… and a Wedding.

If you are already married and therefore rightfully partial to the backdrop of your own ceremony, let me say that a close second will have to be the remote winey hills of eastern Slovenia. It’s shocking and worth so many words and photos and more words just because I had no idea that this existed where it exists. Bam upside your head gorgeous, and right feeling.

Every good wedding calls for scotch, even at 10am. So after breakfast the men of the village (well, about 5 of us) went to the groom’s room and sat with him, a finger of Bowmore in each glass. And there was much rejoicing. Suits were hung on the doortops with care, while the smell of lip balm and makeup filled the air. There was bustling and clicking, shaving and spraying, but not by anyone in our room. We had scotch, 15 year old scotch, and we had no intention of getting dressed too soon, just to seep sweat into nice suits on a hot, still Slovenian day. Besides, there was a groom to take care of.

I shaved my beard off eventually and raked the mole on my chin open, so I had another scotch while holding a reddening tissue to my lower jaw, smooth move baby. It stopped by the time everyone gathered downstairs in the bar hall around a monstrous table filled with meats and cheeses and twisted baked bread. Good thing. Tissue on the chin is a conversation killer.

Slovenian tradition calls for a wedding to occur on a Saturday, to have dinner and party, and for the guests to not leave the party until Sunday morning at sunrise. You do the math. Have you ever been to one of these?

I mean, there was the wedding, so lovely in the church. Then there was the procession along the road to our hotel, with a horse and buggy for the couple, led by a pair of slightly sloshed but good folk musicians, the accordian player especially swaying more than he needed. Once we arrived at the hotel a civil ceremony was performed outside, so both God and The Man had given their blessings. Oh and there was post-ceremonial wine passed around to all by the priest and then later by the justice of the peace. Then everyone walked upstairs to the hall for the great reception. To the background sounds of the increasingly sloshed accordian player in his dual role of verbose MC, we sat in lovely groups and began to eat, and this is where legends are made. We began with soup, then sliced elk meat, then a big salad, then a HUGE PLATTER of veal, chicken, elk, pork, and beef, enough for 8 people but intended for only the four people within reach, and we are talking massive platters, so four for a table of 16 people. Then we rested and out came the cake and deserts, and did I mention the cookies that were always there, and the water and the wine? Oh there were cookies, and oh there was wine. And after the dessert there came ANOTHER platter of schnitzel, baked and schnitzelled chicken and potatoes, and after that another soup, and finally, a wafer thin mint. We were like hobbits, with second dinner coming around 2am.

Basically, you eat in order to drink, and you drink to dance, you dance to eat, and all of it works in a circle until you realize the sun is rising and you are wide awake, and maybe even a little hungry again. At least one person failed to do the eating part of the circle and was a total mess. The rest of us were damn fine, and had a glass of wine at 6am to celebrate how cool we thought we were for pulling it off. We outlasted the entire Slovenian side of the family, but come to think of it, they had to drive home.

…Reunions…

I have carried precious cargo, but rarely the father of a bride in a rented car, and I didn’t break him nor try to, though I did stall the car a few times which he thought very funny, and asked if I knew what I was doing and offered to help. We needed a guide to get us to the city of Ptuj (pi-too-ey, yes, just like that) and John was born in a town just over those mountains over there, and perhaps we could also go there today he probed several times (but we didn’t, something about a wedding rehearsal at 5pm or whatever). He proved to be as much a tourist as the rest of us. So, I spent my first Slovenian day after my first Slovenian night (song cue) rummaging around a surprisingly perusable castle once the home of monks, then Romans, and finally an absurdly dressed line of German princes sent to look over their territory and collect cold cash from the poor, and to this I say PTUJ!

But by word of mouth all our party from the night before came to the same castle at different times, and soon the whole place was crawling with English-speaking people taking pictures, some of which were where one person will take a digital photo and then five other people will want the same photo taken on their own cameras, meaning five-times everything from the first photo. I understand why, but really, we all should get used to scheduling those photo-sharing parties for after the event.

