billboards in bratislava

... do i need to say something about this?

Tesco Piestany

When i entered the Tesco store in Piestany, i swore i had been there before. They all look so much alike. But when i came to the toilet i knew I hadn't. I would have definately remembered the undertaker situated by the toilets on the hallway. 

Halušky á la Provence

My friend Mišo Sládek is an architect. This means he likes good food. For a project about the city of Martin, that is in the run to become European Cultural Capital together with a French city, he came with the idea of a Slovak Fusion restaurant.
The decision was easily made: we would make Halušky, the grey gnocci-like mass that traditionally comes with Bryndza cheese and bacon. His task was to grind the potatoes ('ratat'), mix them with egg and flour and then drop them by small pieces in the boiling water, using the special technique of 'haluškovat'. My task was to add the 'a la Provence'. I slowly fried little Roma tomatoes with garlic so they became soft and sweet. A little bit of olive oil in the pan, and shortly fried a hand full of rosemary in it. Since turning this meal into something vegetarian was already a tricky business, we decided to keep the Bryndza.

And most important. We finished our plates.

Easter

Easter in Slovakia needs some explanation. From dawn to afternoon the men go around to the houses of the women they know carrying a willow whip called korbač and water. They can wet them and whip them and in return the little boys receive money or candies, the elder men a drink. The amount of colored ribbons on their korbač tells how many women they have had. Don't bother asking for explanation, because you will get vague stories about that this would make women beautiful for the rest of the year and such. It is a tradition, period.

On this easter morning Radana and I went with the car around the city and surrounding villages to do the exact opposite of all the other women in this country: we went hunting for men. Armored with our cameras we found this group of young boys, whom were definitely still in the age that they are more interested in candies than in nice girls..... and i had nothing to fear from them. But as soon as we hunted down some experienced men, i stood no chance. They took my camera from me and started to hit me while one photographed it. A solid piece of undercover journalism i would say. Thank god they didn't have water with them!

Creative Croatians on Black Saturday

This is a special post for those who believe "Black saturday" is a pure Western/French matter. Saturday 28th of July we drove from Split (croatia) to Bratislava (slovakia) with an average speed of 48 km/h with an average temperature of 34 degrees celcius. An unfinished tunnel between Split and Zagreb cost us 2,5 hours (same story as last year, why is this tunnel still not fixed?), bad traffic management before the border near Maribor another 2 hours with cars standing still. These Croatian black Mercedes drivers found a very creative solution to the traffic jam. They spend 15 minutes detaching the grid between the highways and then simply turned around....
As for us? thanks to a magnificent broadcasting of John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk live in Carnegie Hall on the Austrian OE1 radio between 02.00h and 03.00 we made it home safely.

White

Anja, Kolochava

There is something about them. They make you follow them not only with your eyes, but make you turn your head. Shiny, high-heeled, elegant, proud, cheap. White shoes.

Wearing white shoes is ignoring the whole in the ground that is your toilet, ignoring the cobble stones, ignoring the fact that you wash your clothes in the river like all the other women in the village.

Wika, Mukacheve

Maria, Kolochava

Svietka, Chop

border of Europe

Chop is the smaller border town between Ukrajina and Slovakia, filled with women uniform and men who will change your dollars, euro's or Slovak crowns on the street. The border of Ukrajina has a political high profile, after the planned entrance of Slovakia to Shengen, this will be the very last time you passport will be checked in Europe. It takes you 20 minutes to enter Ukrajina, but more than two hours to get back. Besides European money, the Canadian governement recently donated 4,5 million US dollars to improve the border security as part of the Global Partnership against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction (Krakow Post, 10-5-07)
Both Chop and Uzhorod are crowded with gambling houses, small places
with blinded windows in regular houses, which makes you wonder about the effectiveness of the border against smuggling -of cigarettes, cheap vodka and people.

Danka, Chop

Slobo on a bottle

Slobodan, Novi Sad, oct 2006


A morning at the trainstation of Novi Sad. Three men are sitting at a white plastic table, eating chunks of porkmeat and drinking serbian Rakija. As many people in Serbia, they are trying to sell handmade stuff on the street. These men sell prints on selfmade bottles the of archangel Gabriël, Maria and... Mladic, Karadgic and former president Slobodan Milosevic. Hiding my Dutch nationality behind my poor Slovak language skills, I tried to avoid the subject of the Yugoslavia Tribunal in The Hague. For these simple men the killers of the Balkan, now on trial or already dead, are still their freedomfighters.

Petržalka§s urban culture

Politicians and Papacy

In the rest of the world politicians and papal leaders of the Catholic church have to be careful about what they say about the Islam. But here in Slovakia other things matter. The new nationalistic governement cries out that they want to send tanks to Hungary and chase all of the Hungarian minority out of the country. And here, in Marianka, a place where pilgrims from over the world come to be healed by the holy water, thousands of people are gathered together in what feels like a mysterious open-air church. When the mass is over, the speach is said, the holy father walks through the crowd to bless the people. He shakes hands and smiles, and blesses the children. No security guard necessary.

Heaven

Yesterday I heard the old drunk whom I photographed lying on the street, died four weeks ago. I hope his wife will recognise him in heaven.

tourism

Beograd, july 2006

Poor rich Saudi's

Spa in Piestany, august 2006

The muslim population in Slovakia is less than one percent, and seeing a veiled woman on the streets of Bratislava is a rare thing. This makes visiting the spa town of Piestany a unique experience in Slovakia. The friendly and clean streets of the touristic centre are dominated with fountains (celebrating the natural healing water of the wells in Piestany) and arabic looking people. On the terraces elderly men in djellaba's play chess in the shade and fat ladies wearing coulourfull headsarfs push their babycarriages past the shopwindows. "Poor rich Saudi's!" Suzka, a university teacher in the nearby Trnava, cries out. "They live in this terrible hot country and from the aircondition they all suffer from reuma. So they come here to heal, because it is cheap here for them." Like most Slovak women she has a great figure from working in her own garden and growing her own vegetables. She has never visited the spa.

The coincidence that changed the world

Latin Brigde in Sarajevo, 2006

"The political consequences of this deed are being heavily exaggerated " writes a journalist of Die Neue Freie Presse on july 2nd 1914. He couldn't be more wrong about anything. A month later the world was at war because of an assasination that almost didn't happen. Gavrilo Princip, a nineteen year old romantic nationalist, planned with his friends to attack the Habsburger Archduke when he paraded through Sarajevo. But when his friends messed up their plans, he turned around and went to the café to drink a coffee. Later, when he walked out of the café, the open car with the Duke coincidently came by on the way back, just where he was standing. Princip drew his gun and shot Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie instantly and changed the world forever.

They were shot right at the place were the white figure in this photograph is walking. Since then the bridge has suffed from many wars, but has been recently renovated.

Concrete

The summer has come to Bratislava, dragging along tourincars with tourist, mainly british stagparties looking for beautiful women and cheep beer. But there are also the unavoidable Japanese with their camera's, running throug the city to get the right picture of the old Austrian-Hungarian grandeur, mixed with the grey concrete communist aesthetics. This is most visible standing on Bratislavsky Hrad, the castle by the Danube, and looking over the river towards Petrzalka. This Petrzalka, built in the seventies to house the new workers for the Slovnaft gas company, is not only physically seperated from the old town. It has its own mayer. When he was elected last june, he handed out coupons for DVD players to everyone who voted for him, and he won. So much for Democracy.