The Bratislava Pálava - Part One of Two

Have you ever gone away on your holidays and bumped into a foreign head of state? I’d often dreamt of sitting next to Joe Biden on a pensioners’ day trip to Llandudno, finding Angela Merkel’s towel stealthily and strategically placed shortly after dawn to reserve for herself what had been my favourite sun lounger beside a hotel pool, or gripping onto the elastic waistband of the Speedos of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Hosseini Khamenei, as we dance a sangria-fuelled conga on the beach in Ibiza, but until recently none of these dreams had come true.  I suppose it happens to the likes of Emmanuel Macron all the time but it’s something that had never happened to me before. And then, as if by magic, I bumped into Emmanuel Macron in Bratislava.

It was a lovely warm evening towards the close of a hot and tiring day during which Priyatelkata and I had travelled by ferry downstream along the Danube from Vienna. We’d checked into our little guesthouse studio apartment near to the Old Town district and above Lidl, enjoyed a recovery hour with the window blinds down, our feet up and our eyelids down and we’d poked about with the posh coffee maker for the customary twenty minutes that are always required to get the first cup of coffee out of a posh coffee maker in any hotel or guesthouse arrangement in mainland Europe. With energy levels back up to somewhere slightly above half full we went out for a wee explore and to find something to fill a corner of our empty bellies. We soon discovered that it’s much easier to get a posh coffee from a waitress in a café than from a posh coffee machine in a guesthouse, and with the additional benefit of being able to simultaneously enjoy a piece of posh Slovakian cake. At the excellent Pasteleria combined pâtisserie and quirky artisan pottery shop (which I would have called a potisserie, had I been the proprietor) the waitress seemed particularly obliging and smiley but even more so when I put to the test my embryonic understanding of the local language. It seemed that I had got some of it right in that my ‘May I have the bill please?’ came across as ‘May I have the key for the toilet please?’ At least I had achieved a degree of success with the politeness bits. The situation was complicated further by the fact that the Slovak for yes is ‘áno’, pronounced as ‘aah, no’ which is also exactly how Irish people say no.

After a bit of embarrassed smiling and the generously tipped waitress bursting into a chorus of ‘I’m just a gal who can’t say yes!’ we stepped outside to get the latest phase of our adventure properly underway. The streets, we found, were awash with tourists with those cursed selfie sticks and/or alcohol problems so we headed away from the city centre towards a large park where we hoped to sit and watch members of the Bratislava public at play as the sun’s rays cooled from gas mark eleven down to a more comfortable four or five. But the park gates were locked and there were police cars and police people everywhere we looked. I thought back to when I was a kid and all that was required in those simpler days was for a park keeper to walk around for ten minutes blowing a whistle to indicate that it was time for park users to clear off home.  What a sad place the world had become! We followed the length of the park’s perimeter but there was simply no way in. So we found two nice, young, friendly looking police officers (the sort who don’t have big dogs or big guns or big spaces between their eyes) and asked them what was going on. They told us that the park was not open for public use that day because there were some French people visiting the presidential palace that backs on to it.

Priyatelkata, who is French, excitedly asked, ‘Ooh, is it President Macron?’

The young policeman, who seemed very bored, nonchalantly replied, ‘Ooh, that name rings a bell?’

‘Ooh, but so does Quasimodo’, I said in a poor attempt to appear to be knowledgeable about all things French.

The young policewoman sighed but gave a little smile as she did so, as if wanting to offend neither her colleague nor us.

Reluctantly accepting the situation, we walked a bit further away from the town to find a small public garden with a large statue of a former famous politician who nobody, apart from a few pigeons doing their ablutions, seemed to care about anymore. Being good tourists we sat on a bench and with our portable telephone apparatus we searched the worldwide web for a few answers. It told us that the famous politician that nobody seemed to care about anymore was Marek Čulen who had existed until 1957 but nobody cared about him anymore, hence the transformation of the garden from a place where people would meet to discuss Czechoslovakian politics to one where they would meet to discuss which Bratislava corner shop sold the cheapest vodka. The internet also told us that French President Emmanuel Macron was at that very moment meeting with the Slovakian President Zuzana Čaputová to try to sort out what the world was going to do about the ‘special military exercise’ going on in neighbouring Ukraine. We wondered if one day, way off in the future, Emmanuel and Zuzana too would have their statues erected in gardens littered with ice cream wrappers and empty beer cans where nobody cared about them anymore. Then we wandered off to find a shop where we could buy an ice cream of our own to take our minds off the shelling of Kyiv.

To our surprise there were no police officers in the ice cream shop but at the front of the presidential palace there were dozens of them. Some were heavily armed, some were chatting and smoking cigarettes and some (mostly female) were filing their fingernails and checking their makeup. Only the west Europeans amongst us seemed to be in any way interested in what was going on (particularly Priyatelkata, of course, she being French, of course) and as Monsieur Macron appeared from the grand front door of the palace to be driven away in a black limousine in the middle of a fleet of other luxurious large black cars we were able to take photographs of him without there being even the merest hint of the brusque voices of authority telling us that photography was forbidden. Security would never have been so lax where we live in Bulgaria. I remember once being shouted at by a law enforcement gorilla for innocently taking a picture of a nice shiny ornate sign on a platform at the Lion Bridge metro station in Sofia, and I’ve never seen it happen but I suspect that visiting dignitaries would be transported about the place in an armour plated Lada Niva in our country where being secure is considered much more important than being a bit flash.

When I said that I had never bumped into a foreign head of state before I was forgetting that on Easter Monday in 2016 I saw Irish President Michael D Higgins in Dublin. He was in the back of a big black car (again not a Lada) in the middle of a cavalcade of big black cars travelling along Bachelors Walk at the side of the river. At least I think it was President Higgins but it might have been the Reverend Timms who is the vicar in the Postman Pat children’s animated television series. They look so alike. I can never tell them apart.

Looking back at my photographs on another day, I realised that the image I had captured of the French leader leaving the palace also included the back of the head of President Zuzana Čaputová. So she became another name that I could add to my rapidly growing list. Perhaps it wasn’t so inconceivable that it would eventually include Joe Biden. 

We hadn’t seen the French Premier and his entourage as we travelled on the boat down the Danube from Vienna, possibly because he was swaggering about between decks with a noggin of grog and singing shanties whilst showing off his tattoos of very nautical things, or more likely because the Danube doesn’t flow through Paris. We felt sorry for him in this respect because we had enjoyed the journey so much ourselves, crossing not just an international border but also the place where the Iron Curtain was once drawn. On a clear day you can still see the runners.

If you'd now like to read The Bratislava Pálava - Part Two

Here's a link

https://www.abctales.com/story/turlough/bratislava-p%C3%A1lava-part-two-two

Image:

Every image I use is from a photograph I have taken myself. 

On this occasion - President Emmanuel and President Zuzana saying an emotional goodbye outside the Presidential Palace in Bratislava.