Hi, Tatras

Oh what a wonderful weekend. This is a good week in Slovakia - history made the national uprising of 1944 almost coincide with the signing of a constitution several hundred years ago, giving two bank holidays. On Friday I'm off to Prague, and this weekend past I went hiking in the High Tatras and fun-having in Eastern Slovakia.

So: there are mountains in the north of Slovakia called the Tatras; there are high ones and low ones. On Saturday Manuela and I got the 05:27 train to Poprad-Tatry, where we met Julia, a friend of M's off with whom I hit it immediately, and the weekend was nicely set up. We hiked the Saturday, then went another hundred kilometres east to Presov and on to Saris, home of the beer and of Julia. We were welcomed with the fabled hospitality of the non-Bratislavan Slovaks, and again speaking a little lingo was most helpful. But I appear to be in a narrative, uninspired mindset today, so i will hope that the following are a thousand words apiece.

On Sunday Vel'ky Šariš had a theatrefest, culminating in a production on top of their hill, among the castle ruins and followed by bonfired sausages, motorcycling monks and much merriment.

There were six or seven scenes acted out along the spiral path to the top of the hill. Very good use of the setting. Languistically incomprehensible theatre more fun than equivalent salsa class.

Manuela and Julia, on our way to

the pleso in Popradske Pleso. Or it might be Štrbske Pleso. Either way, its water had the texture of cold, infinite silk.

It's not all beautiful though. The patch you can see is the edge of the destruction wrought by a wind in November 2004 which has wrecked what must previously have been incredibly beautiful woods on the southern side of the High Tatras. Just a wind, nobody to blame, and the feeling is an ongoing deep sadness among those from anywhere nearby. Someone has an extensive gallery here.

P.S: major thanks to Hazel - good luck in Malawi.

Did something happen?

Today's announcement that carbon-based life forms "homo sapiens sapiens" (or "humans") on Earth have agreed new classifications regarding the status of various solar-system objects has been greeted with a muted reaction from those reclassified.

In what humans are reported to consider a snub to humanity, the trajectories of all bodies continued in line with the Plan.* There was not even the widely-predicted condemnation of Earth-based presumption. Nothing happened, everything continued correctly; early reports of an angry jolt in the orbit of Pluto have since been explained as a door slamming.

* Link may be corrupted and refer to a bastardised, sapiosapiocentric interpretation of the Plan.

The ruling by homo sapiens sapiens is not as extreme as had been feared by some human commentators, but nonetheless means - nothing. (Or, technically, almost nothing, gaining a lower ranking from the Galactic Significance Indicator than anything previously submitted for consideration.)

One non-homo sapiens sapiens entity allegedly broke ranks with the cold reception from the rest of the solar system - some humans claim to have received a message from Ceres, stating that nothing but full planetary status will be conducive to establishing diplomatic relations, but this has not been confirmed.

Not submitted for GSI assessment - and so presumably of even less importance than the human reclassification - were the following:

during the course of the meeting which made this reclassification:
- roughly 100,000 homo sapiens sapiens died as a result of lacking access to clean drinking water
- 98% of the human population of Earth suffered some boredom during the past week (the remaining 2% having no conception or being exempted from counting for other reasons)
- one thousand (1000) of Earth homo sapiens sapiens "women" died due to unsafe abortions
- roughly one-hundred-and-ninety billion homo sapiens sapiens americus dollars (190,000,000,000) of military expenditure took place, enough to prevent all of the above and buy ice cream for everyone, for ever and ever. Good ice cream - or granita if you prefer.


But what do I know? I'm only God.

Take it easy baby, make it last all night

oh yes, and what a night. the best since arriving, for sure. not the bit before sleeping, you understand - that was mostly spent at work - but the bit with the eyes closed: i dreamt i met tony blair at a fundraiser run by the parliamentary labour party, and everything wrong with him and his government and our parliamentary system just tripped off my tongue, smoothly and without pause to the agreement of the assembled - The Betrayed - who were fingering pieces of handcrafted cutlery and so on...

and as if that weren't enough, i had another intense, information filled dream at a conference in sweden about domestic violence, and it seems my work has started to get properly into my head. the point is not the dreams per se, but the sleep that must have accompanied them - having endured snoring cyclists, hard corridors, 25 celsius at midnight, people walk through my bedroom and the latest scourge of bloodsucking (i am bitten all over), i finally got a night's good sleep.

