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“Parting Words from Moristotle” (07/31/2023)
tells how to access our archives
of art, poems, stories, serials, travelogues,
essays, reviews, interviews, correspondence….
Košice
By James T. Carney
[Sequel to "Budapest"]
We were met at the train station in Košice by Hack Boscovich, who was Merrill’s successor as the minder for the Americans in Košice, and by one of the fellows who worked for Hack (and had worked for Merrill before). They took us to a night club next to our hotel where we stayed until about 1:00 a.m. watching the Slovaks dance to American music. The Slovaks love dancing and will dance till all hours of the night. One of the mildly depressing things about this trip to Europe was to realize the extent to which all of Europe has become Americanized—seeing all volumes of Harry Potter translated into Slovak and CDs with parental warnings (in English) on them because they are made by rappers may manifest the supremacy of American “culture” but it is not a development that I particularly welcome.
Budapest
By James T. Carney
[Sequel to "Ljublijana"]
The next morning we walked around Ljublijana a little more, going off to view remnants of the old Roman wall that surrounded the original Roman encampment. Then we took the train to Budapest without even having lunch—something that we lived to regret since there was neither food nor drink during our eight-and-a-half-hour journey. (European trains are not very fast—or weren’t in 2004.) For the first two hours of the trip, we shared a railroad car with a young woman who was completing a degree in chemical engineering at Maribod, which is the second largest city in Slovenia, in the eastern part of the country.) She spoke excellent English and we learned a good deal about Slovenia.
Ljublijana
By James T. Carney
With all due credit to Bilbo Baggins, the title "To There and Back Again" will work for most travelogues, of which I am creating another to deal with our epic 2004 journey to Central Europe—the first time I had been back since the Curtain fell. I even made it to Prague for a few hours in between airlines so to speak but I was not able to locate my 1967 digs, which were right next to a Russian Tank regimental headquarters. (I always figured the neighborhood was pretty safe.)
This time my journey was to Ljublijana [Slovenia] (various spellings and pronunciations permissible), Budapest [Hungary], and Košice [Slovakia] (pronunciation), where I saw the rarest of all manufacturing operations—a USS steel mill that made money.
