THE BRATISLAVA
BUST
HE SAYS:
Greetings, fan club.
This will be a catch up blog for a variety of different
reasons.
First, I am royally irritated that the computer lost my last
blog on the same subject. As well, St. Eleanor has been quite ill over the past few days, but has refused to seek
medical care with a doctor or hospital, which has royally (no pun) pissed off
King Richard. And lastly, during our
tour through Vienna and Bratislava the weather has been a beastly 34C! We are now in Prague (a slightly cooler 31C) and
will return to Vienna in two days for our final whirlwind. So there is a good deal to catch up on. But I am not in a witty
mood.
Today is Tuesday, so it must be Belgium, or is it Bratislava?
We visited Bratislava for 3 hours, which says it all. Why the tour company
bothered with this is a mystery to me. The city, which is a sunny industrial
slum, is the capital of Slovakia. Market capitalism has not been generous or
good to the people here. They are the flotsam and jetsam of the new European
labour market. They are the new untermenschen – the trash used up and cast off
by the capitalist labour market. For them freedom is a bottle of beer and the right
to be skin heads. When we talk about “freedom”, we confuse form and content.
The Czechs tell Newfie jokes about the Slovaks. Now I
understand why. The working class walks about town in their undershirts, baggy
basketball shorts and flip flops. A more middle class woman with her child in a
stroller is walking down the street wearing a white sequined see-through dress
with a black thong. A real class place. To paraphrase the Canadian politician
Jean Marchand, the best thing about Bratislava is the boat to Vienna.
The following day we arrived in Vienna for a full day of
power tourism. It was a brutal 34C. Fortunately, we have decided to return for
an additional 5 days of fun, great coffee and pastries, and high culture. The
Austro-Hungarian Empire (or Habsburg) was one of the great political empires of
the 19th and 20th centuries and lasted for nearly 600
years.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany attempted to
rival the other’s accomplishments and excesses. And, in turn Hungary and
Budapest, the weak sister of the Habsburg empire, aped the Austrians and in
particular the Viennese. Viennese haut culture was, alas, founded on the edifice
complex. The bigger, the better; and the more ornate are even better. The massive and ornate buildings and
architecture in Budapest reflect this
edifice complex; or, was it an inferiority complex ?
After the obligatory city tour we did our own thing. The
first thing we did we was to go off to a famous café where 19th and
20th centuries revolutionaries hung out and fortified themselves
with good pastries and coffees before they went off to change the world. We
decided to do it right, and had one of the famous Viennese coffees – 6 main
types and about 64 with variations. This was accompanied by a large piece of
self-slimming sachertorte with a mountain of whipped cream on the side.
Later, St. Eleanor, attempting to imitate her rival St.
Joan, decided that we should go off and
see the Lippinzaner foals that were running around under the watchful eye of
their mothers in what is certainly the most ornate horse training ring in the
world, complete with crystal chandeliers. The foals will receive 8-10 years of
training and are treated royally. The show was full of pomp and was good fun.
Afterwards we went to the Archives of the Austrian
Resistance. The small museum was created
in the early 1980s by an all-party agreement, ranging from Catholic
Conservatives to Communists, and is beautifully curated. After the abortive February
revolution of 1934, when the Schutzbund – armed workers units under communist
party leadership fought the Austria Nazis in the streets and made their last
stand in the Karl Marx Hof housing project where they were obliterated by
artillery fire – there was never an effective anti-Nazi underground resistance
in Austria, unlike in Czechoslovak where the communist resistance was highly
organized and effective.
Our journey continues….
SHE SAYS:
Remember a few days ago, when I wrote about deciding to
walk back to the boat in the rain because I already had a cold and what else
could happen? Note to self: don’t tempt
fate like that again! Turns out that
colds that aren’t treated with respect can crawl down into the bronchial area
and/or the lungs and cause chills, heavy coughing, and general misery. They also make it tougher for a fog-loving
Newfie like me to adjust to long walking tours over acres of asphalt in high
humidity and searing temperatures (for a Maritimer), no matter how beautiful
the city. I love this climate when I’m
sitting on a beach beside the cool ocean with a pina colada in my hand, but I
have to admit that the last few days have been tough on us both: on me because
sweating and coughing are not my idea of a good time, and on the good doctor
who sometimes forgets that his title does not refer to a degree in medicine,
because my coughing kept us both awake most of the night. If you’ve read this far, I think you have
probably picked up on the fact that not having all of his medical directives
followed instantly makes him a little ….um… touchy. (He says: Grumpy)
Despite recent accusations certain people have made to
the contrary, I am not a difficult patient…as long as the doctor is making
sense to me. I don’t believe in
chemicals for every ache and pain, but when I need medicine, I take it. When travelling through a huge city in
blasting heat, I insist on watching horse shows in air conditioned comfort
rather than hunting down yet another cathedral or military statue, and I demand
equal time to sample desserts and fancy coffees in air-conditioned cafes.
I have to admit that since I’ve started teasing him and
blogging about his travelling pharmacy, the good doctor has pared down his
medical travel kit considerably, from roughly half his travel weight allowance
to probably only ¼. Of course, we’ve had
to take extra precautions as a result, making sure our diets are balanced
enough to ward off beri-beri, rickets, and scurvy, and being careful to avoid
poisonous snakes and vicious dogs. We
trust that somewhere in these big concrete jungles we’ll find a pharmacy or
two, and that our medical insurance company will help us hunt down a hospital
in an emergency. True, it adds a
dimension of danger to our cruise through Europe, but on the plus side, it
meant that Richard could add a pair of shorts, 2 pairs of jeans, and a few
assorted shirts to his suitcase.
Even with his reduced inventory and our trip to the
drugstore in Melk, he still found a dozen things to force upon me: remedies for
everything from headaches to athlete’s foot, none of which would have helped
me, but any of which would have made him feel better. I kept refusing and he kept grumbling. Finally,
in the bottom of the case, he struck gold: an antibiotic his doctor had
prescribed for our last trip, that he hadn’t needed. Two of our travel mates were doctors and one
is a Nurse-Practitioner, so he got ok’s from all of them first, and then gave
me my orders: the pills or a doctor at the next stop, and either way, I’d have
to see a doctor in Prague. I felt so
terrible by then that I was happy to give in.
Bratislava was interesting, but my Slovakian is a little weak, and the
city didn’t strike me as the kind of
place European ladies would choose to visit for their cures, so I decided to
avoid it, too. I’ve been on the pills
for 3 days now and am happy to report that I think I may survive. Even better news: the good doctor is a lot
less irritable than he’s been, so on we go.
“Cough” “Grumble”
“Cough” “Grumble”…
(He says: a bad patient)
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