Ski Lifts, Bucket Lists and Life

When I was a little girl, I remember climbing up the gate at our house to sit on the stone column next to it and wait. Wait for my sister to leave for and then come back from school. Wait for the car to take me to school later on. Wait for my dad to come home from work. There was so much eagerness in that waiting--the excitement of something coming.

Yesterday I climbed the pile of snow plowed up by my house. The last few years I confess I tunneled into these piles with pots and pans and so of course, I had to make sure no other person tunneled in yet this year. But no such thing, so up I climbed. It was like my own personal little mountain in my front yard, a wonderful hawk-eyed view of the streets, the passersby. Not so high as my magic carpet, but wonderful in the way of the tree fort, the hide-out. 

And again, I waited. Waited for some friends to come through so we could caravaan off to the ski slopes together. Tennis I wanted to play since I was a very little child. Skiing, though, I've wanted to try since I first left the Caribbean and got over the shock of the cold and winters. And though I spent so much time around skiiers, I was never granted that opportunity. These past few years, I've thought about it, watched it come around nearly in my reach, and then either slip away again or else I myself have chosen to grab some other opportunity. 

But yesterday--yesterday was my day for skiing at long last. Yesterday, in this marvelously surprising unforseen way, I got to go skiing and it was just so delightful. Learning this foreign feeling, this way of thinking with the muscles of my body, of hearing them in my head and focusing on their directions. The conquering the never-ending fear of heights to move up the mountain, shaking in the seat as I try not to look down, as I remember all the other things I have conquered in my life and how this is the least of them all. To glide down this slope of pure white, so intent on harmony and balance and the beauty of your surroundings and having only a sensory awareness of others on the slope passing nearby at varying speeds. The hilltops across the valley smiling back at me and the cold kissing my nose. It was wonderful. 

And it is the waiting for wonderful things like that, the eager climbing up a snow plow pile and watching for adventure, for opportunity, for pure beauty--I want to do that with this whole year, with the rest of my life which sometimes feels like too many lifetimes to me. I want to climb to this hill of new persepective, of bubbling childish excitement, stamp a spot and plant my feet solidly and wait, eagerly; expectantly. Wait and reach out and embrace all the wonderful new experiences that lie around, hidden from my sight til just that perfect moment. 

Today I ran away from home a while to start reading the next book on my school-list. Sometimes you just need to work from a clean slate, a new environment where everything isn't chatting away at you familiarly and intrusively all at once. I ran away to a coffeeshop where lots of strangers pass through; strangers whose lives seem oddly comforting and vaguely interesting, and it is not intrusive to tune in to their chatter. 

One huddle of women around the firepit near me, wealth sparkling off their particular clothes, their large rings and fancy materials and all; they were talking about their vacations, where they wanted to go next, when they were done this skiing holiday of theirs. Belize, the Caribbean, somewhere really exotic. 

From there, their conversation turned to bucket lists, to checking things off (one apparently is getting quite near to finishing her original list). And it got me thinking about my own list of things I want to do. Not much, really. I don't often sit around and think up adventures, or set life-goals or throw stones at the future in hopes that when I arrive there, I'll find the stone and recognise the significance of that place. But I do have a few things on my list, casual little ideas like flying a plane, walking across a country, seeing the northern lights, looking at the moon from antarctica. Higher education and telling stories that have little truths in them, stories that can resonante with something in all of us who claim common humanity. 

I know I don't value my life enough. I spend copious amounts of time imagining for myself beautiful deaths, epic ways to leave this life behind because I get weary of waiting for the unexpected, or weary of letting ago of another piece of life that I loved dearly. Dearly. And because there is some part of me that finds an aspect of death alluring--Peter Pan saying "to die will be an awfully great adventure," perhaps. But I am grateful for the luxury of dreaming, grateful for the wealth of opportunities that I can choose to take hold of now and, hopefully, over the course of my lifetime. I'm glad that my life is one that can afford even the idea of a bucket list, of langously floating through life coming up with new adventures to turn my rotor towards. I'm delighted that I got to ski yesterday, and that I might go again sometime. I'm eager, in spite of the worse parts of myself, for the adventures of the lifetimes I have yet to live before me. And I am grateful for my life and its many measures of wholeness.  

