations are very good and lasting twice as long as Paula predicted!  One student wore her grandmother's traditional costume for her presentation, and then brought it back the next day for Paula to put on!

So, who knows what next.  Spring is sprung, we're getting lots of good ideas about what to see, we're involved with things here....  Such problems!  More to follow.... 

Beautiful, and Cold, Budapest

We should have known, I guess, that it would be cold in Budapest at the end of February, but that's when our "Spring" break was, so that's when we went.  We stayed in Buda, in the Burg Hotel which is (not surprisingly) in the castle, since that's what "burg" means in German.  The hotel stands right across the square from St. Matthew's Church.  Paula saw a view of the church on line with scaffolding and shrouds, but no such screen existed when we arrived.  Workmen had taken everything down two weeks before.  Three bells sat on the ground, but a crane lifted them up into the belfry tower on Monday.  We could have stayed around to watch the process, but too many places called to us.  We went for a walk and saw St. Mary Magdalene church, or what's left of it.  The Hungarians worshiped there when the higher caste "Germans" (Austrians) used St. Matthew's.  Heavily damaged by wars, the only pieces left of St. Mary

St. Mary Magdalene

Magdalene are the tower and one reconstructed arched window to show where the altar stood.

St. Matthew's

Sunday morning we attended high mass at St. Matthew's.  Apparently a high mass is sung at 10AM each Sunday.  This was Mozart's Mass in C Minor, with a fine orchestra and choir. In the afternoon we took the tour of the Parliament building.   We tried to walk around and look at architecture, but looking at buildings is more difficult when you shiver.



We went to the market on Monday morning, bright and early. Shopkeepers, bundled up against the cold, opened food stands on the ground floor, but many of the tourist shops opened more slowly.  The eateries opened by 10AM and we did have coffee. 

Having coffee in the market

After lunch we 

Parliament, in Pest, as seen from Buda.

went to the Grand Synagogue and took the tour there.  Parliament, of course, had heat, but even though the synagogue (as with most if not all places of worship in Central Europe) had no heat, being inside and out of the wind warmed us up.   


Tuesday we bathed.  Budapest is known for its thermal baths.  The Hungarians built two, one in Buda and one in Pest, in the late Nineteenth Century.  We went to Szechnanyi, in Pest.  It has two outside pools, one at body temperature and one about twenty degrees cooler.  Once we got in we were fine, but being in a "hot tub" with snowflakes falling on your head is a little strange.  Tuesday afternoon we found the "shoes"

Shoes

on the bank of the Danube.  We heard about the shoes during the synagogue tour, but could not find them later Monday.  The exhibit, sixty sets of period-appropriate shoes, commemorates Jews who hid from the Nazis during World War II but were taken from hiding by a group of Hungarian sympathizers in early 1945, marched to the Danube, and shot into the water.  A sculptor placed the bronze shoes in the early 1990s.

We also enjoyed the National Gallery and the "Labyrinth."  Wednesday we went back to the market briefly and then caught a train for home.  It had been cold in Bratislava when we were gone, and our friends who went to Ljubljana, Slovenia, and Kiev reported very cold temperatures, too.