That evening was the wedding rehearsal at the church 300 meters away from our hotel, with its magic aged tower endlessly peaking over a small chapel that can barely hold its artifacts and treasures let alone a wedding audience. All was normal until a few people quietly walked in on the rehearsal. It seems a well-known relic painting rests above the chapel altar, just behind the bride and groom now, and this painting attracts pilgrims in long caravans and large buses, part of a Relic Review if I may be so not-clever. The work is placed just perfectly so that, when the crowd of about 50 people finished trickling into the oh-so-very-small chapel, they seemed to turn to the bride and groom, gaze upon them with smiles, and sing lovely four-part harmony to them. They were far enough away, you couldn’t really see that their gaze and thier voices were focused just a millimeter above the heads of the priest and Margaret and Tim, and on the painting behind. So I stood at the door, checked for any stragglers, closed the church door again and quietly assumed that these were the all of Margaret’s Slovenian family members who couldn’t come to the wedding the next day, and just popped in to sing to them, and all of this made me and many of us smile. Tradition? Close family? No, after the song they all just left.

Back at our hotel, there was a very large room with a very small bar and several long tables. Stairs led to the level above it, a balcony ringing the lower room and sharing the tall wooden-beamed ceiling, the balcony running by the huge kitchen and ending at the entrance to a large hall that was already being decorated with flowers in white and soft green for the wedding reception the following day. Directly below this room, back on the first floor and opposite the tables and bar, lay a sunken room with brick ceilings resembling a wine cellar, except it was filled with solid old wood tables set upon old upright barrels or notched into booths lined with equally old wood. Along the walls were shelves, and on the shelves were various implements of farming that were as old as the land. Throughout our time in Slovenia we would be told the uses of every one of the tools or devices, which resembled tools of torture more than of the land, especially highlighted along the walls of this cold brick cave. But this night, our widening wedding party once again slowly gathered to fill the room and all the tables, with the last of the new arrivals dropping their bags and grabbing a seat, the bartenders busily shuttling into the cavern, the kitchen working late. Plates of pizza with a sunnyside egg on top, steaming buckwheat porridge in a heated crock, hearty brown goulash with mystery meat, wild boar with polenta, mushroom soup, long phallic sausages, and so much more came out and went down, to make room for more and more wine (again, from the hill across the patio) provided to us by the bride’s mom and dad, whose generosity to her daughter’s guests deserves more than just a mention in a blog. They flat-out took great care of us, thanked us way too much for making the long trip to Slovenia, and smiled at our satisfaction with everything in and around us. Tim’s mom, she was always smiling and stayed up way past her bedtime smiling every night to keep us “young people” company and out of trouble.

As the night continued, we realized that this was the first time so many of us had been in the same room in over a year, marked by an increase in the fluttering flashes of digital cameras, some with the ability to take movies, and all with red-eye reduction turned ON. The movies have been rated T, for teachers only. And with all the next morning to awake, eat breakfast, shower, shave (women too), lounge, drink whiskey, and try to relax the groom, with the wedding only a short walk down and up the vine-lined road, we all meandered to our various receptacles of sleep. Except for those few who had to call a taxi 20km away into our pitch-black heaven to drive them to the other two hotels just a few kilometers away. For those of us walking to our rooms, it was oddly OK to pass the taxi driver at the bar waiting patiently for his passengers, drinking his second beer.

Roadtrips…

My week and a half in Slovenia and then Munich was freedom, a great pause in the Great Film Project and a sweet and sturdy wedge filled with friends, plus a nice continuation of the life I had left exactly a year ago. It’s best said with picture accompaniment.

The autobahn was not as lovingly fast as usual, Germany rolling slowly by in raining grey from top to bottom, until we crossed over into Austria where the road signs turned a lighter blue and we entered the mountains. We met long tunnels south of Salzburg and all the way through the country, a highway contained in tunnels burrowed into the feet of tall hills, one after the other each no shorter than half a kilometer. The end of one left a half minute of daylight before the next hill towered above you, with fog falling from the top down its sides and through tall thick trees and lush untouched greenery, evaporating as the tunnel’s mouth opened and the VW glided safely through the mountain’s side and beneath its belly for another few minutes. This went on for a few hours and until we came across the signs for Graz, a city I thought may be in Slovenia, but it would be another few hours before we pulled up to a muddy wet river and into a gully that was the Slovenian border. No strip search, but definitely a passport check and our one word, “Jeruzalem” before we dipped into first gear, second and third gear, up over a bridge and into the former Communist territory previously called Yugoslavia.

