Yesterday started slowly. Cynthia and Slavko make coffee, from beans Cynthia roasts in the oven. They bring the coffee (Turkish style) along with homemade bread cheese and marmalade to the outside table, and then we spend an hour or so having a light breakfast and talking. It’s quiet, and there is a light breeze to cool things off.
There are many errands they run in Austria, shopping and otherwise, from time to time, and as their car insurance was going to expire soon, we decided to take a trip to Graz, which is only about an hour away. After arriving and taking care of the car details, we went into the city proper. I am finding that the older, “inner city” areas of these towns are what makes them appealing; otherwise the cities are just like some version of an American town, complete with McDonald’s or Kentucky Fried Chicken or the like. Graz was a walled city in the past (this helped it withstand the Ottoman invasions), and it’s inner section has been largely turned over to pedestrians. Thus it is pretty quiet and easy to walk through. It’s also fairly large and easy to get a bit disoriented.
We ended up in Glockspielen Platz at a bar. This is named after the clock tower which has one of those mechanisms where animated wooden figures emerge from behind doors and turn around on the hour bell strike. The next “show” was in a couple of hours, so we sat down and had a beer brewed at the bar, and ordered kebap, pommes frites and ajvar while we talked. There was also a thunderstorm to entertain us, my first real rain of the trip. At 6:00pm we had the show, not very exciting, but definitely not something I’ve seen in the states, very old world in my imagination.
We tried to find last night’s organ tuner in the main cathedral after this; he was supposed to be fixing its organ, but wasn’t there. This church was huge, and very different from the Byzantine ones I’d seen earlier in the trip, obviously; again, “You’re not in the Balkans anymore,” is the way it felt. I just can’t get into these edifices, and certainly not a place to worship anything I would believe is greater than me. It’s too gaudy, too snooty, too…false, I don’t know how to say.
We took a scenic room back home. At the border, I learned that when Slovenia wanted to join the EU, this particular town, sitting on both sides of the Mur (Mura) river, was going to be split up between Austria and Slovenia. The Austrians made it a condition of approval that Slovenia would build a sewage collection system for the river. The Slovenians did that, but the Austrians continue to send their waste directly into the river.
We went to a small sweet shop near Sovjak for dessert. Slavko ordered 7 pieces of cake for us, as an extravagant celebration, and to fulfill a previous promise to the owner. The cakes were delicious, light and not too sweet, very different from the American style. I think Sandra would like these. While ploughing through the cakes, Slavko talked about some of his history with folk music in Yugoslavija, including research and ensemble directing. He knows Atanas and Kete, and worked with Atanas a long time ago, as director of the Yugoslavijan orchestra that went to the Dijon festival (I wonder if he and Dragi crossed paths there?!). He talked about learning how to work with the dance leader, changing the way the music ensemble sounded, and how this positively affected the dancers in the larger ensemble, leading to a gold medal at Dijon.
