Dinner last evening

There appeared to be a threatened mutiny in the convent over lack of vitamin B.  So last night, to great cheers, we ate cooked yeast and had beer.  The yeast looked like taupe scrambled eggs and tasted like yeast.  If anyone knows what it was or how to cook it, leave a comment or shoot me an e-mail, because I'm curious.

You Only Live Twice ... or so it seems

If you read this via e-mail, consider going through to the website so you can get the embeded Youtube videos.

1. I don't say this lightly, but people who do reallyfast downhill skiing like in the Olympics should perhaps be under some kind of psychiatric supervision.  Because they are a little bit crazy.

2. Imagine Bridget Jones (specifically, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason aka Bridget Jones 2). Of course, there's a lot of her in all of us women -- right down to the control top underwear... Alas. I was almost totally her today -- not quite, but almost:

I know the video's in Spanish, but just the visuals suffice. 

Thank God I had someone with me with saintly patience, and eventually I almost got the hang of it.

 

This is me concentrating really hard and also trying to calm myself down with the thought that if I keep perpendicular to the slope, I'm not actually going down it.

 

It was at about this point (taken later) that I really started to freak out -- I could see the bottom,

but before this point everyone stops and takes a break.  When I asked why everyone was stopping ahead, the response was "you'll see".  I only went down this part once, which was kind of my baptism by fire.

However, an upside to all this is that I will have quite hot legs and other relatively toned body parts.  Which is, as Martha would say, a good thing.  But it goes without saying, this was certainly not me:

"So does England." Ahhhh. I melt. Ok, enough Bond for one post.
Point is, this was not me today.  I will have to put off my spying for the future, if it requires expert skiing ability.

Now the whole wide web knows one of my (now not-so-secret) infatuations.

And for the record, I do like Roger Moore as 007.

3. If you know me well enough, you know my love for Krynica knows no bounds. It's as beautiful in the winter as it is in the summer.  I ♥ Krynica.  Maybe I'll make myself a t-shirt.

 

Here insert some joke about here's why all the dinosaurs died in the ice age / evolution is a joke and humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs / etc.  Contest in the comments section!?

Today's Vintage Rusyn Photograph

Medzilaborce (Меджильабірці) Festival of Sport and Culture, June 1992.

From the Silvestri archive.

Cuteness!!!

I've blogged before about the cuteness that is Martinka Bobáňová from Terchova -- she was by far the star of Slovensko Má Talent.  Last night, she was on the show Modré z nebo with a South Korean girl who lives in Svit (right under the Tatry) and sings Slovak folk songs (and speaks perfect Slovak).  Super cute!  Here's a link to watch the video: scroll down to #2 directly below the video for the correct segment.

Mesto v nás - Komajota

This is a video from a local band, Komajota, and the song is about what a great city Prešov is -- even if you've been here only once, you'll recognize most of the places in the video.

Today's Vintage Rusyn Photograph

 

Somewhere around Medzilaborce (Меджильабірці), June 1992.

From the Silvestri archive.

Bryndza lurrrrrve ♥

So, since Ružomberok is in the middle of the Liptov region, there's a lot of places to buy more artesianal bryndza than what I normally buy at the grocery store.  And I admit, I've been lazy about becoming more of a connoisseur even though I definitely have the opportunity to do so!

This week, at breakfast, when I am usually still half-asleep and also in minor awe of whatever herbal tea is in the pot (it changes depending on the herbs, obviously), there was something good that looked to me like whipped butter with chives.  So I smeared a bunch of it on the fresh Slovak bread (your mouth should be watering, if it isn't already), enjoyed it, and went on with my day.  At dinner, it made a brief reappearance, and I asked what it was.  Hint: it wasn't butter.

Yes, that morning I had thoroughly enjoyed bryndza spread!  Even though you can't really get bryndza in America, you can approximate it by mixing farmer's cheese and feta and then you can get started on these two versions of the same spread:

Bryndza spread
Mix well together: 100g of Bryndza, 50g of butter, 100g of melted cheese, dices of onion, sweet red pepper, a little of mayonese. Serve with bread.

 

This I found in the book Polish Heritage Cookery.  Slovaks and Poles like to fight over who really 'owns' bryndza, also because it's protected by the EU like Parmigiano Reggiano is, but the truth is that the word really comes from Romanian, which is a Romance language, which comes from Latin, who were the first Italians, so really, like all good things, bryndza is Italian.

Today's Vintage Rusyn Photograph

 

 Yeah, we know how to get around.

More Vintage Rusyn Photography (VRP)

I think I'm going to have to make this a recurring theme, because I just absolutely love the aesthetic.  I just found a treasure trove of Vintage Rusyn Photos on Facebook, and since not everyone who uses this blog uses Facebook (see the Venn diagram), I can share and have some new content, while acknowledging I totally yanked photos -- though I've got some of my own Vintage Rusyn Photos to share too. 

See this post for the first installment of VRP and for an explanation of why I love the aesthetic.

Here we go:

This week, teaching: A Dialogue

Dramatis Personæ: A group of 7 girls and 2 boys, plus Self.

[The two boys are sitting together and talking incessantly.]  
Self: You two are talking the whole time.  You’re like two old tetkas (aunties).  Do you need to go down to the kaviareň (coffee place) and have a nice chat with some coffee instead of being here?
[Some of the girls, who are much better at English than the boys, perhaps because they don’t talk nearly as much during class, pick up on the fact that I called their colleagues chatty old women and so translated this for their benefit.  Because of their age, they are often teasing each other in both Slovak and English, so this aided the young ladies in their teasing efforts.]
Boy 1, in Slovak: We’ll go if you pay – we’ll need €2.

Maybe you had to be there.  But my Pitt SLI crew will be happy to know I also made the Martin Talking Gesture™ while commenting on the boys’ conversation habits.  It’s just as much of a hit here as it was with us.