The signs showed towns whose names we couldn’t help but butcher and we laughed at our naïve ignorance in the confines of our German auto, four Americans on their first drive into the heart of Eastern Slovenia, listening to Cher and U2 (aka, the BonoRail) on the radio. We won’t talk about starting in the wrong direction, because we never were lost. We will talk about finding ourselves creeping up a road pointed straight for our destination, then turning off the road at the sign we gloriously and triumphantly discovered pointed us to our own promised land (Jeruzalem), and then driving up a slow road arched by tall trees straight out of Marin county California. We crested the hill, emerged from the trees and saw a great sprawling valley before us stretched to the horizon miles around, a valley literally filled with vineyards terracing in all directions from the bushy green trees at the valley base and up uneven rolling hills to the top, meeting our road and the few old houses built next to it. This one road dove and rose up every hill we could see, one ancient path now paved with a few tributaries connecting everyone, the view on both sides showed only more vineyards, more hills, houses. Infinite flowers, natural and not pristine, everywhere, green lushness in every direction.
Where on earth did this come from? In moments we rose up a hill and drove past the church where Tim and Margaret would be married, and past the place we would eat that night. We came to one of the hotels and finally up and over around and down we arrived - via a hairpin turn that almost sent us tumbling (happily?) into another vineyard - at our hotel, settled also at the crest of a hill. All of this would be our environment and our home for five days, with all our old friends from Munich coming by this same road to this same rolling valley. And as we pulled up, Margaret’s mom came out with a big smile to welcome us to her country, and there wasn’t a sound outside the car except familiar voices laughing and the scrap of gravel beneath feet.

Dinner was a long table with many plates filled with bacon, pork, sausage, lard, bacon fat, veggies with spicy peppers, local mild onions and pickled artichokes, and bread, all home-made, home-grown, or home-cured. The wine in unlabeled bottles came from the kitchen in waves, homemade from the vines outside the window (“This wine comes from over there”) accompanied by natural sparkling water that came with its own carbonation from the ground an hour away, at a spring that Margaret’s dad wanted to take us to, badly. As long as you kept eating, you could keep drinking and mixing your sweet Muscat with the sparkling spring water. Eating is essential in Slovenia, because drinking is essential in Slovenia. Therefore, the food tends to be the kind that sticks to you, so you can unstick it again, with something nice like good wine. Highly scientific, highly civilized.

The house itself was a maze of oldness, with old wood lining every angle and crevice, an old bar in a nook and the opposite staircase that turned round behind the old stove which they still use to bake their bread. The other side of the stove was ceramic and heated the room behind it where we were told stories of how children would sit on it as the bread was kept warm below. The staircase rose higher into levels of small eating areas, all contained under an old wood roof with hatch windows that showed us the starry night and the quiet valley of wine dark and silent. A room off the highest level was a bedroom renovated but with a corner that still preserved its centuries old natural ground, with a natural dirt mound for a bed, and a sparrow that had gotten in through the window and was content to rest on the dirt. I refused to look for the bathroom and chose the edge of the vineyard, standing with a very principal character at my former job, acquiring a mound of teenie bugs on my back that I returned to the group with.  They appreciated the relieving story but killed the bugs.

Back down in the dining room, the cook / owner kept bringing more wine and the people kept getting louder and the music changed from the traditional to the inane to the radio to German drinking songs to nothing. Conversation. The table went from pristine and orderly to a slew of empty bottles and mounds of meat and bread. And digital cameras. Around it sat friends from Denmark and England, New Zealand and Ireland, the US and Germany, Canada, Switzerland, Austria, Italy and Slovenia, all connected not only by this marriage but from past encounters and old friendships. It was a night that made even the most subtle connections stronger just by our seats around this common table, in this small old room in this house which had stood for centuries on a hill above terraces of vineyards with a moon hidden behind clouds above. I couldn’t help but keep saying, “How cool is this?” and “Life is so f***ing good…”, or “I’m going to go pee again… no outside… I’m serious, c’mon..”