Night Train to Bangkok

Deep darkness has fallen; I ride the night train to Bangkok. Right now we we sit at a station somewhere. Leaving Chiang Mai to head south, we had to go up into the mountains and are only just now descending from them. It is junglesque in there; the colours all bluegreen and the full palate of avocado and deep shades of lime.

The conductor just lowered some of the beds in our compartment; we are riding second class with private beds; the bottom two seats slide down to meet each other and form one bed, and from above, a storage unit unfolds itself to reveal another, rather smaller little “bedroom.” Curtains then separate you from the aisle between sides of the train, and outside your curtain is the luggage rack where you stash your belongings.

This morning I spent the day at last in the market in downtown Chiang Mai. My concious hours here have been full of longing to be out and about; I think it is a unique form of torture to be in a place you have so long waited to explore and then be so entirely incapacitated. Freedom and energy this morning were beautiful in combination. I surely could have shopped forever, wandered endlessly through the streets. It is so fascinating to me, this place. I have never travelled before in Asia, and the last thing I expected was to feel familiar here. Yet, that has exactly been the feeling I find myself coming back to; a familiarity with this place so foreign to me in actuality. Nearly all the trees and fruits I know from somewhere else, with but a few exceptions, like teak. Nearly all the building structures and particular array of colours I have seen before, with but a few very temple-like places the excpetion—and certainly the discovery and variety of these structures surprises me in itself. I am more surprised by my familiarity here, perhaps, than shocked at the differences I expected.

Even today, in the market; the items sold themselves are new, and many of the more pungeant smells were new, but the arrangement and the chaos and the specific order of how it all works were all familiar from markets in Slovakia; on Crete; in Uganda.

I go back and forth one moment to the next here thinking ah, that's Rwanda! Ah, that's Uganda! Ah, that's so British it's ridiculous! Ah, that's like Venezuela! Whoa, that's so Caribbean! And that is odly like Slovakia. How does it happen that the world so big can be so small? Even the language; so very incredibly foreign to me, yet I am already accurately picking up on the grammar and some of the particular words—it's wonderfully exciting. (Especially as this shall be the first country whose script I do not know coming in and will still not know going out. That aggravates me greatly, I confess!!) So this small ability to crack the language gives me that much more enormous a pleasure. If I ever came for longer than a week and a few days, and were not sick most of that time, I would immerse myself into this language until I could wear it like an invisibility cloak.

It is also interesting to me to begin to comprehend a little of this place at large. When we come to a new place, we do first see it through the only eyes we have, and so we cannot see it for itself as it is for different eyes. We have to learn first how to see the place at all. I have enjoyed getting tidbits of history and culture in this short time here—again wishing so badly I had more time to delve!--and a bit better a view, as I said. I don't remember what started our conversation—some question I asked—but I got to learn this morning all about how Thailand has grown as a nation. It was never colonized, which I knew beforehand, but didn't really register until that moment. I don't think I have ever been in a country outside of Europe that was not at one point colonized (or still a colony)! And now here I am. Shazaaam—another new experience I wasn't even looking for. It was also pointed out how all the surounding countries (all of which were indeed colonized by the various European entities) have collapsed completely since that time in the redoing of themselves. Thailand, on the other hand, could perhaps be equated then with the old story of the tourtise and hare-- the Thai being the tourtise slowly but surely developing themselves. They have done an impressive job, it seems, maintaining their Thai-ness whilst still incorporating Western culture—other cultures at all, really—into their mainstream at their own will. Not to say that their own will has always worked out for their own best, but no one and no country always can make the best decisions for itself. Isn't that part of the adventure of life, the twists that we didn't see but have to work out?

(Authors interrupting note: When travelling, it is always more interesting to leave the curtains on the train open and not yet go into your private sleeping compartment when there are good looking people sitting across the aisle from you. We just decided we don't really need to go to sleep or sit in private for a while still...Alas, though, it seems the french eye-candy have decided to retire... )

 

We dined tonight on sticky rice and pork sticks that Candace picked up nearby the train station. So tasty! I am thankful to eat and enjoy taste again. It is a beautiful thing. 

[Next day...]

