Concert, hiking, caching and opera - another normal week!

Having closed my last post with the mention of my beloved violinist Kristóf Baráti with his 1703 Stradivarius called "Lady Harmsworth" you can see it and him below, just for fun! :-)

 

The concert was magical. The hall is pretty big, but he filled it with Bach, Ysaye and Bartok and my only complaint was that it finished too soon.  We managed to bully him into 3 encores, but finally he came out to take the applause without the Strad, just to hint at his reluctance to carry on playing for the rest of the night. I queued for his autograph in the foyer and he put it on the inside cover of my newly bought Ysaye CD which has since taken proud place in my Baráti collection on the shelf.

The following few days were spent in the garden and on the computer, plus watching TV. Sometimes I don't watch any TV for days, or even weeks, and then I have to catch up in a panic. A lot of my favourite US series are coming to an end and I need to be up to date.

The next meaningful event was on Sunday. I am in the process of putting together my next two or three caches and decided to go and recce a few forested hills in the nearby range as a location for one of them.  The sun was gorgeous and while Roy did come, he decided to have a nice snooze in the car while I charged up the hill to the top. I did find a lovely place, now I'll have to revisit it with Andor to check the co-ordinates on his GPS too plus get him try to find me some trace of a castle/hill fort, which I couldn't.  The name of the hill is "Castle Top". I can't imagine that there should never have been at least some earthen ramparts there in the past, but currently there is no sign of them.  I suppose forestation might have obliterated it. 

The village, where I have started my hike from is also worth a look, so hopefully Andor should come out next week and we could get up there to have a look together. After my 2 hour hike Roy and I went to a cute little country restaurant where I had some local sheep's cheese in breadcrumbs, which was beyond delicious.  And it didn't give me a tummy ache, which proves that it was completely organic and with no additives. Apologies for the lack of photographs, but I took them with my phone which since then had gone funny and does not want to download them. I am still investigating the cause, whether it is the phone or the software that has gone barmy.  Sorry!

On Monday I went to town on my own as Roy felt very happy in the village and didn't want to move. The first night's entertainment consisted of the annual general meeting of the flat owners in the block which is always good for some hysterical giggles, while last night I went to see Janacek's Jenufa, which was surprisingly good. Janacek is Czech and I have never seen any of his operas.  I think the only other one I have ever heard of is the Cunning Little Vixen, but I have not seen that either. I also had a really pleasant surprise as I entered the Opera House: they offered to all those who had tickets in the gods that they can go into the stalls and sit in the empty seats. Unfortunately I could not get hold of my friends, so it was only me who had this privilege.  I sat in Row 2 and had a lovely evening.

Jenufa in her wedding gown

Before this lovely opera, however, I had another enjoyable if ultimately painful experience. The weather was still bright, sunny and not very windy, so I invited Klari to come caching with me in town. There are still a lot of caches in town that I haven't got, so we had a go. It took us all day to do 6, but that was de facto 14, as four of the six were multis: one 2 parter, two 3 parters  and even a 4 parter.

The Roman Catholic Church

The old Synagogue

An 18th century little chapel

The Polish Church

These four churches are situated in a previously industrial district of the city and therefore were quite a surprise for me. I only knew the first one because I have been to an organ concert there some years back. The synagogue does not operate as a synagogue any more, but looks great now that they renovated it. The little chapel looks really lovely and I am so glad it is still there, almost in the middle of a road.  Finally the Polish church has a Katyn memorial in it and is acting as a community centre for the Poles in the area and that was very nice too.  We caught two buses to the next cache, as it was in a different disctrict.

Once upon a time there was a shanty town on the outskirts of the city which got demolished and replaced with a housing estate of fairly enormous proportions. The estate was built in four phases, starting in 1957 and finishing in 1980. The parks and gardens round the blocks have now matured and are quite nicely looked after in some places. Not everything is totally dereliction, vandalism and graffiti free, but on the whole the atmosphere of the estate was pleasant.

Klari sitting on a bench waiting for me putting the cache back after logging

Two of the four multis (one with 2 and the other with 3 parts) were on this estate.  We plodded slowly and successfully collecting all cache parts, except at the end we had an infuriating mishap.  This last bit was in a little forest at the edge of the estate.  The description said that it is hidden at the bottom of a treetrunk. As we were closing in on the location using the GPS, the silly gadget starting going barmy jumping all over the place.  Within 5 seconds it could produce 5 violently different readings.  I couldn't understand why, considering that there was no foliage on the trees yet, so reception had to be pretty good. Apparently occasionally it is due to sunspots or something as mundane as high power lines above that causes this.  It has done this before, but now I was furious, as all other parts of these two caches could be got with no or little reference to the GPS, but not this last one.  Looking for a treetrunk in a forest you definitely need your accurate coordinates. I was just about giving up when Klari spotted it.