About one hundred hours later we realized that some very important people were not really wanting to drink or eat anymore, nor could they, so they were whisked away the 2 kilometers up and down hills in the dark to the three hotels, headlights working overtime in the pitch darkness to catch the details of slowly passing crops and hedges where animals might lurk, illuminating the road just a little late around the hairpin turns, all the way home. Safe.

Day 3 and Beyond

I can’t complain. I am being paid to work on a film set over the summer, a behind the scenes look at the making of a kidz movie, German style. I know that TON is sound, DREHEN means the cameras are rolling, PROBE is rehearsal, and the kids have to go though GARTEROBE and MASK before they sit around waiting for a few PROBE before beginning to DREHEN, at which time everyone should be LEISE, BITTE or else you will be shhshed at, perhaps even in English. It’s all interesting but takes a lot of waiting around on my part, waiting for the chance hour when I can drag one or both boys over to a table and sit them down in front of a Biology book. They are so overjoyed. And the fact that the other kid actors don’t have schoolwork to do sometimes kills these two kids. Too bad. I’m not here to watch you twerps work, I’d rather be knitting. Get over here and tell me about photosynthesis. And you ask me, Matt, do you know anything about Chemistry or higher maths or exothermic reactions, or um ANYTHING outside of English? And I say yes, because I read the books the night before and I look up the big words.

My first weekend in Germany had me moving hotels from the dorm in Isolatedville to join the young cast and their caregivers in a large Guest House 2 km outside a small village which itself is 4 km from the closest thing to a commercial village (read: has a train station with service to Munich, and a bank and a grocery store). The best things about this place were their functional international phone service and the lovely setting in the fields of nowhere. I made long, cheap calls to Munich, and in the evening to Canada and to mom and dad. With two days at the hotel alone and two days on the set (14 hour days), I had taught a total of only 2 hours, which stinks and drives a working man crazy, but it allowed me to settle into what I could expect in life both on the set and off. I found my bearings enough to borrow a car, remember how to drive stick, and get the business end of my movie job sorted out at another gorgeous small farm also in the middle of a corn field, complete with wireless internet and chickens running around, cats nursing kittens and a full production studio occupying the barns and stables. When in the middle of nowhere, the movie business finds a way.

I came to enjoy walking out of the hotel in the evening to see the deer grazing in the pen, flowers folded wildly into the front of farm houses, and the kind family that ran the farm and the restaurant/hotel. They would take their own time serving you, so eating became a ritual of listening for the door to creak open in the backroom, which meant someone was home, and then hoping not to hear it creaked closed again without them noticing that you were there in their restaurant with a menu in hand, waiting.

On set, I became accustomed to being inconspicuous and innocuous, moving in the shadows, trying not to get in the way or eating too much food. I did quickly meet some set people eager to speak English to me, camera and sound and costume people wondering what I was doing there, and I answered Teaching even though I was making sandwiches or wandering aimlessly or asking someone if I could help, in any way, please, because I was so bored.

I had a weekend off after 10 days, and I took the first train 2 hours to Munich, having packed the night before in total excitement of getting the hell back to my people and be reunited with all of our old friends loosely scattered all over the world to celebrate our friends’ wedding in the exquisite wine region of Slovenia. Our weekend in Munich was full of bike riding, our shrunken stomachs being stretched by lovely meat and beer and cheese, and memories around every corner, though we avoided going to our old neighborhoods for fear of tears and tight throats. Every day new people would arrive in Munich for the wedding, every night was another dinner with the bride and groom and their family, and every late night was back to the comfort of my friends’ empty house to rest my aching, out-of-shape North American body, sit with their cats, and realize, over and over, how much I loved Munich.