So at last we are arrived at our destination at the beach. The night train to Bangkok came into the station several hours late, but it was a lovely trip nonetheless. We didn't go to sleep right away even after the conductor came by and put down all our beds. Instead, the two of us and our charming french companion across the aisle sat on Candace's bed and watched Star Wars, A New Hope. I was informed that I'm much more of a "fan" than I realised previously. Haha. Oops... When the train finally lulled me into sleeping sitting up watching that fantastic movie, I went up the luggage ladder to my bunk, curled up, and fell asleep promptly. I think it must have been hours later that I awoke at some stop, and it took a long time to fall asleep again, but when I did, it was bliss. Morning and wake-up and bunks-up came far to swiftly. 

My first impressions of Bangkok were of congestion and smell. I'd like to add more to those impressions, but I am at least glad to say that they were insignificant enough as I quickly fell asleep sitting in my chair there, and slept the extra two hours of the trip away. 

Bangkok train station was massive and awesome and air-co'd a bit, and after purchasing our train tickets to the beach, we settled down for our 2 hour wait at a lovely coffeeshop where I actually ate a whole croissant! (I am feeling MUCH better!) Then we bookshopped, looked into how to get me to the airport from the trainstation on the return journey, and finally waited and waited and waited some more for a very late train to come.

2nd class on this train was a vastly different experience than the first. In the first place, not only did C and I not get seats together, we were in entirely different train-cars! Moreover, whereas the first train we took had air-co and individual, padded seats; this one was "padded" seats on a bench, with open windows and fans blowing and lots of noise and bustle and vendors coming down the aisle hawking all sorts of delicious looking and smelling goods. At one point there was icecream being sold and run around the train-car windows on lids and it looked so very delicious and cold, but... i'm not actually a big icecream fan. 

While our beautiful (I presume) beach is only 2 hours out of Bangkok, it took the train six hours to get there. (2 hours longer, again, than the ticket said...). So we missed our first afternoon on the beach, and arrived in the dark. But we did arrive, grumpy and absolutely gross from the travel, and I wondering if spending 3 hours on the beach would really be worth it before having to turn around next day and take the train back to take a taxi to get to the airport to spend the next 29 hours from that airport in transit. Hmm.

As frustrating as it was to spend extra hours on a train alone the time we had hoped to spend together on the beach, I confess the trip was absolutely beautiful. The night train veiled much of the scenery, being night and therefore dark for most of the trip. But those 6 hours of watching a more southern Thailand unfurl outside my open window, and smelling the air (sometimes heavy scented with beautiful flowers, sometimes with delicious food and thick spice, and sometimes with the pungeant smell of the canals and slums) and just breathing was wonderful. The hot and the sticky. The breeze. The wonder of "where am I?" and not even knowing the time to count the minutes or hours by, or listening to a language I'm left out of. 

The colours changed, too--much more the colours of lemon and lime. I got to see a pink sunset over fields, and harvested rice fields set to fire in the darkening twilight. The houses on stilts. The cities we passed by--some with tall fiercely modern buildings and some with sprawling older houses of concrete, of wooden stilts, and of metal-piecework slums. 

And the mountains! Finally I have seen what I always have wanted to see; the mountains that look like clay, rolled around and pulled and squashed and slashed jaggedly to look like dragons and hollows of mystery and I am in love with them from afar. Enchanted as I have always known I should be if I saw them; bewitched to come take a ridiculously long train ride just so I could pass them and fall for them and their  raw wonder. 

I wish so much I had more than but these few hours. Hours which I won't even spend in the hills or mountains, but will stay in the sea. Hide in the sea. 

When we arrived (and we both did make it off the train despite my being in a separate car from her and she not being able to make it to collect me!), we caught a taxi to our hotel, tired and as I said, grumpy and gross. As soon as we got cleaned up, though--and more particularly, as soon as we walked out on a beach with sand that feels the same as the sand I grew up playing in and I heard the surf breaking, it was all worth it. Even for just that moment, without the 3 hours of daylight tomorrow. And then we ate delicious, heavenly food (mine being stir fried asparagus and fresh shrimp) and it was even better! And now we found a way for me to stay here for longer than 3 hours tomorrow and ideally still make my flight. We'll see! Here's hoping nothing goes wrong on the journey to the airport tomorrow afternoon or I might be doomed. 

Well, it's time to curl up and get rested and continue being happy. So very happy. 

Positive Dissolution

I read once, somewhere--and how I wish I could remember where and by whom!--that the "true international" can dissolve into anywhere. While on the one hand, I suppose that technically rules me out, I like to think that perhaps I am indeed just such a person.

