andré carrilho is a wonderful portuguese cartoonist. recently his cartoon entitled "the evolution of species" was published in a portuguese newspaper. the israeli community was very upset and accused the cartoonist of anti semitism and of making fun of the holocaust.
so, two things i've done recently made me a bit annoyed with this reaction os the israeli community. - "our cancer year" is about a jewish man, harvey pekar who's married to a women who writes about the israelo-palestinian conflict. her editors asked her to include the holocaust in her story, otherwise it wouldn't get published, for it would show a very dark facet of the israeli. harvey pekar, a jew, was already guessing this ending for his wife publishing attempt: it's recurrent. - "war photographer" is a documentary about the war photographer james nachtwey. among many others, he shot the conflict in rwanda between tutsis and hutus. he photographed both, for those who were once killers, were afterwards dying in feeding camps, of hunger. the only idea that andré carrilho wanted to transmit was that those who are victims, can as well become agressors. and it's very clear and not for a moment it makes fun of the victims of the holocaust. it annoyed me. i started reading this book some months ago in lisbon. luís brought it and i finished it in my journey to kralova lehota (plus the other hours of waiting).
in the meantime, harvey pekar died. this book is incredibly moving, about disease, love and fight. because harvey pekar got his first cancer diagnose in 1990, this book was written as well during the beginning of the gulf war, so we are side by side with two different kinds of survival. very simple, very real. today, on another of my five hour journeys, i started thinking on all the places i've been to in past three months.
at first i got the "wha, three months?" reaction and now in front of google maps i'm just amazed on how much i've been travelling, partly due to 72h project! i'm very curious to see this very own map by the end of the EVS! the whole EVS family gathered this week for the belarus dinner! yuliya really made such an effort to make it a "didactic" dinner! the food was great, with a lot of salads and a delicious meal cooked in the oven. potatoes and meat! and of course that every now and then we had to drink vodka. yuliya found a russian shop in bratislava so we drank a bread based drink, real belarussian deserts and sauces...loved it! oh, and it had belarussian traditional music as well! in the end, yuliya made a powerpoint presentation about belarus that was wonderfull, really interesting. i think she knows that people don't really know much about belarus so she put a lot of effort into teaching us. dakujem yuliya!! and of course, although yuliya put the "country dinner" standard really high, the portuguese dinner will come soon!
so, after we arrived from budapest, we slept in bratislava and off we went do popradské pleso in the high tatras! (the revenge) luís was always sleeping and missed my favourite journey in slovakia. the train that goes bratislava-trnava-trencin-zilina-liptovzky mikulas-poprad-kosice is beau-u-u-u-tiful! from zilina on, it keeps getting better and better, with lakes, mountains, green fields, and of course, the tatras! and so we arrived at the popradské pleso train stop. from there on we should walk to the place where we would slept, right next to the lake. on the way, we passed by a symbolic cemetery which honours the victims of the tatras. and so we arrived, isn't it deaaaaamy? this country is so full of natural beauty! - natural beauty makes me corny. aaaahhhhhh let's ruin a landscape picture! after we arrived, luís suggested we walked up that mountain. i was thinking it was too steep for my unprepared body. and so, on the next day, we did. it was quite easy and in an hour and fifteen we were on top. cutchi cutchi II to see this, it was totally worth the visit! after we went down to catch the train in strbské pleso. it was a bigger lake but it had so many people and buildings around! oh tatras, me loves you. and so we returned once again, to bratislava.
before we came to bratislava we stoped by "terror haza". it is not a theme park attraction as the name may suggest, very far from it, actually. terror house is one of the best museums we've ever visited. this house, in one of the main avenues in budapest, was converted recently into a museum, and in terms of design, presentation of historical facts, videos, music, environment in general, it's really really good. this house was where the political prisioners were kept. at first for the dissidents of the nazi regime and after for the dissidents of the communist regime. it was so heavy, full of video testimonials. all with a lot of information. i was impressed with this room, the gulag room. it was incredible how the two regimes, the nazi and the communist were so similar, having opposite ideologies. there were people who, after surviving the concentration camps, died in the gulags. the visit finished in the last floor. in here we could see the conditions where the prisioners lived. the solitaries, the toilets, the cells, the torture room, the room where they were hanged. it was a really heavy museum, but we got to understand how things worked. the phoney court sessions, the lies, the fear, the punishments. a 16 year old boy lived there for writing "death to the communists" (or something similar) in a wall. they waited until he was 18 to get him killed. They could punish children who were 12 years old! the laws just kept being stupider and stupider. this is a memorial and an hommage to the people who died there. there are pictures from the killers, from the victims, all with a small description of what they did.