me and tom petty celebrated with a brisk stroll to work (via hell) and breakfast. and life is good.

so yes, i was at a conference on domestic violence - perhaps this gives an insight into what i'm working on? well, you kind of had to be there: the significant thing was not the conference but the presence of a large youth caucus. among the other things i am doing, and the most interesting part of my work here, is the pre-background study work i am doing on gender and youth policy in eastern europe and the cis.

in short: there is a european problem, acute in many parts of eastern europe, of below-replacement birth rates and aging population. governments want to increase their populations and birth rates; without commenting on whether this is a good thing, we want to make sure policies aimed at raising the birth rate don't impact negatively on gender equality or on women's human rights in the region. by -we- i mean me and my colleague - this isn't exactly a unifem project, but it's so nascent that's it's not an anyone project yet. the goal is, as far as i can tell (you), to create a credible proposal for very progressive youth policy in the countries concerned* which will, as a by-product, create conditions in which young couple decide to have children. so in a sense we are trying to jump the gun on potentially very negative policies and push for something very positive. suggestions on a postcard please. if anyone is more interested, leave a comment. i have to go and do some of this now. (and what do i do? read a lot and gather together potentially useful data, at this stage... it's not a million miles from university, except that it manages to be "eight" hours a day.)


* Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Bosnia, Albania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Armenia

wieners

i found a stag party in vienna on wednesday night. i'm so jet set (or train set, whatever). the stag party had adjective-laden cocoa powder, that i may make chocolate cakes. thank you stefan and laura, and enjoy the rest of your trip!

The hen and the stag; the stripper took the photo (ha, you know you're all imagining now. ha.)

and i had maybe the most graceful experience of my life, a hundred feet up in the air in a little chair. there will be a video on you tube, although this video habit has to stop (not watching youtube, which everyone should do all day, rather my loving-the-novelty digicam videoing. i don't like the attachment to technology feeling (he types, on his laptop, in the wifi pub...)). i would love to go back to Praterstern and ride half a dozen times, with contact lenses rather than glasses - i had to keep my head within about ten degrees of vertical or lose me spex, and the view was too good to take em off. and just like flying, nearly. (go here.)

speaking of contact, i'm in touch with this man about starting something up in BA. it may come to nothing, but it may not. comme toujours, regardez ici.

i'm going to play slight photo catch up, do forgive:

you'll remember the lovely flat i told you about previously? toto je to.

and toto je just one of the details in the next lovely flat in my series. as is the next:



and this is my standard teacup (though i was informed by my office-sharer, blissfully away this week, that it's hers, and come winter she'll be wanting it. i'm going to lick it all over). for scale, we only use A3 paper, to save trees.

Tonight was the perfect evening for strolling, so stroll i did. there is a several nights music festival in town, classical music with a blues edge today, and some gorgeous piano. you have to pay some nominal amount, or, this not being london, you can stand outside the seating bit and watch through the gapswhich haven't been stingily covered up. sadly, the promised afterparties have all been cancelled, for what reason i know not. i was looking forward to that. i'll go tomorrow though, to see bizet's ringtone overture.

having finished The Amber Spyglass (being a thousand pages, these perhaps shouldn't be gcse texts, but in every other way they should) i sat on a lamplit bench and read Amin Maalouf's Ports of Call, having found it at Robert's flat and previously liked Leo the African. star-crossed lovers, mental illness and exaggerated revolutionary heroism - right up my street. the walk down along the danube toward the national museum was less lamplit and its lovers less crossed (at least on the outside). i miss having somebody to hug. (speaking of: sam, this is for you. and anyone else, but the added value will be less. i apologise if the sound (which is the point) is not up to much. it's worth a try.)

nonetheless, a happy evening in a town with a centre small enough to be a centre, a happy town on an evening warm enough to be bustling. tomorrow, i make banana cakes.

lots of love to you, and sweet dreams. i'll be playing with your hair.

outstanding enquiries

From Pavla:

When they say 'Extraordinary staff meeting' - doesn't it sound as if the staff were extraordinary?