Coming back here has been a delightful homecoming if only for the dissolution of myself back into these worlds. Could I ever express the efforts I put into acquiring the speech of where I live in NY? (And still I know once in a while it slips...) What of my fears that in slipping in, I would be stuck?

But as it is, when I entered Germany, I could speak German, and so did. To the immigration official, who was quite surprised hearing me but seeing my passport. To the flight attendants and the young family sitting across the aisle from me.

I remember the first time I ever did that, on a Czech airlines, speaking Slovak to the attendants. They never did know. When I got back from Russia and switched over Russian to Slovak again, it was merely a couple months of people thinking I was Ukrainian instead.

When I first returned to the place I was born a few years back, the very most gratifying part of that trip was being welcomed home by everyone once they realised who I was, or told "once from here, always from here."

Now in this other homecoming, I think Monday presented the greatest such gratification. I bought a painting at a kiosk in the Tatras, at the first mountain my sister and I climbed. Poor man. He is now under the firm understanding that she and I are actually Slovaks, born here but moved to the States around the time of the revolution, along with even our grandmother!! He was so delighted that our parents taught us Slovak and that we would still come back to our homeland. And we were delighted by our ability to dissolve back into this world.

I confess I am--as I was informed on Sunday by an old friend--"feistily independent," and that I am wont not to accept the kind meant advise especially from close family. But I recall--always have--my father saying when I was but a young child to make sure I really lived where I found myself and didn't wast the time I had there. I have always tried to find the best way to live that.

For the longest time I tried to find that one place to be home. We are taught that growing up, no matter what public school in what country you attend, or how many such different ones. Each teach that all you want and all you should want is to belong. But I really love now how that can be for more than the one, how we don't have to live divided or continually conflicted. It may be oddly limiting on some levels, but there is a plane of reality that allows for a broader world, a world where opposites can live side by side without war. I love that my life can encompass all of these worlds without the annihilation of any other one. (And that statement comes from one who tried to annihilate one of her worlds to fit the other, once upon a time)

I love the fact, as my sister put it, that our being American as well makes our being Slovak that much more impressive and generally awesome.

Trip to the Tatras!

Speaking as someone who is terribly afraid of heights, these last few days in the Tatra mountains have been terrifying and probably knocked a solid few years off the end of my life (which is alright--I plan to die young). But as someone who loves mountains, whose sister loves them even more, and who loves a good challenge, it was a fabulous experience.

We arrived mid morning on Monday, after catching a train from Hlavna Stanica (downtown train station) at 5:57 a.m, after catching an even earlier bus to taht station. Upon arrival, we located our hostel--a task not quite as easy as it sounds, thanks to several innaccurate and ambigous sets of directions--where they upgraded us to an een lovelier room because we checked in early and the others weren't available. You could see the mountains from our windows. It was lovely. It was lovely also to see a Slovak room again--the layout and the beds and other furniture is different, you see.

After lunching in our room on rice crackers, cream cheese, tomatoes, smoked cheese, and salami, we caught a train up to Stary Smokovec and then on to Strbska Pleso. There we wandered a while, got much needed strong coffee, then took a ski lift partway up the mountain. After that, we hiked nearly the whole rest of teh way to the peak. We stopped probably 5 minutes away from the top, neither of us, perhaps, entirely sure why? Except that sometimes you just have to finish a journey later. (I never visit all the sites in a city, for instance--it is good to leave reasons to return.)

We then hiked the entire way down the mountain, through pine and grass and nettles, over slippery rock and loose gravel and sinking dirt. It was wonderful. Racing sunset and train departure time and my vertigo. I hate that I can't get over that (the vertigo), especially because it is incredibly draining to muster the courage and concentration no matter how much you know you really love climbing mountains and getting to the top.

When we finally reached the very last step off that slope and walked on flat ground at last, we made our way to a little wayside restauarant (where earlier we had that coffee). My sister had klobasa (a yummy meat thing, not quite a sausage) and I almost did as well since it sounded so good. I had to change my mind, though, at the sight of my dearly beloved Langose on the menu.

This, friends, is an excellent, ridiculously, positivley sinful tasting fried flat dough which I always order topped with syr, smotana, and cesnak (cheese, sour cream, and garlic). It's absolutely decadent, if you missed that. I was quite pleased.

