How to change your currency

Have a big party, give away stuff, and play music.

Slovakia is giving up the crown and adopting the euro on 1 January 2009. You can already pay just about anywhere in Bratislava in euros. Lots of Austrians and Italians do. And this weekend they're throwing what we think may be a countdown party in the Bratislava Grand' Place (Hlavné námestie). Today they were giving away stuff: conversion tables, pamphlets, brochures, highlighters, and tape measures, which were also a kind of euro-crown conversion tool. Then you invite what appears to be a gingundo local pop star, Jana Kirschner, who is my new favorite Slovakian singer. Here's a sample.

Visit Bratislava. Now!

"Gunner," a retired Navy warrant officer colleague of ours, is about 20-40% accurate with anything he tells you. He's right just often enough that you can't even use him as a negative barometer. (Curtis knows who and what I'm talking about.) But one thing Gunner was right about is that Bratislava, Slovakia, is a cool town. It's just across the river from Vienna, so it has excellent pastries and coffee. It was ruled by Hungary for 900 years, so the food is good, if a bit "sturdy" in the German mould. It was actually the capital of Hungary while the Turks were knocking at the gates of Buda and Pest, so it has some great architecture. It was joined with Czechia for almost a century, so the beer is good, yet at the same time it has its own strong viticulture tradition. It's smallish (half a million) and has made great strides in repairing decades of communist neglect. The old part of the city in particular has really been fixed up. And it doesn't seem to have been discovered by too, too many tourists yet. But you might want to hurry to get here before they do, because the Slovaks are working hard to attract people.

Some scenes from our first full day:

Slovak teen idol singer.

Slovak C&W singer. Even better than the teen idol.

Slovak mounted police.

Across the street

It's a small field: one bale.

The Girls of SHAPE

No, it's not a Playboy spread. I could just as easily have labeled it "The Boys of SHAPE." And actually, it's more about uniforms than the soldiers in them.

There are 26 nations in NATO and more than that at SHAPE (Swedes and Irish in the EU mission, for example). The easiest way to tell them all apart is by their camouflage patterns (all the ground troops tend to wear BDUs or ACUs or whatever they call their battle gear). You wouldn't think there'd be so many, but there are. About the only dupes are the Croatians, who are not yet full members but have tons of personnel at SHAPE and who look like they bought surplus fabric from the US Air Force.

The French uniforms are, as you could probably have guessed, very nicely tailored. The trousers for both the women and the men have darts in the waist so that they all fit very tight--much to the delight of all the girls. And I have to admit that the little blond lady capitaine isn't exactly what you'd call ugly. The French also take the prize for dumbest uniform piece: a wrap skirt for the women.

And speaking of women's uniforms, the first time we saw the Czech girls, we thought they were in civvies, their uniform skirts are so short. (Not that I noticed, of course. Other people pointed it out to me.) And they don't seem to have a standard shoe; most of them wear strappy sandal type things--cute but definitely not your grandmother's combat boots. Actually, it seems like lots of countries don't really have a standard for female footwear because many of them get to wear far more stylish shoes than the US girls, who do wear combat boots.

Hautrage en fête

Party time in our little village of Hautrage. It's the ducasse, the annual feast of the patron saint. I have no idea who that is, because as is often the case here in nominally-but-not-really-Catholic Europe, the party around the saint's day has eclipsed, or even replaced, the religious component. But for what it's worth, the village church is Saint-Sulpice. This is a picture of the tiny carnival that now fills the Grand' Place in yesterday's rain.

And here's one of today's antique tractor expo. Lots of models from 1956 and 1957, which I figure must mean that harvests (or subsidies) were better than normal in 1955 and 1956.

For the serious language geeks, ducasse is a Belgian and northern French usage that is a corruption of the word dedicace, meaning a dedication or consecration.

Why they still kick our butts

On one of my trips to Germany last year I saw the end of a kids' soccer practice. And the little guys didn't just run out to Mom's van and jump in. Almost every one of the little dudes hopped on his bike and pedaled home. I figure that must have something to do with it. (Good thing for them, though, that soccer doesn't involve much one-handed throwing.)

And we think Texas can gerrymander

Well, it can, but for sheer complication of borders, check out the town of Baarle-Nassau, the Netherlands, Baarle-Hertog, Belgium. Not only is this a piece of Belgium inside the Netherlands, there are bits of the Netherlands inside the bits of Belgium inside the Netherlands. According to the wiki entry for Baarle-Nassau, it goes back to some political horse trading during the Middle Ages. The entry for Baarle-Hertog (that's the Belgian part--you folks keep up!) gives slightly different numbers for the parcels.

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Why we like coffee in Belgium

A picture that doesn't really need any explanation.

Why I microwave my beer

The US Army believes--and rightly so--that no American should be without a honkin' big refrigerator. So to make up for our little freezerless Belgian, the Army loans us a US model (a big shoutout to all you taxpayers). The only problem is that it has only one temperature control for both the refrigerator and freezer; so to keep our ice from melting, we have to keep the refrigerator way too cold for our Belgian beer. Which is why I microwave it for a few seconds, to boost it to proper serving temperature.