We then agreed that scarecrow is a cute word (it's another of those words whose perfect formation stares you in the face but goes unnoticed most of the time).

screaming, rabid fits of pique (and some reading matter)

wow, there is a raging argument going on down the corridor. one of the other agencies' staffers has discovered that this stupid piece of work which i've been working on for weeks is nowhere to be found, and the admin people are being throttled; senior admin has had to come to help junior admin - all we can do now is set up x, y - i thought that had been done already - yes, so did we - this is really hurting my feelings - this is unacceptable (said who to whom?) ... sadly we don't have a dpko office here.

~

i'll take this chance to link to the odd articles i found distracting last week:
- for Ed - how manipulative men in smart-casuals take a lovely, organic phenomenon and ruin it. it's quite thorough though, i'll give them that
- i'm not sure this applies to me, but perhaps one day it will
- right for our times (although it should be UCL rather than Oxbridge).


feel free to comment, criticise or put up other links : )

i appear to have brought a lunch of onion with onion garnish (now extraonioney!); thankfully half my colleagues are away and i'm unlikely to be kissing anybody.

i'd give my life for a digestive biscuit, as long as i got to eat the digestive biscuit* before giving my life.

*means seven or eight, singular for aesthetic purposes only
chris

all you lovers were there with me...

or so it felt at various points during last night's Radiohead concert under a mild sky on the island of Obudai in Budapest. This was at the Sziget festival, which has become the biggest music festival in this region and is one i've fancied going to for several years. It's a magnificent set-up contained on an island and despite murmurings from those who were here back in '93, the size it has now gives a lot of variety. That said, we were distinctly there for radiohead, and the rest of the excellent program took rather a back seat; it would be worth coming for several days (it's a week long) and taking in more than is possible in nine hours (i was peer-pressured onto the midday train, rather than my fantastic seven am plan...).


The Silent Disco was rocking, though, and nicely filled the hours between two and four, in preparation for our long walk to the train station (and then the other train station, from where our train left) for the 06.50 Budapest to Hamburg via Bratislava (which negated the need for accommodation). Everyone had a pair of headphones, and the choice of two channels, one techno dj and one more funk-pop stylee. It's remarkably difficult to figure out which most people are listening to - it seems most of us dance with our body but not our soul (exceptions noted for Diana, Laura, Wahay-Rach and others...). Forgive me - i'm tired.

(William and I also helped make the world's biggest ever cow (hopefully they'll put a photo on the site) and saw the scandalous Teatro de Automatos from the heyday of innocence that was the 1900s.)


Budapest is absolutely gorgeous. Maybe more of Europe would look like that if certain people hadn't waved their willies around so, but there we are. I have to go back for a longer stretch, but I'm glad to have walked through the unreal, breathtaking use of public space that is Margit Sziget*, and the Hungarian parliament is even more impressive than (i realise) the British parliament is.

But this is all window dressing - the point is: i saw radiohead and they were grreat. i didn't realise i was waiting for this; for those who know you should have been with me, know that i missed you and turned to smile and hug you many times during the show. We're always hearing this is a band of massive importance, but I guess I hadn't realised what a big-deal band they had been in my listening to music over the years too; it's nine years since i bought ok computer now, followed by those prior and subsequent, and given a fairly sustained listening over that time, it's perhaps little wonder that you find so many of the songs attached to this or that memory.feeling.coincidental significance... however this sort of sentimental nonsense is unworthy of a blogue-aux-ue, and shall cease. it's also entirely unnecessary, since they are such a fucking genius band that nobody could be unmoved seeing them play. and i'm done.

Let down would have been appropriate in the current british context. they didn't play electioneering either - could have been an oversight, but it was probably because Lexus and the Love Bullets did the definitive live version back in 2003.


I have some photos and video to post at some point. but now to have some dinner, stretch my poor legs and try to stay awake until eleven.