After that, we were perfectly boring--just catching our train back to Poprad, walking to our hostel, and going to be dearly. VERY early (too early!).

The next day, Tuesday, we woke early (by which in this case, I mean slept in til 7:30 am), ate breakfast (same as Monday's lunch), checked out of our hostel, got my tickets at the station, checked our food and sweaters into the station lockers, and then had some coffee at a nearby cafe. After that, we headed out and up the mountains again to the highest peaks in the range.

It was exquiste. Terrifying, but exquisite. We took the ski-cars up and then up some more, and then got on the ski-lift and went up to the second highest peak. We couldn't make it to the very top because we would have missed our afternoon train back home. Alas! But again... something to return for. We climbed all around those cliff tops, scaling the rocks. My sister is half-goat, I swear.

You can see so far from up there! It's breath-taking. And as you can see, we were quite high up... I don't think I want to know the actual height. But it was so lovely, to be up there again.

Our trip back home was bittersweet. Hard to leave the mountains, but it was good still. We sat in the dining car of the train the whole way home, just talking and writing and looking at the view. And despite hours of hiking and climbing, we walked the whole way home with our bags and weary feet from the train station. Just because by foot is the best way to see anything.

First Train Musings...

Our train rolls out of the city, matchboxes and trees and village houses peeling away from us, the stepped hills sliding softly by like green waves. And the train chuckles and sings to us. I have missed these trains. My sister and I, each with a notebook and pen, smile contentedly--not at each other, but from the deep gratification of contentment, of "this is the way it is meant to be." Together, training through to the mountains in this country we love. "Krajina moja srce," (country of my heart) as a fotobook of it I have at home says. Though, I think, it is not the only country of my heart.

I love watching the houses and flats as we pass by; buildings whose faces I would know in the dark like a lover; their lines, curves, and textures just right. Just right like being on a train at all. Weekends in highschool, taking the train country to country, home to home, german to slovak to german again. My world. A familiar world. In dreams I often wander and grow lost on a train, but the lostness is beautiful to me; the lostness I carry back out of my dreams with me, into the whole of my life. "To live without roads is one way not to be lost." (naomi shihab nye)

Once I tried to make sense of my world by mapping it out like the metro. Places I have lived or studied and the paths I moved on between them--marked time. Languages in subtext. They were to o equal for a painless answer. I am a child of many worlds, a voice of many tongues. I then decided that the map of me lies in the people I have met and known. My story, dissolved across the world into other lives and tales.

Just the other day, I returned to the church my family engaged in here, expecting to find three or four friends and instead, there was a convergence of time and people I know even from the very earliest memories of this place and people of my later years here came. It was like pieces of my life for a moment brought together. Such a lovely surprise.

How to describe to you my city? The last summer I spent here is five years gone. Gone Perhaps "ago" is better here, for I think of that summer still. Living in Slovakia. Working in Vienna. Making radio programmes. Writing intensely and trying to "find myself;" find how my selves from all thse different worlds were supposed to be one person living in peace when the worlds themselves don't get along; exist as polar opposites. Remember travelling by bus across the continent, ferrying across the Channel (white cliffs of Dover rising!), travelling to London for interviews. Remember the hot summer days when the air itself sizzled on the black cobbles of the city (Bratislava, not London), and burned my soles as I spent hours alone downtown, meandering through galleries, reading in the University Library, documenting in pictures I've since lost that world I loved. I love.

The buildings of downtown, old next to new. Old even to the time of the Roamns and before--Celtic farms once--new to very current and noisy, sweaty construction that smells like cold water somehow. A growing city. Moving and morphing. Do you know how many names and in how many languages this city has been called?

Shades of fading paint, peeling through to cement peeling through to old brick--layers and layers. The old old wall of the Old City, one length still standing. Remaining destruction from Napoleon--even to a cannonball still wedged into the tower of our Old Town Hall.

Art everywhere. Grafitti on most every surface (though usually, respectfully kept off the Old Town district buildings). Fascinating art installations--a display of Slovak wines through cask art. Who knew? Statues--Sir Roland. George and the Dragon. Hans Christian Anderson. Hviezdoslav. Famous poets and political saviours.The fomentors of Slovak national identity (which is relatively new and an ancient land. I grew up in the shaping and making of the nation itself.) One summer, enormous fotoraphs from around the world hanging like sheets around one of the squares. I wished then they were my fotos. I wished the resolution of my camera was good enough for such blowups. One summer I paced around searching for art institutes to which I could apply for study.