An impressive building on one of the corners of the central square

The Western Gate of the central square

Beautiful hundred year old lyme trees along one of the wide avenues

And then we went to another, fairly nearby part of the city I have been meaning to visit for decades. It is a bit like a garden suburb with wide avenues, lots of parks and gardens and interesting style houses. It was built at the begining of the XXth century and to this day preserves its unique atmosphere. It was really very nice to walk about and find the 3 parts of the cache. The only downside to walking around there was the painful injury that I have suffered towards the end. We were walking along a narrow street with large trees whose roots often lifted the paving stones.  I was rather carefully watching where I was putting my feet, but all of a sudden at one point two sneeky dogs launched a ferocious attack with loud barking at us through the fence and this took my attention away.  I banged my foot on a lifting paving stone which then sent a shockwave through to my heel and all of it hurt a lot.  It was even swallen for a while, but thankfully it's settling now.

Finally this cute little castle complex was spotted in somebody's little garden while we were walking to catch the bus home. We have no idea whether this was created just for the sake of it or perhaps for a child.  It is only about 3ft high, but quite detailed, so it must have taken quite a lot of work. This was a very good, if tiring, caching day where I could log 6 caches and acquire a great deal of pleasure out of visiting and learning about new and interesting places and buildings.

This morning I caught the bus down to the village a new way.  Normally I come straight down in the afternoon, but today I tried one where I had to change and it got me home for lunch. The only downside of this one was the appalling state of the second bus I caught, so perhaps I will give this itinerary a miss in future.

A quiet week

Not too much happened this week even though we had days alternating between plenty of activity and then total veging out. We came in to town last Wednesday as I had a concert at the Music Academy. It was very good, even though I have never heard the pianist before. He played Beethoven, Brahms and Schubert, so his repertoire seemed on the safe side.

On Thursday I saw the pulmonary specialist and I have to have a CT sometime next month to have a closer look at something in my lung that is not very clear on the X-ray. Friday and Saturday was mostly spent watching TV and on the computer. Sunday, however, was great fun. A good friend of ours had a quite serious operation only about 6 or 7 weeks ago, but he started to recover so well that he invited all of us for a Hash run which he put out. Obviously he wasn't running and I was only walking too, but the weather was good and afterwards we went to a restaurant and had a very good meal and a lovely time. Even Roy turned up, which is unusual for him and he had a very good time too.

On Monday Roy and I went out to plan an orienteering course for next month on an island. The weather was less windy than on Sunday, but it looked like rain all day.  Thankfully, it didn't rain, so we have finished our task. Today we mostly stayed in, but in a minute I am off to yet another concert.  This time it is my favourite violinist giving an entire evening's entertainment on his own.  All solo pieces on a 310 year old Stradivarius, sheer heaven!!

A reasonably uneventful week

On Tuesday we got on the bus as left the city behind. It is amazing how quickly the spring can come when it decides. My good friend Andor has gone to the country himself with a few mates to photograph a lovely wild flower which looks a bit like a crocus, but much prettier.  He sent me this photo of it which cheered me up no end.

 It is protected, so they do not advertise exactly where it grows, but Andor knows. The weather has definitely improved this week and we even had a few lovely, warm(ish) sunny days. On those days we started working in the garden, which was really lovely.

Roy replanting some of my lemon balm

My chives look very healthy and sturdy

The rosemary is looking great. I wonder how big it will grow eventually?

One of the three oregano plants has survived the winter unscathed as well.

And even the rhubarb had got going this early.

The first task was to tidy up the herb patch.  We weeded it and investigated any winter damage.  Practically all the perennials have survived, although I am not sure what's the situation with sage.  Is sage annual or perennial? It looked dead, but I still live in hope that it will grow again from the root. Some of my perennial herbs, like rosemary just survive like a shrub.  Others, like tarragon, chive, mint and lemon balm die down but then grow from the root.  The sage looks absolutely dead, but we still live in hope.  Obviously, the annuals, like basil and parsley need planting again, but not for a while as late frost can do lots of damage.  The two lavender plants, one of them in a pot the other in the old cracked loo look as if they survived too. The next bit of gardening included planting the peas out.  The soil is like glue at the moment, so even digging shallow trenches for the peas was a struggle.  Finally we planted two rows of them and built the frame for them to climb onto, like they did last year.  Let's hope they will be successful again.

