Grey Bear (Ad) Vents

Once again, things have gotten a little stressful around the house and my bipedal attendants are even more down-in-the-dumps than usual (and that's saying a lot). I'm sympathetic to their situation - I'd be a pretty rotten freelance Goodwill Ambassador if I weren't a caring sort of bear - but I admit that they've been driving me a little crazy.

In an effort to cheer them up, I picked them up an Advent calendar - and of course, it has bears on it! I thought that opening a little window every day and finding a chocolate would be fun - plus they can count down the days until Christmas. I know they're also a little sad that they won't be spending Christmas in Spain with my female bipedal attendant's mother this year - which they've done for the last 3 years - but then I reminded them that they could be spending the holidays on a ship off the coast of Somalia, so buck up!

Anyway, Advent technically begins today but children (and my bipedal attendants) will begin opening the windows of their Advent calendars tomorrow. Advent calendars were created by German Lutherans about 150 years ago and the first printed calendar appeared in shops in Hamburg around 1902. A Swabian claimed to have invented the calendar, but I don't give that theory much credit since I don't know what a Swabian is. You can tell that our calendar is German because one of the little bears (bottom left) is holding a pretzel!

A few years later, what we think of as the "modern" Advent Calendar with its 24 little doors marking the days until Christmas became a staple in Germany and eventually, chocolates and candies began to magically appear behind those little doors. Since tomorrow is Day 1 - and my attendants aren't very savvy about the ways of the world - I had to demonstrate how the calendar works. That's me on bottom-right showing them what's behind door number 1.

Nowadays, some Advent calendars have extra days to accommodate Hanukkah (I don't quite understand that) and New Years and you can even buy digital Advent calendars too - although I don't know how you get your little piece of chocolate from one of those. Sometimes humans are too clever for their own good.

Anyway, I know that my bear calendar won't transform the lives of my attendants but maybe it'll give them something to look forward to and keep their grumbling to a minimum. Of course, knowing them they'll start arguing about who gets to open the door and who gets to eat the chocolate. I think I'll have to get another calendar just to keep track of the two of them. Now I know why we bears hibernate!

Bear-Furt

It's been a while since I've updated everyone on my whereabouts but for the most part, I've been in Bratislava, listening to the squawks and complaints of my bipedal attendants - and of course, bearing it all. And just to put it in perspective, the temperature has finally plummeted to zero, so you can imagine how well my female bipedal attendant is holding up. (Not.)

On Sunday I had the opportunity of flying to Frankfurt with my male bipedal attendant, who had some business to conduct. Rather than take Her, he took me - as it's universally accepted in our household that, as a former international fashion model and freelance Goodwill Ambassador, I'm the savvier traveller. That sure put her nose out of joint!

Unfortunately, we were in the city for less than 24 hours, and most of that time my male bipedal attendant was in meetings, and I was left in the hotel room but at least we were at the Mövenpick, instead of some of the other fleabags he's chosen in the past. Except for the one paparazzi I found hiding in the bathroom (we soon became friends though), our stay there was faultless - which makes it a bear-pick. It even had a bear-size jacuzzi (below, left)- although I had to fight my bipedal attendant for it because he wanted to brush his teeth in it. Who ever heard of anyone brushing their teeth in a jacuzzi? He can be such a Philistine!

Above the bed (top centre) was a quotation by Goethe: Es ist nicht genug zu wissen, man muss auch anwenden; es ist nicht genug zu wollen, man muss auch tun. Fortunately, I speak German fluently (ein Bier bitte?) so I translated it for my attendant: “It is not enough to know something, we must also apply it. It is not enough to want to do something, we must also do it.” I know that Goethe was born in Frankfurt almost 300 years ago and that he's a local son and all, but I don't know what that has to do with having a good night's sleep - it seemed a rather strange thing to be mulling over after a hard day.

Germans!

Still, I had a wonderful night's sleep even though my male bipedal attendant snored a lot. I'm just glad that the room designer hadn't decorated the room with a quotation from Goethe's Faust. As a freelance Goodwill Ambassador, I don't think it would be appropriate to sell my soul to the devil - even in my dreams!

