Another eventful week (well in parts)

The guest mentioned in the last post has come and we had a lovely chat. He is English and lives in Szirak. He brought a lovely hot dip, some jam and a collection a jalapeno and other very hot little peppers. We have now tasted all but the hottest and they are lovely. He updated us on some of the Szirak gossip and we had a really nice evening with him.

The main event this week was my trip to Bratislava (see photos). Tuesday was the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution which signalled the fall of Stalinism in Czechoslovakia. My friends invited me to attend a demo organised by the Communist Party to protest against the hardships that the reestablishment of capitalism brought to Slovakia. It was nice to see that at least some of the Left is still alive and cicking in Slovakia. In fact, one of their slogans was: "The communists are still alive!" Needless to say that the core of the demo was male and over 60, but it was also very refreshing to see that there was a significant minority of youngsters from a variety of organisations taking part. The Slovakian CP is obviously slightly more enlightened than its Hungarian counterpart on the need to co-operate with other anti-capitalist forces when it comes to show its face on the streets.

At home I managed to teach myself how to make films out of my little videos and even how to burn them onto a DVD. Unfortunately Roxio is still a bit of a mystery to me, for the life of me I can't find the button "Burn" on my version, so I used Windows itself. A 4.7 gig disc took almost all my Canada videos, which is great.

The little Flip camcorder is an absolute gem. Its own software allows e-mailing of videos, irrespective of their length. Obviously, when you click on the e-mail function, what it does is uploading it to its own site and then send a link to it in an e-mail to the address(es) you specify. Brilliant and so simple even a technophobe like me can do it easily with no hassle. END OF COMMERCIAL!

Today we are off to pick up my new(old) phone and the extra protector for the car's back bumper en route to BP. We should stay there for a week or so, as I have Opera and theatre tickets for next week.