Passing By

A while ago, I mentioned I wanted to contribute to the site Passing By. Finally, I have.

vlog: Štrbské Pleso

Apologies in advance for uneven audio and visual quality -- I'm still learning and figuring out the technical and narrative aspects of vlogging!


vlog: Štrbské Pleso from Maria Silvestri on Vimeo.

The vlog only tells the first part of the story, because afterwards we had a great late lunch/early dinner in the Tatras and then ended up driving through the mountains to Vyšné Ružbachy, a very pleasant village built on top of massive amounts of travertine marble. An excellently adventurous adventure!

I need sunshine

I'd be lying if I didn't admit that the lack of sunlight is affecting my mood and productivity in a somewhat negative way.

First Snow

The windows in the room where I sleep are like skylights on the roof of the building. Having grown up in a house with three excellent skylights, I know with minor dread the exact light conditions which mean that I have woken up to snow. Immediately when I woke up this morning, I knew it had snowed.

But Ružomberok looks beautiful with the pine-covered hills dusted with the perfect amount of snow. The thing is, everyone was like, "Let's go outside!" (including one of my colleagues, who added, "I'm like a kid when it snows!") and I was like, "Thanks, but no thanks! I'd prefer to be under a paplon right now!"

Lunch was amazing, as usual -- the second plate was lievance, which are pancakes + jam. Everyone was kind of curious when I said that this is something we eat for breakfast... But they are cooked in a special pan which makes them all cutely uniform.

Some of how my weekend looked

In my previous post, I mentioned that there was a national holiday this week -- so the long weekend was taken advantage of, which was wonderful, replete with amazing food and great company.

Sunday was foggy, but the fog made things beautiful, and looking out onto the lake meant looking into infinity.

During WW2, this shot would have shown the Slovak-Hungarian border.

On Sunday, during a walk, we watched a scene that was like Pymatuning lite: the fish in the lake were fighting for some pieces of bread, though there were fewer and they were more Euro-refined fish. By Monday morning, the fog had lifted and the lake was back to its normal clearness -- this lake is absolutely crystal clear.

A Bit of Sadness: Things the US MSM Doesn't Talk About

My existence here is so absolutely life-giving and energy-giving that I can barely describe how amazingly wonderful it is. I try so hard to tell the people that are around me how much they are doing for me, and it often feels like they don't believe me or believe in their life-affirming energy.

So because my everyday is overwhelmingly positive, it makes me so sad that current happenings here are so ridiculously negative. Specifically, the horrifically hateful right-wing nationalism that has been rearing it's ugly, ugly head in this corner of the world lately. Some flava from recent headlines:

• Bitter Blood Boils Between Neighbors (Budapest Times)
• Slovak, Hungarian leaders Fail to Thaw Icy Relations (Deutsche Welle -- one of my new favorite news sources, btw)

First off, a suggestion for Ján Slota: STFU. You're really an embarrassment to a lot of people. On Monday, in the car, we drove past where you insulted the Hungarian foreign minister -- disgusting. Also on Monday, and in both the Czech Republic and Slovakia, on a holiday commemorating protests against the Nazis and the beginning of the Velvet Revolution (thus, a holiday celebrating nonviolent protests -- lovely), nationalist groups even farther to the right of Slota protested against immigration and were openly racist. A stinger? While watching this bullshit on the news, I made the comment that effectively, I was an immigrant here, these people should be against me as well, and the response was something like, "but Maria, you're a student, blah blah ..." subtexts: "You're not a gypsy. / You look like us so we're not against you."

I am so sad and angry about such things. But there is some goodness from a Slovak Spectator editorial:

"Whenever a political leader, not to mention one who leads a party which is part of the government, lets out steam by calling other nationalities robbers and villains, there will always be a handful who will take it as an inspiration and might one day choose to go out into the street and attack people for using a different language or having a different skin colour."

The thing is, this is true for everywhere, not just Slovakia. Disaffected white males: quit feeling sorry for yourselves and find something more productive to do -- love will always triumph over hate, so just submit now.

More Rusyns in the News: Winemaking Version

This blog has the potential to get more and more self-referential the more I write -- postmodernism is dead, long live postmodernism!

A few weeks ago, I discussed the general process of sauerkraut making and posted the following picture:
I found out later that ironically, it had been caught by someone's e-mail filter as being inappropriate. If that's the case, I'm going to be inappropriate, again! Like Berlusconi! (The connections keep making themselves -- yay for hypertext!) Except this time, the picture really goes with the theme!

The other day I posted a news item that had to do with Rusyns in the news -- usually when Rusyns are in the news here, it's newsworthiness borders on teh Fark. This item is no exception!

From Ananova, 12 November:

A woman who plummeted 100ft from her ninth floor apartment had a lucky escape thanks to a giant vat of grapes.

Lumilla Vasko's fall was cushioned when she landed by chance in the huge container of fruit, Ananova reports.

Police called to the apartment in Uzhgorod, Ukraine, said the 29-year-old was "very shocked" by the incident. The grapes had been harvested from a nearby vineyard and were waiting in the vat to be crushed.

"She was still sitting in the vat of squashed grapes when we got there," a police spokesman said, adding: "But doctors examined her and said she was absolutely fine apart from the shock. The grapes cushioned her fall.