The Metamorphosis of Grey Bear

As Grey Bear awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

Well, not really. As you can see, I am still a bear. And I always have nice dreams. But 93 years ago, readers in Prague and soon around the world read these opening lines (except it was Gregor Samsa and not Grey Bear who awoke from uneasy dreams) and followed the sad tale of the transformation of travelling salesman Gregor Samsa.

Franz Kafka - who wrote the Metamorphosis - was born in Prague and his presence is keenly felt throughout the city. I read a little Kafka when I was a bear cub and, I must admit, found his themes to be a bit depressing. There's so much misery in the world - and as a freelance Goodwill Ambassador I see a lot of pain and injustice firsthand - that I don't want to spend my few leisure hours dealing with troubled individuals flailing about in a nightmarishly impersonal and bureaucratic world. I can spend time with my Bipedal Attendants for that.

As I said, you can find Kafka everywhere in Prague's Old City. Naturally there is a museum devoted to him, and you can see several of the houses he lived in. My favourite of his houses is the one on Golden Lane, in the Lesser Quarter near the castle (photo, below right) because it's the cheeriest all his homes. Having read Kafka, I'm surprised he didn't paint it black.

His statue (above left) appears next to the so-called Spanish Synagogue in the Jewish Ghetto on Dusni Street, across from one of the houses he lived in. I don't pretend to understand it - it's a little bizarre. The tall black sculpture is of a headless man in a suit with a smaller figure of Kafka sitting on his shoulders. And of course me. In one short story, a young man rides atop another's shoulders and walks through the streets of Prague at night - and it is this story which inspired the sculptor. No bears though. Too bad.

Interestingly, Kafka almost emigrated to Madrid where his favourite Uncle Alfred lived. Uncle Alfred was trying to find work for his nephew with Spain's national railway and had that job materialized - which it didn't - I have to wonder if Spain's picture-perfect blue skies and ruby rioja wines would have had an impact on his writing. Maybe Kafkaesque would have come to mean something completely different. Maybe that cheery blue door on Golden Lane was a sign of the inner happy Kafka.

A Bear in Bohemia

Last weekend, I took the Bipedal Attendants - who have been pretty stressed lately - to the Czech Republic for a well-earned weekend in the fabled "mother of cities", the "city of a hundred spires" or simply "Golden Prague". Amazingly, they didn't grumble too much at the prospect of rain - which never did happen - and brooding skies - which did. I think I'm finally whipping them into shape. Even when they found out that they had been the victims of bank fraud, they cheerfully blamed Slovakia (where the crime had actually occurred) rather than the Czech Republic. I think this bodes well.

So, Prague - or officially, Hlavní město Praha (Prague, the Capital City) ... the city of writers, monsters, musicians, physicists, artists, hockey players, Hollywood directors, religious dissenters and near-mythical kings ... the city of Kafka, the Golem (if you're not familiar with the Golem, click here), Mozart, Einstein, Alfons Mucha, Jaromír Jágr, Miloš Forman, Jan Hus and Good King Wenceslas, and so many many more - and now us (plus another billion tourists)! In fact, there's so much to say about Prague that I may have to write more than one posting about it.

For more than 1,000 years, Prague has been the political, cultural, and economic centre of the Czech Republic. Amazingly, the city was left relatively unscathed from the ravages of your stupid WW II (although its Jewish population, which was one of the largest in Europe, would woefully disagree), and what greets the visitor is an urban mosaic: a Gothic city, a Baroque city, an Art Nouveau city. Whatever you want, you can find it, whether it's the haunting Jewish quarter or bizarre cubist houses, tiny medieval houses or fin de siècle apartments.

That's me (above left) in front of the Astronomical Clock which was started 600 years ago. Beside the clock are 4 figures which represent the civic anxieties of its citizens: vanity, greed (originally depicted as a Jew holding a money bag - but since your stupid WWII changed), death and foreign invasion (a marauding Turk). Below those figures are the Chronicler, the Angel, Astronomer, and Philosopher. Below those figures is me, and a thousand camera-wielding tourists all clambering to take my photo. When will I ever learn to wear a disguise when travelling?

