TRAVEL DIARY

A weblog regularly updated by Jodi Rose.

Saturday, July 15, 2006

2:21 PM
Posted by jodi rose

I met two very attractive young Danish girls who are world champion bridge players in Bratislava the other week. They laughed when I expressed surprise, and told me that playing bridge is actually quite sexy now. Well, who woulda thunk it? Guess I had better get my mikes out again, and it gives me a chance to quote the immortal Mae West, who said:

Good sex is like good bridge. If you don't have a good partner, you'd better have a good hand.
Mae West

It,s funny - sorry I lost the apostrophe on slovak keyboard and haven,t found it yet - people keep acting as though I have done something amazing by coming back here. What are you doing here? they ask first, and when I tell them I come back for a summer holiday, as everyone told me it was so lovely and I promised I would, they are surprised and say in wonder, its so great that youre here. Really, like some kind of incredible accomplishment.
With that and my native english skills, I feel blessed.
Very cute, like the daughter of the music school headmistress who greeted me effusively at the pub the other night- I couldnt quite remember who she was at first - now we arrange to meet at the stage on the small danube in Esztergom for a concert by the Budapest Jazz Orchestra. Last night saw Andrea playing accordion with tango dancers and singers, and a fabulous Klezmer band from Bratislava.

Visiting the Shaolin Temple the other day was lovely. The monks were standing around playing ping-pong, no kung-fu demonstration just then. Dobogoko means beating or thumping rocks in old Hungarian, and as I mentioned earlier, when the Dalai Lama visited he spoke of the place having special lei line energy and being the beating heart of the world. Wandered into the tiny stone arch wine cellar which is now the temple, and had to sit quietly for a few minutes with very powerful vibrant sense of peace.

The next evening I saw a film purely for ewan mcgregor - he could read the phone book and I would be entranced - a thriller called -Stay-. The entire summer movie program here is all thrillers, but its good to see alternative genres I guess. Than romantic comedy I mean - must get onto Audrey and her lending library again.

Anyway, the film opens with this incredible sense of claustrophobia, and sound that was so like the alien squeaking on batman bridge, it shocked me. You see wheels spinning and cables flash past and realise it is some kind of car accident, on a bridge.
I was hooked instantly, wonderful mosaiac collages of bridge cables superimposed from different angles with a deep dark blue. The story built a sense of dislocation and unreality very subtly - noticed people dressed in matching clothes at odd times, and then scenes repeated for no apparent reason, until you start to realise there is something going on with parallel universes or time-space continuum stretching and reversing. Striking editing transitions too, with one face or shoe cutting into a completely different scene, but left you wondering if that person was real or a ghost or alter eog facet of themselves.
Not to spoil the plot, which continues to build an eerie feeling of haunting or hallucination until the final denouement when the space between the cables on brooklyn bridge is shimmering with pulsing light and energy zapping from them. I was literally agape, staring at the screen as images from ideas about the bridge as a place of transcendence and lifting of the veil between worlds played out on film. Wonderful. Completely turned my head inside out.