Now, the only reason I was even available to take this tutoring job was because I had a ticket to Munich for this wedding, so I changed my ticket to give me two months of paid work in Germany instead of just the two weeks of money-dropping vacation. So, after this weekend off I worked 1 ½ days on the set to earn some extra cash, and oh was I a restless, grumpy, demanding and ruthless teacher. Then, I giddily hopped onto an evening train to Munich with a beer in my belly and spent one night with cats on my head, the apartment now heavy with friends heading to the wedding, camping out on the floors. Thursday morning, as the rain poured and the fine couture carefully packed, I plopped behind the wheel of a rented VW Golf, directions in hand, and sped on the rainy autobahn past Salzburg through the mountains of Austria and into the winding unknown roads meandering through sparse and beautiful flat villages into Slovenia. 

Destination: Jeruzalem.

From a Pacific beach to a farm in Lower Bavaria, via Toronto and Montreal…The Bad News Bears Begins

Last time you found me here I claimed that I never rode the Giant Ferris Wheel though I did eat at the Wendy’s and poured tokens into all the driving games at the Marvel Comics arcade (complete with Incredible Hulk Black Light Mini-Golf, only $10 a round!), all on the sunny slopes of Niagara. But what of Toronto? And shall I say it was hot there? The fans were on overtime, the cats sat in strangely warm places, curled into a chair tucked under a table or perched on the tallest cabinet (they are so cool they can stand the heat). Maximilliam von der Stadt and Gretl von Boondocks only appeared in the apartment for one daily cuddle session, and then back to their hiding places. The mornings were good for cat wrestling. The humidity I could stand, this Californian had made enough trips to western Illinois in the summer to know humidity, but without AC, the great balancer, Toronto heat was rough, rough enough to force us into sleeping positions and places that afforded even the slightest breeze, and sometimes all the breeze was from our collective snoring. There were movies watched, bad TV laughed at, friends seen and stories unearthed, cold good food made (stove is off limits, except for desperation nachos), and lots of conversation between the two of us over wine and beer and water (the first two are pretty expensive in Canadia, but that doesn’t stop you).

Before too long Montreal was our destination, via Union Station. The cottage brought relaxation, and the company, jubilation. (endation) Nothing like sinking into a paddle boat on a quiet lake with friends lazily sitting on the floating dock behind you, to feel the lake beneath your body, nothing to do but pass the copious magazines and books, the suntan lotion, and the next beer, and engage in backgammon wars while shirtless and wondering what time it is may be. There were Wonder Woman flashbacks and various takes on Jenga which involved forgetting about building a stupid tower and just firing your spare blocks at another person’s spare blocks in hopes of breaking up their mess of blocks. And do you know Suger Pie? We do now. Best had with a good Islay whiskey. Poutin? Oh yes. Unibroue beer and “the white wheat beer with the white horsie on it”? Oh my, this is part of Montreal. All that and more, plus a family dog named Early (with the fat splayed-leg gait), as well as that great and growing feeling that you will be coming to this home and this family for a long time – that is Montreal for us, for me. We had been looking forward to meeting our friends there and at their cottage since last summer when we did the same thing for the first time. Isn’t it nice when expectations are totally blown out of the water?

And not long after, too short for this writer, he had to board a plane for the old land once called home, Germany, even though he had left that home to return to his oldest home only to giddily move to a new home, and now had to leave that home for a less-old home. So why leave home for another home only to come home? To work on the set of a great and powerful movie in the middle of the forest among people you don’t know who speak a foreign language and who know what is expected of them, and you don’t! Oh Yes! I can only tell you that we are working on a movie that I will call the Lord of the Flies, or as my friend Aimee suggested, in bad German, “Die Schlecht Nachrichten Bernen” and I am in charge of teaching two of the Lords (or are they flies, or bears) all the subjects they will miss in school as a result of a summer’s worth of starring in this movie in the middle of nowhere, etc…

I can tell you how it began, with the plane ride, beginning at midnight and ending six hours later, noon in Munich. My seat mate, some dude all in red next to me who didn’t know the meaning of shared space, arm rest and leg room included, but the poor guy looked more nervous than rude, so I let him have some of my legroom and while he spaciously dozed I would push him back to his side in his sleep. But opposite the aisle I saw a six-man heavy metal band from Toronto, each with a different version of bad hair, who were totally stoked to be heading to Munich and to France and to be getting the whole thing paid for and yeah-shit-ohmygod-dude yes, like where are we playing again? All night. And they watched all three movies, The Shaggy Dog, The Pink Panther, AND The Jennifer Aniston Latest, and yes I tried to sleep through all of them and couldn’t.