~
Sun, the twelfth day of Alp Arlsan, YOCH 2006 (photos to follow)

~
* This is an island in the Danube which is a mile-and-a-half-long park with virtually no advertising to be seen, a wonderful array of plants, beautiful grass (which you're, you know, allowed to walk on) and many different types of tree, all spread out beautifully to give a sheltered, magical feeling without being claustrophobic. They have a dancing fountain, and there's even a sports ground with stands tucked discreetly away at the southern end. Just the sort of place it would be great to go and relax, alone or groupwise, summer or winter. And it's still open at five in the morning!

slovaks might agree on their history. and pigs might fly, be yellow

today's lunch=roast wild boar, at a meal with one young post-communist colleague (pavla) and an older colleague (erika) with a very balanced view of the various positives and negatives. our discussion prompted pavla to circulate this:

i want it on my tshirt.

Also, and as a complete non-sequitur, i come across articles here and there that interest me and which i would like to share with others, through a friendly, no-obligation medium such as this. they might vary widely and may or may not appeal to you, but i know others among you have similar stuff to share. so i'm thinking maybe once a week i'll put up a selection, and y'all can put links/articles/miscellany up via comments - interested?

in other news i found zdrobshe was behind the breadi know that doesn't sound like i looked very hardi'm apprpriately ashamed and sorry for the panic and drama and i'm so pleased to have her back. mmmmm - chocolate baaa

a quick tour of our flat

while not wishing to forgive Sanne and Ylle in any way, i would like to share with you this:




I miss having dancers lying around. If Sanne felt so inclinced, she could send me a photo or two from the salsa club last night.

Also, here is William, fiddling with our sound system, which is better illustrated in the following shot:


It's a step up from the headphones-in-saucepan method, anyway...

don't mess with zdrob.

Maybe it was somebody from your primary school days, the first kid to go on the new rope swing. Some bully who pushed itself to the front and had to be first, and had to show off and ride standing up or with no hands and who promptly fell off and got grazed and red-of-eye. And you thought ha!, until the Authority in place said nobody else could ride as it was clearly too dangerous.

Or there was the clown who left a flag - of all things! in all places! - on the moon. Or the unhappy soul who jumped from the newly reopened tower in Pisa, it having been closed for just that reason. History and our lives are littered with examples of people taking first place and abusing it, messing things up for all next-comers.

So while it was lovely to hear that Sanne would be visiting, and charming to meet Ylle, kidnap and the aching violation of trust which followed are not on. Never again shall William and I be so naive, so trusting, as to let anyone near our beloved zdrob. If, that is, we ever see our dear and precious zdrob ever again.

Zdrob is a symbol of youth and hope, of new dawns and tasty, tasty chocolate, and we dearly miss her. While she is missing, we may not be able to let anyone stay in our flat. This, more than anything else recently, has shaken my faith in humanity, cackling cruelly as it does in the face of friendship. I won't know how to look our dear zdrob in the face if we should ever discover her place of imprisonment. I may -- hard as it may be -- i may have to put her out of her traumatised misery. And only with her safe return and consumption will my faith in visitors be restored. I encourage you all to put what pressure you can on Sanne to Bring Back Zdrob!

Will zdrob have her modesty respected, or will she suffer like this poor, shivering victim? Only time will tell.

at last, a flat

A couple of things have happened. Firstly, I now have a flat and an address, though I am not going to tell you it as my entrance hall has a post-will-be-stolen feel to it. Rather magnificent though, with lovely tiling and general bigness. A photo will follow.

To be honest, i don't know my address. To put you out of your misery, biscuits can be sent to my office.

Don't get too excited though, i'm only in this place for a month. it may make finding a place for the whole duration harder rather than easier, as six months is the perfect length. This place is fine, if not ideal. I'm sharing with William (again, photo to follow), a charming New Zealander attached to the UNDP writing a web-based educational tool on economic transition in the region. For transition, read hideous, knee-jerk decisions to sell everything off, slash social provision and drive millions of people out of work. Slovakia now has a flat 19% tax rate, Russia thirteen or thereabouts. Tesco has more of the retail market in Slovakia (>50%) than anywhere else, which has had an effect on small shops here the likes of which we can only nightmare about in britain.

But the flat: after snore-avoidance in corridors, pouring water on my sheets to stay cool enough to sleep and listening to my compatriots through the small hours, my sleeping arrangements are again ... interesting. There is a tendency in this country for having bedrooms you walk through to get to other rooms. Maybe it's a communist shareitall phenomenon. I am in such a room, although to be fair i think this place was designed to only have one bedroom and me in the living room. My first thought was So, where *is* the bed, and of course it was under the sofa. The short bit of the sofa:










Still it's only for a month. Just don't ask whether I have an oven.