The old wall of the Old City heading around to the last remaining old gate--Michalska Brana--St Michael's Gate. My favourite part of the city. You pass through the arched gate under a beautiful copper topped tower and enter the Old City--opening before you is a cobbled streed lined up and down each side with cafes. People spill out like flowers from a basket, littering the chairs and tables with their colours and their lovely varied words. At night it is most beautiufl to me. Van Goh's painting of a city street of cafes by night always makes me thinkof this street. It captures just the right atmosphere, vibrancy, and glow.

From nearly every point in the city you can see the castle rising high on the hill, its largest tower facing west to Vienna. Crown jewels were once held there, in the time of teh Austro-Hungarian empire. Empress Maria Theresa (mother of Marie Antoinette) would come and hold court there, so the houses of the nobility drape the surrounding hills. The empress was so fat that she rode a horse everywhere, so when you are in the castle you will note how wide, deep, and flat the stairs are for the sake of that unfortunate creature.

Across the way is St Martin's Cathedral, where through history many Hungarian kings and queens were crowned. One of the villages where my family lived was most often Hungarian, so there all the statues and inscriptions are in that language.

I remember when the first shopping mall came to the country, a chink the dam. Now we have many, nestled new into the old. I took my youngest sister (whom I'm now travelling with!) there for her first salon haircut. We went after to the lake next door, rented a paddle boat, and jumped off in the middle of the lake. Our clothes so heavy clinbing back aboard was nearly impossible, and her newly styled hair washed flat... but our dripping and laughing moment was perfect.

We have another lake with crystaline waters to which she and I biked nearly ever day one exquisite summer I was home from university. 7 km. This week we plan to bus to that village and then walk out there as we no longer have our bikes here. But we want "our" lake. Apples and cheese and water and sun.

There are several mountain ranges in this country, and one is beginning to grow in the distance now. Beautiful. I forgot how blue the green here is, and in these hills and mountains and across the whole of this little country are over 180 castles and castle ruins.

Nature is iportant here. Even in the city, most everyone has a garden plot outside the city limits. No yards, just gardens. Land that is beautiful and will nourish you.

I love teh poppies here. The further we go today, the more I see them. So red and delicate. When we had to say goodbye to  friends moving away, it helped heal our grief to stand in a field of poppies--a field of bleeding red--the visualisation of our hurt like a balm, soothing us.

In the near distance right now are some smaller moutnains that I would almost swear I climbed a few years ago! No way to know, though. I didn't even know then wehre I was.

It's funny the way things affect you. When we were young, my olders sister and I lived to read. Books, and certainly english ones, were ahrd to find, so we read everything we could get our hands on--reading, as a result, things far too old for us. For instance, storeis of war and desolation and rape (which we couldn't understand except that it was dreadful) and pillage and torture in Europe. Reader's Digest "Drama in Real Life" and book excerpts were especially good for that.

When we moved here, those storeis ripe in our heads, and our parents' american-instilled fear of anything communitst filling our world, we made contingency plans. How to escape when war started, when the new country collapsed, when nazis or communists took over again. We gave our parents up for loss--with their terrible language acquirement and heavy accents, they could never hid, blend in, or escape. Taken away, tortured, and killed But we would survive. We mapped our various escape routs out of the country--over thsoe mountains, through that river, and then... We covered who and how we would be responsible for "the children," (our siblings). I made them practise scaling walls and walking fences, and tried to teach them the art of dodging bullets (though, in retrospect, I realise mudballs shoot very differently than bullets and shrapnel.) In my dreams our parents secured us in an orphanage right before being taken away from us.

It didn't help those wild and rather uneducated speculations in that time that the government here was, in fact, still sorting itself out and rather unstable, relatively speaking. At elections iwthin our first year, there was widespread concern over a coup, we were given to understand. Many expatriots had their bags packed and emergency exits and rendezvous planned out. I remember climbing up my apple tree in the orchard of our first house wondering what morning would bring the night of elections. Fortunately, it brought none of those negatives.