In Munich, I began to see all those memories of living there and my heart began to ache just as my head and body were sore from the night’s adventures. I didn’t have time to hang out and think about it all, I had much to do before sundown, including finding friends, downing a liter of beer and a having a lovely swim. When you leave a place you love via a certain route, and then come back to the place with good memory and the route totally set in reverse, it’s quite an experience for the heart and mind. Except that you are not with the people you were with the first time. The people change, not the place. It’s the people that now make my heart ache. Some are missing from this tableau, and I wish they were here.

The next morning I hauled all my baggage in the sun to a spot to await the driver to take me to the far east side of Germany, where the film crew and sets and children awaited, about a 2 hour drive through small villages, rolling grassy hills and rows of wheat and corn. Then I was tossed with luggage in the smallest of all villages, the car drove away, I was showed my dorm-like room and small television, and I was alone in the German language.

So began the survival skills. First, work. I tried the room phone, it didn’t work and needed someone at the front desk to connect me, so I follow instructions and the line goes dead. Go to front desk and there is no one there, no one in the hotel. Go onto the streets, still no people among the quaint European village surroundings. Grabbing handwritten map of town in the room under the phone, I go in search of Phone and Food. Find phone, call the film company for instructions on what to do, and call back again when money runs out. Then I find from my boss (first time I’ve ever talked to her) that I am free for the day. Second: I call Dot, and I run out of money again. So, now to find change. The town seems to be closed, and as I explore the cobblestone streets that turn around old homes and a church and a few businesses, I discover that the whole town is closed. The map says there is a gas station, which must be open, so I wander out of town and find it, where two small girls are running the front desk. Third: supplies, I buy a phone card because my German is so bad that I am informed that this may help me make phone calls (you need a cell phone first), but buying this useless card gets me the most small change possible. Quickly in the heat I am off into another far little corner of the village and into its closing supermarket to search barren shelves for bread and cheese, my dinner. Finally it’s back across village to the hotel to take a long awaited shower, eat, and to notice that Once Again It’s Only CNN, damn, but I wonder where in the world I am and where everyone else could be… the people I left in Toronto and the people I am to work with in the movie bizz. At this point the sky is darkening, and still no one on the streets, and my loneliness is pretty harsh, and damn I am tired. But I arise to get back to my new routine of walking to the dimly lit pay phone booth, which greedily eats my accumulated pocket change as I count down the time left in another phone call to Dot…hang up sadly, and then… all is dark, the phone is dead, and I am broke. I wander to the hotel, no one is there still. I walk down a different street, and I get out of the town hoping to find SOMETHING open to get more small change to call someone on the pay phone to ease my loneliness and find to my lovely surprise a little restaurant whose outside garden still looks open, illumined by Christmas lights left up all year. I ask the mysterious waitress in German if the kitchen is still open, and she answers in English that I can have only (my old favorite) a brotzeit teller, so I go WHEE! and I get to sit down with beer from the tap in the cool night under dim lights. But still, all alone. Did you see 28 Days Later? And after Toronto, I didn’t want to be alone like this. Anyway, just like me, after my first Bavarian meal, when I had paid up and the colored lights of the open garden had gone off behind me as I was walking the moonlit streets, I checked my pocket and forgot to get small change money for the phone. I could talk to everyone in North America now, but I forgot to get kleine geld. Just so you know, to paint the picture even worse, I couldn’t sleep, and walked the streets for a sign of life and small change. I remember purposely standing under the stars in the center of town, no one around me but large lit buildings, the cobble stones beneath me are foreign beauty but damn them! and I felt as flat as the crushed pidgeon roadkill buzzing with flies a few feet from my feet.