 In the meantime we had some excitement as well. One of our neighbours has a large menagerie of domestic animals, all of them for the pot, but they don't seem to look after them very well.  The ones that fancy a wonder invariably come up our way and the handsome cockerel above is a regular visitor.  This time I managed to take a photo of him.  However, the lovely white bunny rabbit is a new friend, we not only found her hopping around the car and in next door's garden, but judging by the large amount of little dark pellets in our barn, we obviously acquired a squatter. Thankfully a mutual friend came and caught her, promising to lock her up properly in future. After I put her picture on Facebook I got lots of worried comments about her well-being, but having been told about it I had to let my friends know that no amount of worrying is likely to save her from the pot! :-( 

Roy also set about some maintenance and servicing chores and now has two functioning lawnmowers and is in the process of servicing the tractor as well. There are few more chores to be done before we depart back to the city: thinning out the strawberry patch and replanting the young ones in the neighbouring plot, cleaning the pavilion, bringing out the swing and preparing the plots for the tomato and pepper plants that hopefully we should buy in the market next month. Some of our raspberry bushes that we planted last autumn show some sign of life, but not much.  As the winter was not particularly severe, I hope they are all alive, but we will not know for sure for a few more weeks yet.  The fruit trees all look alive, but, again, it's a few weeks yet before we can be sure.

Another concert, family history, geocaching, orienteering and an unexploded bomb

I know I have only posted 4 days ago, but so much happened since then that I thought I would try to be ahead of myself this week. I attended another concert in the Palace of the Arts last Wednesday, where a slightly off colour (obviously having the same lurgy as I had) Mitsuko Uchida entertained us with some superb piano playing. Both pieces were a bit new to me. First she played Schubert's Sonata in D major which was absolutely fantastic.  Somehow I managed to miss this sonata over all the years I attended classical concerts and it did not sound like a typical Schubert piece to me. Apparently it was out of favour with most pianists due to its length and technical difficulty.  Well Mitsuko Uchida managed it superbly and I enjoyed myself in the first half.  In the second half she played another piece I have never heard before, the Diabelli variations from Beethoven.  Now this I didn't like half as much as variations have a habit to end up sounding very samey in my view. 33 variations on a small simple tune, even with Beethoven's genius did not provide me with extreme enjoyment.  Still, all in all, we were quite impressed with Mitsuko Uchida, especially as she must have got out of her sickbed to come and play to us.

Mitsuko Uchida

On Thursday we went to the Jewish Record Office to do some research. We didn't find anything world shatteringly new, except an address for my grandmother in 1946, which confirmed our belief that she survived the war. Still, the place, date and time of her death and burial is unfortunately still a mystery.

And on Friday Andor and I got going to find 9 caches that we listed for the day.  We were going more or less parallel with the A3 hopping on and off the railway in the morning while doing the second half on foot, which was a bit unfortunate as that is when the rain started. Finally we managed to find 7, leaving the last two as we were both too tired and it started getting dark. The 7 included one in a park, one multi walking around in a nice garden suburb, the source of a pretty stream with big trees and sheep along it, a golgotha up on a hill, a stages of the cross on a forested hill and a few pretty views. This day was also a tryout for how strong I am for outdoor pursuits this weekend and whether my cold and cough would let me start orienteering again.  We covered something around 10 miles on foot plus the trips by train and while my toes, knees and hips were pretty painful by the evening I enjoyed myself.

The Golgotha on top of the hill

One of the large stream side trees

An Art Noveau villa in the garden suburb

The avenue of limes with Andor walking across

A chubby sheep making friends

Finally on Saturday I managed to get a lift and I departed for the first O event of the season. Roy, who has started to cough in the meantime, stayed at home. Having been unwell for most of the last three months I felt totally unprepared, but was still excited to go. Miraculously I came second on the first day and won on the second day plus overall. I suppose there were reasons for this: 1. some of my quality opposition ran up to W60 and 2. others only came on Saturday, but I still won overall, which is a brilliant beginning for the season.

1st day course with a few wiggles where I was at sea in the juniper jungle

2nd day which was slightly easier technically, but still very good

And now for the punchline: On Saturday I came home from the orienteering about 5pm and as I was getting out of my friend's car I saw a lot of police and fire people near the park on the corner and an ambulance arriving.  I completely forgot to tell Roy about it, but about 8pm we had a knock on the door and when we opened it we saw several young coppers who told us that we had a half hour to clear out. Apparently there was a wartime unexploded bomb in the park and we had to go either to a nearby school or to friends/family.  We chose one of our orienteering friends and spent the night there.  In the morning we found out that the bomb disposal guys found more that 20 explosives, which were not unexploded ordinance, but a cache of them probably hidden in either the Second World War or in the 1956 revolution.  They didn't actually say that, but Roy reckons that's what happened. It was finally at 2am when people could return to their flats, so we had a stroke of luck not to go to the school.  We are off back to the village either tomorrow or on Tuesday.

Postscript:

And when I was just about going to bed Callum rang.  He was playing silly buggers with his Star Wars electric toothbrush. He is a real clown and very funny! :-)