It also didn't help that within our first year and a half there also occured the impeachment process of Clinton (causing our vulnerable and imaginative minds to disbelieve our parents' claims that the USA was safe and stable) and the nearby war in Yugoslavia. By the time of the bombing in Kosovo, we had friends there who were hiding in basements and shelters. Friends who didn't evacuate and we stopped hearing news from. Our house constantly shook as bomber jets from a nearby base in Hungary flew over our hosue on their way to unlaod issiles (on our friends!) and traffice was stopped in the streets from long lines of tanks filing by, achingly slow, along with supply trucks and red cross vehicles.

it is so funny in this odd way to recall all those fears.

Political scientits talk of how soccer united Germany after the wall fell, off if not for taht, what would have happened, who knows. Here, we ahd a similar experience when the Slovak hockey team won its first gold medal. Of course, we had played long and won games before, but not as Slovakia separate from Czech Republic. it was the single nation of Slovakia's first win, and the country went crazy. We all went crazy. It was really the first display of nationalism by the new country, according to everyone. Even to the 1800s, the Slovak language wasn't considered much more than peasant speak as opposed to a national language. Ludovit Stur was one of those behind the birth of Slovaki nationalism through the language. I think that is something very special about my experiences, something difficult I wouldn't trade, and something of the bond I share to this place; that I was shaped into my person with teh shaping of this place into a nation.

I was thinking again now of Bratislava, and of the peeling pain, and the old with the new, and even of teh buildings you still find bullet holes riddling the walls of. And I think, one of the reasons I love that place so much is its story. Hours of reading its history, years of walking through its history in the streets, and a life that is part of its history, however unrecognised. I love how my story is wrapped into its larger one. I love the way that its deep history enriches my life even now, when I live so far away from it.

I don't know that I would ever again live in this place; I have too much of too many other places in me so that this one always has and always will be just a little two small to fit right--but I love that it has a place in me.

One of the lovely things about here is the code of courtesty. It has always been awkward to mein the States how you are in waiting rooms, for instance. Here, you say good morning or day to everyone before sitting down. Here also, on the train, before entering a compartment (if you need a visual here, recall the Hogwarts Express and how Harry and co are alwas in their own compartments), you ask for permission by those already in there.

This one woman who just sat down in ours saw me writing here and complimented me on "what lovely handwriting you have." I am quite delighted by this (though my sister says it has, in fact, gotten worse!)

I was thinking how long has passed since last I wondered here. 10 years now since I was up in the peaks of the Tatras. 7 years since last I travelled deep into the heart of the country, up towards Poland and east towards the Ukraine. This, I believe, is poetry. That last summer, I stayed with some14 others in the Fatra mountains (smaller, rounder mountain range) at a chata (pronounce the "ch" like a voiceless "k") (chata's are like a rustic cabin or cottage). One afternoon one of the girls and I took a long walk, losing ourselves deep in the fields picking wild blueberries and mushrooms, and then looking out for bears as we found our way slowly back through the black forests, our mouths blue and happy. The mountains themselves were shades of blue and the fields bright green and the valley golden and deep green. Beautiful. I think there is a degree to which this place is like the Sea; it gets into your veins and runs through you so you can never forget it; never quite catch your breath from wonder when you're by it.

Explorations.

I spent the afternoon downtown today with my sister and some friends of hers who followed her here from Italy. It was neat, wandering around and taking so many pictures. Very hot, though. 37 degrees (C)! We walked and walked and walked. We went around downtown city area Bratislava, played in the Presidential Palace gardens, and climbed up into the Bratislava Castle. We snacked on a Botel (hotel that is a boat) on the Danube and later (though before a lovely evening meal on one of the Squares), my sister and I grocery shopped.

It is absurd how happy shopping here again makes me. Everything is in the proper aisle, making sense. I used to wander lost in US stores, unable to find flour or paper products or the slightest thing, because the stores are organised differently; a different pattern of logic and association.

Place matters.

Tomorrow we run away to the mountains. I haven't climbed the mountains in 10 years; far too long. The sea, I think, runs more strongly in me than the mountains, but I can hardly bear flat lands for very long. I need the mountains--at least rolling hills--around me, visible somewhere on the periphery. And tomorrow we train out and climb up and stay over and our bags of chocolate and smoked cheese and apples and crackers are packed, waiting for us. My train ticket whispers to me from my pocket, eager to go.

I won't be online again for that until Tuesday, but I'm sure I shall have lots of stories to tell then!