We have a bar right next door, called 4zby: štyrizby, štyri being four and izby being rooms. It’s named after the film Four Rooms, apparently. The beer’s not as good as elsewhere, but it’s also cheaper and closer, and utterly appropriate for a celebratory na zdravie.

Speaking of compatriots, I am especially impatient to finish The Amber Spyglass (a shout out to Oli for the recommendation and loan) as I have just got Philip Pullman’s subsequent Lyra’s Oxford from the library. That is the British Council library, which I was helpfully informed would be closed for a month from yesterday evening. Having dutifully gone down to stock my summer with books in god’s own language, I was told I could only borrow fiction (okay), and I could only have one book – they are spending their August holiday doing an inventory. Having chosen the Pullman book, I talked them into letting me have another, my colleague (who helpfullly informed me, and with whom I will be working closely on matters of fertility and youth policy) recommended Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet.

This is also the colleague in whose flat I lived for a while, a man for whom generosity is a mother tongue. This reinforces my sense that to have, to enjoy and to share are the sides of the happiness triangle. I’ll do the same for someone some day.


With Adam, a UNDP intern from Hungary, I took a long walk today and came across this gorgeous dog and its companion, and a few doors down the house you can also see at flickr. That site has a great deal more to it, but its basic photo-gallery function is quite pleasing enough for now. We then went to an art gallery and saw a bunch of rather cool stuff, but i'll have to tell you another time as my laptop battery is making like the fat lady.









The other thing i must tell you about is my work, as I now have a much better idea of what i'll be doing. But that will also have to wait.

That old chestnut

left to right: the kind of place i'll go to escape the kind of place i'll live

Is the international system characterised by continuity or change?

Well, there's the one hand and there's the other, but maybe because i've travelled mostly in western europe and amongst societies of humans, things generally don't seem much different from place to place. Socially, the same needs are repeated everywhere, and if you ignore the packaging, the same provision. Even the packaging responds to economies of scale, and our beloved Jif became the ambiguous, foreign Cif. Friday night is Friday night, and alcoholics are alcoholics. Social and community support may vary worldwide, but i've not been in any position to explore this.

National borders are less flexible than brands or packaging or government policies, at least in this part of the world, and their nature sits somewhere between what is fixed and natural and what is whimsical and human. So it was with great born-on-an-island pleasure that I went to Vienna for the evening last night. Get this! I finished work at six, went home and showered, (had a panic about making the train after missing my bus,) and went abroad and saw a show and came back and went to bed. All in italics. Of course it's just like nipping down to Brighton, except it's a third as expensive and they speak Austrian. (I got racially profiled - I spoke to the ticket dude in Slovak, fairly since we'd just left Bratislava station, but he insisted I was German and wouldn't take nie for an answer.)

Legs bentest to straighest: Donald Shorter, Leah Cox, Bill T. Jones

And the show was soooooooooooo worth going overseas for. Bill T. Jones is an incredible performer, and if you have the chance to see something by him, do. As I Was Saying was fabulous, gorgeous storytelling, a virtuouso violinist walking around the stage, holding me in that place where the excitement of language overlaps that of music and non-rational pleasure; and the second piece was set to what started at least as a Beat version of Hamlet's soliloquy. But I'm done talking about it - verbal-texty descriptions won't describe dance well or make you want to go and see it more than me giving it Three Thumbs Up. (There are notable exceptions, perhaps, but not from me.) In addition to my for the sake of all that's good etc, I have a) never seen a dance show give an encore of that length, and b) never seen any performer brought back out onto the stage after the curtain, after the house lights went up and people started leaving, and start high fiving the front row of the audience. Last-night euphoria, perhaps.


As a post-script, every time anyone saw me with Colloquial Slovak I was preparing for last night. No thanks to the widespread and utterly baseless "everyone speaks english", I spent a few months learning the lingo, and wouldn't have made it to the station last night sans parler. To Adriana: you are as kind and motherly as you looked when I picked on you to find guidance. Thank you for your help, your taxi phone number and the way you looked with a smirk at my hair when describing me to the driver, and I'm glad we could communicate.