slovakia 2017

i have been many times in slovakia this year, you know? well, my mother is ill and this time i took care of her for one week. why? because my youngest brother and his wife, who take care of her all year, were 2 weeks on holidays in turkey ...

liptovska tepla

we have had many stops this time:

• bratislava ~ my brothers place. the funny stuff was that when i came the 
• dubnica ~ we met my cousin vierka for a lunch
• ruzomberok (rosenberg)
• lucky / kalemeny / liptovska tepla ~ i took a bath and filled up all bottles i had in the local thermal and healing spring in kalameny. let's hope it helped a lot ...
• einsiedel (mnisek nad hnilcom) - my mothers birth place and her sister's house was our 'base camp'. yes, we have met relatives, walked a lot in the village, cemetery, i met all my friends in the village pub (and wifi hotspot) each night ...
• spitzenberg mountain (703 m) ~ i've managed to climb up the spiky landmark for the very first time. i went alone as my mother have been up there in august during the yearly spitzenberg tour with music and goulash and she prefered to stay with her elder sister ....  i have seen many, many mushrooms and a deer in the forest. the mushrooms were much more photogenic than mr. deer
• schmöllnitz (smolnik) ~ my cousin renate lives here and we have visited the orthodox catholic church built by the victims of the chernobyl nuclear catastrophy (ukraine) who were moved to eastern slovakia
• lake uhorna ~ the ice cold artificial lake built by the mining industry some 200 - 300 years ago. anyway, i swum three times there. my dears, we have had end of september ... and water temperature about 13-14 degrees celsius. of course, we have also walked with my mother around the lake + drunk some tee / coffee or had lunch in the nearby restaurant.
• göllnitz (gelnica) ~ in the center of the göllnitz valley we have visited the eldest sister of my mother and an aunt of mine
• kaschau (kassa, cassovia, kosice) ~ my birth city and a place where we visited a doctor with my mother this time and of course my father, who still lives in kosice 
• bratislava again
• melk abbey in austria ~ we enjoyed to take a break from driving in this beautiful benedictine monastery 
• anger (bavaria) ~ small but nice

bridge SNP over the river danube in bratislava

my mother loves to go out in order to drink a coffee and to eat some cake - an easy to provide joy :o)

bratislava castle

ruzomberok (rosenberg)

thermal and healing spring in kalameny

countryside in liptov area of north slovakia

einsiedel (mnisek nad hnilcom) below the spitzenberg mountain was our final destination

inside the catholic church

watch out, spitzenberg - i'm coming up :-)

einsiedel as seen from the cross at the top of the spitzenberg mountain

deer goulash with family 

orthodox church built by ukrainian tschernobyl victims in schmöllnitz (smolnik)

lake uhorna

the block where i spent my childhood in kaschau (kosice). 

good-bye, dear mother ... i think i see you again soon

kosice / kassa /  cassovia / kaschau

R.I.P dear grandparents, uncle, aunts

more pictures here

eof 

dear mother ...

well, my mother is quite ill (alzheimer disease) and thus i try to visit her in slovakia as often as possible ... thanks goodness, she lives at my youngest brother's place in bratislava now. it is not only much, much better for her than staying alone in kosice, but also easier for me to reach them from munich :-)
well, i'm trying to sort my thoughts and to say something to my mother, but i do not think she is ready to listen / understand it as she is still captured in a situation which broke her vital energy some 10 or 15 years ago. dear mother, why can't you stop crying about the past and start to look forward? there is so much life in front of you which you could enjoy, but you are still looking back and not willing to drop the past where it belongs. relationships sometimes break apart, so what? no matter how hard it is for you what happened, you can't change the past. but you could change your perspective, couldn't you?
 ... more coming soon or never ... please find a great guidance for help to alzheimer patients by vera f. birkenbihl in her 13 minutes video (in german) at the very end of this blog post

bratislava, danube river park

bratislava castle

you can't stop the time or ignore reality, dear mother ... avoiding pictures doesn't help either :)

old meets young; the youngest gruber => OLIVER

we have many muslim refugees in munich now, let's learn s.th. about their background

mikulassky cintorin is an old german cemetery in bratislava, SK

river danube, bratislava

welcome to eastern slovakia:

pictures from the ukrainian artist curej (churey / tschurej)

the ukrainian church in smolnik was built by tschernobyl / chernobyl refugees

schmöllnitz (smolnik) in the carpatian mountains (karpaty)

the evangelic church in smolnik (schmöllnitz) in the region spis (zips)

catholic church einsiedel / mnisek nad hnilcom ... anyway, my family was evangelic

R.I.P grandpa + grandma

back to my roots, the city of kosice / kassa / kaschau

bell tower (urbanova veza) is a museum today. i have never seen this chapel opened in my whole life because of reconstruction before, but now:

this tower used to be my home the first 19 years of my life :-)

our next visit in bratislava, december 2016:

 ice skating with viki

 the blue church

christmas market 

my sweety and the alchemyst know a lot about happiness, don't they?
btw, so true and so difficult to apply 😃

more slovakia pictures: here

vera f. birkenbihl - wie hilft man ganz einfach und wirkungsvoll alzheimer geplagten? anti-alzheinmer und anti-altenheimer hilfe :-)

i'm so sorry for so much disappointment + loneliness you have encountered in your old age, my dear mother ... it counts probably for big part of your today's problems (reference opinion: harvard longtime study what makes us healthe & happy)

eof