Probably the two most famous landmarks in Prague are the Charles Bridge (above right) and the Castle. The Charles Bridge, which spans the river Vltana, connects the Malá Strana ("the Lesser Quarter") with the "Old" and "New" cities on the opposite side of the bank - although the "New" City is about 700 years old. The bridge is peopled with 30 statues of famous - and not very famous - saints and other religious scenes, and although I saw a few dogs and deer, I couldn't find any bears. Maybe that's a good thing. Historically, bears haven't been treated very well.

How the Charles Bridge hasn't collapsed under the weight of all the people (and 1 bear) who cross it every day is a marvel of engineering! After pushing our way through the crowds of tour groups, buskers, vendors, and pickpockets, we stopped to have a glass of mulled wine - what signs advertise as "hot wine" - just to calm our nerves. It was "okay" - it was certainly better than burčiak which (unfortunately) is sold in Prague too, but when I think of the Czech Republic, I don't think of wine, I think of beer.

Of course, since Czechs drink more beer than anyone else in the world, tossing back per capita approximately 157 litres of pivo a year, my male bipedal attendant - who fancies himself a bit of a beer connoisseur - was anxious to contribute to the national statistic. We ended up at a brew pub called U Medvídku - which means "At the Little Bears" - I couldn't have chosen (or named) a better place myself! For over 500 years there has been a brewery and a "beer house" on this site. After all, Czechs have been brewing & drinking beer forever (written references to bear are 1,000 years old) and even Good King Wenceslas - in a bid to safeguard Bohemia's famous hops (the secret ingredient in its world-famous beer) decreed that anyone caught exporting cuttings from the nation's plants would be executed. Ouch!

Now I wonder if that's the first example of corporate espionage in the history of the world?!

Puttin' On the Ritz

As a former international fashion model, I've paraded down my fair share of catwalks and appeared on the covers of the world's most prestigious fashion magazines wearing all sorts of fancy dress (and undress - sometimes, I bare it all!). At the risk of sounding a tad immodest, everyone knows that I put the Armani tuxedo on the world map in the 1980's. Nonetheless, it's always a treat to have the opportunity of putting on a top hat - even if it's someone else's - every now & then. Today I was combing the streets of Bratislava's Old Town when a throng of Japanese tourists asked me to have my photo taken with the statue of Ignác Lamár - a local character whose likeness has been memorialized in bronze.

Ignác was born in the somewhat impoverished neighbourhood of Petržalka (it's still a sea of ugly communist block apartments) 111 years ago to a very poor shoemaker who was himself the son of a famous clown. Even at that time, Ignác was considered by many to be someone who lived his life in the past. Ignác - known by locals as Schöne Náci - epitomized the elegance, courtesy, and gallantry reminiscent of the Austro-Hungarian empire in an era pretty much bereft of those qualities.

Many today believe that he was mentally ill - and maybe he was - but, in spite of everything, he paraded up and down the streets of Bratislava - especially in the area between St. Michael's Gate and the Danube - with a smile on his face, a cane in his hand, dressed to the nines (wearing a velvet frock coat with tails no less!), opening doors for people, bowing to passing ladies with the words ruky bozkávam ("I kiss your hand") in Slovak, German, and Hungarian, and doffing his signature top hat. He survived on the generosity of locals who gave him food from the Old Town's many cafés, or by working on and off as a carpet cleaner.

A legend has grown up around Ignác which says that he ultimately went insane because his beloved was taken by the Nazis and died in a concentration camp. Poor Ignác!

Ignác died of tuberculosis on October 23rd, 1967 and was buried in Lehnice, a town in southwest Slovakia. In 2007, his dreams were (belatedly) fulfilled when his remains were brought to Bratislava where he was finally interred in his hometown - in the city's beautiful Ondrejský cemetery (I was there last week but I didn't see his grave). Hundreds of people attended his "second" funeral. His gravestone is engraved with ruky bozkávaman ("I kiss your hand") which appears in all 3 of the languages he greeted Bratislavans with on the streets of the Old Town.

