Matching Tracksuits

It usually happens in the opposite direction: Slovaks come to Poland for the relatively cheap goods here. Twenty years ago, Poles went to Slovkia, but now that has reversed since Slovakia adopted the Euro. However, Babcia likes bucking trends, I think, so today we went, as we always do during our stay her, on a shopping trip to Trstena, the nearest town in Slovakia.

Every time we go into Trstena, Babcia waxes romantic. She goes on and on about how she loves the town, about how there’s so little traffic compared to Jablonka, how there are so few plastic, awful sign attached to every available surface.

It is a unique little town: you can stand in the middle of the town square and just behind a few buildings see the farming fields.

It’s a sliver of town in the middle of vast fields of grains and grasses.

It’s a small town, but there are a couple of churches and several restaurants.

It’s easy to see how a small town could support two churches — at least in the past. But so many restaurants? There can’t possibly really be any industries around here, one thinks. And then one remembers the fields surrounding the town. And who knows — perhaps they are like their neighbors just across the border and go abroad to work.

We started with the shopping. Babcia is convinced that Slovakian flour is better than Polish flour, so we bought an almost unbelievable amount of flower. The next item we bought in large amounts was Slovakian rum. Slovakia is not exactly the first country that comes to mind when thinking of rum, but Babcia swears by it. Finally, we almost emptied the store of the grill rub that makes chicken wings magical for the Girl.

It’s obvious almost instantly that you’ve crossed the border into Slovakia. Everything looks similar, but just different enough. The villages above all: stretched out along a single road, houses huddled up to the street, house after house looking quite similar.

Today’s fieldtrip, Oravský Hrad — Orawa Castle, just about forty kilometers inside Slovakia but a world away from the twenty-first century. Probably the third or fourth time I’d been there, but when I’d shown L pictures of the castle — instant intrigue.

And who wouldn’t be intrigued with a castle literally perched on the razor tip of a high cliff?

Yet I was a little worried about the legs of our smallest visitors: it begins with a climb and only grows steeper through the visit. Up, up, up — anyone with any fear of heights needs not apply, nor anyone with weak legs.

Having seen for the first time a couple of years ago the film 1922 Nosferatu, I was particularly interested in the first couple of gates. While none of the interiors were used for the film, the exteriors framed the early adaptation of Dracula.

In 1922 none of the interiors had yet been renovated, but if they had, there are a few interiors that certainly would have served the film well.

As for today’s visit, the interiors seemed less interesting than the exteriors. And most fascinating was the mannequin dressed as Count Orlok, the vampire antagonist from Nosferatu.

“Tata, is that real?” And it was a fairly terrifying sight.

“Why does he have claws?” little D asked.

“What is that?” S asked.

I explained to everyone about the film, and honestly, I thought they would continue to worry about it, to fret about it. But soon enough, they were crowded around the mannequin.

A small victory for adult common sense in children.

It wasn’t supposed to rain. “Bedzie pogoda,” everyone says, which is oddly appropriate when literally translated. A word-for-word translation is, “Will be weather”; a less literal reading: “There will be weather.” It seems a little odd: there’s always weather. Still, it’s synonymous with “There will be good weather.”

“Bedzie pogoda.” Not quite. But at the very least, “Bedzie spacer…”

And there will be signs. With two little girls under the age of five, we had to turn it into a game. Easy enough: let’s look for the path marks.

And so off we went. The sequence was simple.

Adult: “I see one.”

Children: “Where?! Where!?”

There were plenty of places they didn’t look but I did — not for signs of course. For something less concrete, literally and figuratively.

In some ways, shooting in heavily overcast conditions is easy: it makes one look less at the sky and thus focus on the things at hand. On the other hand, the light can be, at best, tricky.

Given the wet, slippery conditions, I wasn’t the only one looking down instead of looking up.

Yet the hunt for the signs continued. Through the forest, through the meadow, we looked for the elusive marks. When they became obvious (striped stakes driven into the ground beside the path), the girls become somewhat blind to them.

But the moment of discovery was as exciting for us as the girls.

But for a great deal of the time, it was just walking. As the lingering droplets on the grass made our pants increasingly wet, it started to become a question of plodding.

Finally, we got to the forest, and the “almost” plodding became pure plodding as we slogged our way through mud and up hills, the girls on shoulders or strapped to one’s back.

Once we got back onto the paved path — an oxymoron? — the frustration lifted, as did the clouds.

By the time we returned home, the sun was breaking through the clouds.

It sort of figures.