"She saved the winemakers a bit of work as well in the process because she crushed most of the grapes when she landed on them."

Important questions not answered: How/why did she fall? Where in Užhorod are there vineyards so close to a panelák? Will this newsworthy event take the attention away from the other stuff that's going on there (scroll down for English items, or better yet, try using Google Translate)?

My Brain's Competing Hemispheres

"If we spoke a different language, we would percieve a somewhat different world."
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein

I was just going through some notes and came across a thought process I wanted to write about earlier in the week. This week was one of those weeks wherein I was reminded of the huge cultural differences (perhaps related to the way language makes our brain work) that sometimes become awkwardly apparent and yet funny at weird moments.

Often when I'm telling my mom about various things that happen at school or elsewhere here, her main suggestion is that I explain what is known academically as "lateralization of brain function" but more commonly as "right brain/left brain." But it's one of those things I can't explain in English, let alone in Slovak, though I am generally more right brained. But that is not the only binary opposition that exists in my brain.

This week, I was sitting at my desk in the zborovňa during a break, leaning back in my chair. The principal came in and commented on my posture and seeming-inactivitity (the truth is that my mind is constantly racing):

Self, laughing: The Italians have an entire concept for this, called ozio -- it's finding the beauty in doing nothing.
Principal, also laughing: Ah, here we generally try to find the beauty in doing something.
Self: See? This is the constant conflict I have in my head, between being Mediterranean and Slavic!

When my rightbrainitude is thrown into the mix, hilarity ensues.

This week, I was preparing for my kružok with the eighth and ninth graders, who are usually so excellent and really surprise me with really creative, thoughtful answers. So this week, I went into it with the following prompt: The answer is three times. What is the question? which promptly sent the snowflakes into a state closely resembling a meltdown. I really should have known better, because right before the kružok, I said the prompt in Slovak to one of my colleagues, and she kind of winced, looked at me like I have three heads, and then said something to the effect of, "I'll get back to you on that one." Similarly related, I do conversation practice time once a week with the vice principal, who is so super cool, and as we began this week I asked her how she felt about the conversation practice thus far. Her response: "I think this is really helping me improve my English, but sometimes I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Like absolutely no clue."

So when the kids went into the closest thing to outright rebellion that they were capable of, I was secretly happy, because their nature is not usually rebellious. "Pani učitelka/Mrs. Teacher, give us a regular question like you normally do! How can 'what is the question?' be a question? Give us the next question please now!" Seriously, they all simultaneously erupted into unanimous displeasure about the question. I tried to talk them through it. I tried to explain that I understood this was the opposite of what we normally do. To no avail. As I was unable to overcome their mental rebellion, we did do something else, a "normal question" like I usually give them. At the end, I told them we'd try it again in the future, and repeated yet again my now-standard mix-of-continental-philosophies stump speech on "language is a creative act and a tool for communication."

Which gets me to the point that I think sometimes between everything that's lost in translation and all of the cultural differences and the way language causes us to think, I must often come off as being absolutely insane and yet I'm also grateful that people are mostly polite enough not to mention it. Sometimes though, it all causes poetry. This week, I was eating lunch in the refectory (usually I eat in a different room, which is another story for another time), and small chat ensued with one of the sisters who's around my age and speaks absolutely no English. Over soup, we chatted about the weather and how cold it was, and she said, "Yeah, it is pretty cold today -- I'm dressed like an onion." My immediate reaction was, "wow, that is an excellent idiomatic phrase! We don't use it in English but I know exactly what you mean!"

For the record, I was wearing a turtleneck sweater, but I did not say "I'm dressed like a coldblooded reptile."

A void, filled

Just as I was getting a bit antsy about what my one weekly American TV fix would be, now that Mad Men season 2 has been over for a few weeks, the answer to my question "What will I do?" has come to me: TOP CHEF!!!

Old News: Megahrudka

This was on the TV news about a month or so ago and I thought I had blogged about it, but I realized I hadn't yet.

In the Rusyn village of Roztoky (Розтоки), Svidník region (represent!), they made this massively huge hrudka. Before this, Roztoky's claim to fame was an astronomical observatory, but this hrudka is of course a much bigger deal. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the video from the news to embed, nor could I find any photos to include, but trust me, it was impressive.

Yesterday I found a short blurb about it in a rather obscure quasi-newspaper, which I include here (with my weak translation):

REKORDNÁ MEGAHRUDKA Rekordnú megahrudku, čo je tradičné veľkonočné jedlo Rusínov, pripravili v obci Roztoky v okrese Svidník. Kulinárskej špecialite, ktorú zapíšu do Slovenskej knihy rekordov, padlo zo obeť 5009 vajec a 330 litrov mlieka. (TASR)

RECORD MEGAHRUDKA A record megahrudka, which is a traditional Rusyn Easter food, was made in the village of Roztoky, Svidník okres. The culinary specialty, which was written in the Slovak book of records, sacrificed 5009 eggs and 330 liters of milk. (TASR)

This is what Rusyns do when Rusyns do something newsworthy in Slovakia.

It goes without saying that I'm not making this up -- seriously, I'm not that creative.