Currently, his statue can be found on Rybná Brána Street in the Old Town which many consider to be an unlucky location since it's been vandalized a number of times over the last five years. Often it is his top hat which suffers the most. Even in death - and now immortalized in bronze - poor Ignác has had a hard time of it.

Wouldn't Ignác have made a great freelance Good Will Ambassador? Or better yet, maybe I should say: isn't Ignác a great freelance Good Will Ambassador?

Vienna Calling ...

I appreciate that as a freelance Goodwill Ambassador (and former international fashion model), I make a lot of demands on my bipedal attendants: I travel a great deal, I distribute food and medical relief to troubled nations, I have to be rushed to various functions with world dignitaries and heads of state, and be whisked about to photo ops - just to scratch the tip of my very big iceberg. But my bipedal attendants have been whining more than usual lately - a period roughly coinciding with our move to Bratislava - so I decided that enough was enough.

I took them to Vienna.

Vienna! - the home of sachertorte - the world's most famous chocolate cake - Mozart, waltzes, Gustav Klimt, Viennese coffee, the Vienna Boys Choir - and of course, wiener schnitzel. Unfortunately, of all these things, we only managed to have a coffee; there was a humongous line-up for the sachertorte, we skipped the museums, the Mozart we found was made of cardboard, my male bipedal attendant has 2 left feet and couldn't waltz to save his soul, we saw lots of boys but none were singing, and since wiener schnitzel first saw the light of day as a calf on a farm, we couldn't have any of that. Thank goodness the coffee was good!

Because we'll have other opportunities to visit Vee, we decided to make our first outing a walking tour and save the museums for a rainy day - which my bipedal attendants reminded me should be any day now. Personally, I don't think my bipedal attendants have earned the right to stand in the presence of Dürer, Rubens, Rembrandt, Raphael, Vermeer, Titian, Velasquez - and Klimt.

So we walked and we walked and we walked. Of course, my female bipedal attendant developed a dozen blisters during the course of the day - which we still haven't heard the end of - because her feet have yet to be acclimatized to wearing shoes rather than flip-flops (bears don't even wear footwear & I don't complain!), but in between the "rest stops" for coffee and beer and a pee, we did manage to see a lot.

And because we'll be back soon (there were no inspectors on our train to validate our tickets so they're good for another 30 days!), I'll just mention what for many Viennese is the very soul of their city: the Stephansdom - the cathedral of St. Stephen. Dominating the centre of the city - it is the Eiffel Tower of Vienna - its first incarnation was as a simple parish church in 1147 which itself had been built over an ancient Roman cemetery. Over the years it saw much rebuilding, expanding and redesigning in the Romanesque and later Gothic styles. It is now very big and very awesome - even by a bear's standards!

Its highest point - the South Tower - stands 136 meters (445 feet) tall and served as an observation point and military command post during both the Siege of Vienna (1529) and the Battle of Vienna (1683). The North Tower stands at about half its rival's height - money being tight and all, it never reached its intended grandeur. There is a story though that its architect killed himself over a girl before he could complete the tower and, as a hopeless romantic myself, I much prefer that tale. Poor architect!

It's also said that, one day, Beethoven saw birds flying out of the church's belfries (the Stephansdom has 23 bells!) but he couldn't hear a thing - and that was the moment when he realized that he had gone totally deaf. Poor Ludwig! The largest bell (weighing over 20,000 kilos) was actually cast from cannons seized from Muslim invaders - one of the best examples of recycling I can think of. One of the lesser bells is known as the bieringerin ("beer ringer") which was once rung for last call at the city's taverns. We could use one of those in our house - but maybe not as big.