it really deserves a visit. in the end i though how it would be important to have such a museum or memorial in portugal. we too had our dictatorship, with it's state police who tortured and imprisioned innocent civillians. that should't be forgotten. in our second day in budapest we went to the ethnography museum, of course. so, i have this thing for hungarian folclore, because it's so diverse, the dances, the music, the instruments, it's so so rich that it could only have a museum like this: in the museum, if you pay extra circa 0,80€ you can take pictures of everything. so we did. we spent a lot of time in the temporary exhibition. it was so interesting! in the 50's the communist regime wanted to industrialize the country as much as possible. so, with the fear of losing some traditions in the peasant life, two ethnographers made a massive work. for an entire year, they lived with the people from a little village in hungary. every weekend, holiday, normal day was minutiously recorded in pictures, videos ou notebooks. what they ate, how and where they slept, what tools did they use, how did they manipulate them, who was who, etc. it was really motivating and didactic as well to see how this etnography thing is done. it's a lot of hard work, patience. i was very impressed by the amount of work they had everyday, working from 4h to 16h in the fields and then at home to prepare the next day... because we were supposed to meet with miklos and elvira, we didn't have enough time, so we ran across the permanent exhibition, that was very big and interesting. i promised myself i would go there again, just to see it. and then we went to another temporary exhibition called "how we see the finns". it was an hungarian view on how the hungarian people see the finnish people. i didn't know they did competitions and other events together. their language has the same common root, and they sound similar actually. but they cannot understand each other. i'm really getting crazy with this language thing. i want to know how each language works. i just just focus on this one because i still can't manage a conversation, grrr. oh, and of course than hard-core-metal-thing-core-rock had to mark it's presencee!
after bratislava we went to budapest, a city i've always wanted to know, and that now is only three hours away! so we went to our hostel, a normal hostel, except that it was inside this very luxious building! the weather was tricky, it rained sometimes, but we went first of all to buda side, to see the above view of peste from "citadella". our first impression of the city was "waaaw". it was filled with grandeur, classy buildings, beautiful, all full of details, and the streets had a lot of people - something that doesn't happen in bratislava. so we ate our breakfast, that had, of course, paprika. our first contact with the language was as well "waaaw", because it's so different from everything we've heard before. in the first day we just walked like hell, across the centre streets. ate chocolate, again. no no, we didn't get lost. in here we were sharpening the concept of "express turism", which i'm sure you'll hear about soon. st. stephen's basilica. near the dunae at late afternoon. just because the colors are nice. cutchi cutchi this is luís after another "express turism" shooting. it's very hard to travel with a person who keeps posing everywhere. this was already day two in budapest. or helping people. the hungarian parliment this is a memorial to the victims of an uprising in 1956 against communist regime. the flag has a hole because the uprisers removed the communist symbol it had. this we don't know what it is but miklos told us to take a picture of it because that's what every tourist does. ah! so in this day, after we visited the splendid national musem of ethnography, we met with miklos and elvira. miklos was born and raised in budapest and elvira is from another little village but she lives in budapest now. they were incredible and showed us during the whole day a lot of things in buda and in pest. the view from the castle is beautiful, and so is all the centre inside it, with all the narrow streets and ancient buildings. so, this is me, elvira and miklos. it was very funny because elvira is very fond of portugal and she even learned a bit of portuguese. after the visit to the castle we ate a big and wonderfull hungarian meal! fish soup, bean soup, chicken with halusky and paprika, yummmy! bullet marks and at night we went to see the city with the lights, very nice. and on the third day we went to the terror house museum, which was very impressive, and then we came home, to bratislava. which was empty, of course!
so, because it's so close, i plan to return just to spend the day in the museum of ethnography. and eating. really loved the food :x |
i don't understandnerozumiem ti means "i don't understand you" in slovak. a tradition, let's say. after not understanding anything in granada, now i don't understand anything in bratislava. Archives
May 2011
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