At one time, a mastodon bone hung over the main entrance to the church, so that doorway is now known as the Giant's Door. Poor elephant! On either side of this doorway are curious features - curious even for a church. Embedded in one wall are two brass ells - the ell being a unit of measurement roughly calculated from the shoulder to elbow. These brass markers provided the approved, standardized lengths for measuring drapery and linen in the city. On the other side of the door and also carved into the wall is another indentation (see photo, above left). Those people who believed that their bakers had cheated them by giving them small loaves of bread, could check these questionable loaves against this standard measure. With all this measuring of cloth and linen, I wonder if anyone actually went to the Stephansdom to pray?

There's so much more I could tell you about the cathedral - there are lots of miraculous stories and legends attributed to it - and about Vienna for that matter, but it'll all have to wait until we pop back for another visit. With Vienna only 1 hour away - in the immortal words of Falco (Mr. "Rock Me Amadeus") - Vienna is always calling.

Burčiak & Beer for a Bear

“Le Beaujolais nouveau est arrivé!”

... well, not really because it isn't the 3rd Thursday of November, but ever since I walked Paris' catwalks as an international fashion model, the arrival of those coveted bottles of vin de primeur has always been a day of celebration (with a day of hangovers the following day) in our household.

I confess that I was a little relieved when I heard that Slovakia produces its own wine and hosts several wine festivals throughout the year and, as I reminded my bipedal attendants, this alone should take the sting out of leaving Spain. This weekend saw Bratislava's "Rača Vintage Festival", so I thought I'd give my attendants - who are still sulking about the weather - a little treat by taking them for an afternoon of tasting the region's (self-) acclaimed burčiak or "immature wine".

Of course it rained, although temperatures did climb - for a short period - to a downright tropical 12º C.

Slovakia's Small Carpathians region produces 0.3 % of the wine in Europe and most of it is consumed domestically although a little bit is exported, notably to Japan. I would remind you that David Hasselhoff is big in Japan too. Oenophiles in the area suggest that the best way to taste the local wine is to visit the private cellars of those vintners who started up their businesses after the fall of Communism. Instead, we took the #5 tram to the village of Rača.

I mentioned that burčiak is an immature or young wine - so young that, from a scientific perspective, it might be a little premature if not ambitious to even call it "wine". The wine - or what might be more accurately called "broth" - is, in fact, only drawn from its primary fermenters after about a week of fermenting. At this point, there's still a lot of yeast and sediment in the wine. Bottles of the murky burčiak sold at the festival - mostly 2-litre plastic pop bottles - proudly display a good inch or so of sediment at the bottom and "floaters". Don't ask me what those are.

Because of the high sugar content (remember, the wine is still fermenting), the wine is very gassy (just like my male bipedal attendant!), so you have to stop about every 30 minutes to unscrew the bottle caps - lest there be a burčiak explosion. In fact, it's been suggested that the etymology of the word burčiak is "explode" or "stir up". The other option is to finish your 2-litre bottle within that time frame - which I think lots of people do.

The wine sells here for just pennies a glass or about 2 to 3 euros for a 2-litre bottle but, after having sampled both the red and the white (yes, that is white wine in the above-right photo) what seems like an outrageously low price is actually quite reasonable. Certainly charging more would be criminal.

What are normally residential streets in Rača are closed off to traffic and booths are set up, so people can wander about, swig wine from bottles, stop to release gas from the bottles, and eat all manner of deep-fried doughy things, and lots of sausage. Although it only has an alcohol value of about 5%, the wine keeps fermenting in your stomach so it doesn't take long for people to get into the spirit of the new wine - the so-called "burčiak curse".

Some of my bipedal attendants' colleagues attend the festival annually and have learned to self-medicate with an anti-diarrhoeal before drinking. After trying both wines, I can easily believe that it does go right through you, which makes me wonder why I only saw 4 porta-potties the whole afternoon. Imagine: new wine and Imodium! I bet that never happens on "Beaujolais Nouveau Day".

After my 2 samples, I decided not to buy an actual bottle but took my male bipedal attendant's advice and changed my tipple to beer. Fortunately Budvar, the original Budweiser, from the Czech Republic was on tap. Unlike the American Bud - the self-styled King of Beers - its Czech forebear is the Beer of Kings. Which made it the Beer of Bears today.