Friday, December 10, 1999 (Bratislava, Slovakia)
At last, an easy day in this trip. The one wrap-up meeting was scheduled late enough in the day that there was time for a drive out to the city of Piešt'any and back. The main attractions of Piešt'any are its spa and thermal springs, and much of the economy there seems to depend on them. I tried some of the supposedly curative mineral water, but it was so sulfurous that it tasted like eggs had been boiled in it. I guess I'm thankful there wasn't enough time to indulge in the supposedly equally curative mud baths -- the stuff is mildly radioactive and I'm not ready to spend the rest of my life acting as my own night light!
# # # #
Those of you who read my closing comments
with its travel diary excerpts (like the one above) in Mimosa 24 know that my
real-world job, as an international trade promotion specialist, usually takes me to
Eastern Europe once or twice each year. Even though my hosts over there do take
every opportunity to allow me to experience their countries, these trips are intense
-- there's often not time to do much after a long day of business meetings except
write a few postcards to friends and collapse into bed.It eventually dawned on me, with some
insistent nudging from my friend Guy Lillian, that I was really missing out on
something by not trying harder to find and meet some of the science fiction fans who
live in the places that I visit. Even though I do know some fans in parts of Poland,
Guy was mostly right; in all my many trips to Bratislava, for instance, I'd done
nothing whatsoever to try to locate the local fan club there, much less try to
attend one of their meetings.
So when the time came to prepare for my trip
to Slovakia and Poland this past December, I decided that this time it would be
different. I'd met and enjoyed the company of fans from Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Japan during Aussiecon; this trip
to Eastern Europe would finally be the time I'd get to meet some of those fandoms,
too.To my surprise, it turned out easier to do
than I thought it would. The day before I left home, I was able to get the email
address of Martina Pilcerová, a member of the Bratislava fan club. I didn't
receive a response from my query to her about meeting dates and places before I
arrived in Bratislava, but luckily there was an Internet café not far from
where I was staying, and by the time I was able to access my email one evening, the
response was there waiting -- it turned out the meeting was going on that same
evening in a bar/restaurant just a five minute walk!
It was a very pleasant meeting. I'd only
intended to stay about a half-hour, but the conversation was excellent (as were
several large glasses of Slovak beer) and we ended up closing the place around
midnight. I was surprised that many of them had fairly specific knowledge of North
American fandom, though not of many individual fans themselves. And I was even more
surprised to find out that in spite of the disadvantageous exchange rate between the
Slovak koruna and the U.S. dollar, some of them had previously been to the United
States. Martina had even attended two previous North American world cons, and was
planning ahead for Chicago! By the time the evening had expired, so had most of my
preconceptions.One other thing I should mention
about Bratislava fandom is that they are very committed fan publishers! They have a
very slick-looking Slovak-language magazine, Fantazia, edited by Ivan Aleksa,
that seems a combination of Locus, Starlog, and F&SF... and
maybe even a little bit of Mimosa as well. There were manuscripts of some of
the articles they were considering for their next issue spread out on the restaurant
table when I arrived for their next meeting two nights later. It was easy to see
they were having a good time being trailbreakers; Fantazia is presently the
world's only Slovak-language science fiction periodical.Poland is a much larger country than
Slovakia in terms of population, so you'd expect there'd be more fans and fan
organizations there, too. And there are. There are so many, in fact, that even if
I'd had several weeks there, I might not get to meet with all of them. My December
trip took me to Poland for only four days, so I really had time for only two
meetings, one in Warsaw and one in the southern Polish city of Katowice.
I'd previously met some of the
Katowice fans. One of them, now the Director of a large design engineering
institute, had been part of a delegation of Polish Energy experts I hosted in 1990.
And we didn't discover that each of us was a science fiction fan until a chance
remark in a breakfast restaurant in Owensboro, Kentucky, after more than a week had
passed! (But that's another story.)The Katowice club also publishes fanzines
(including an English-language one!), and is a bit eclectic; their interests seem to
include everything from Tolkien fandom to "Let's party!" And it's also one of the
more well-known and visible fan groups in Poland; they have their own clubhouse
(something that only a few SF clubs in the United States can boast) and one of their
members (Piotr Cholewa) is the leading translator of Polish science fiction.
Warsaw is by far the largest city in Poland,
and it also has the largest fan community in the country. I was told by Magda
Zórawska, one of my fan friends in Warsaw, that there are several different
fan clubs in the city. Unfortunately, I didn't have much of a chance to talk to
very many of them the one night I thought I'd be free; that's one of the perils of a
business trip. But they were a cheerful group, and insisted I stay at least to
drink a beer with them; it was an offer I couldn't refuse.When the time comes to go Eastern Europe
again, I don't think I'll need any more reminders to locate other fans. It's an
enriching experience that I can recommend for anyone. I know it was for
me.
Title illustration by Sheryl Birkhead
All photos by Rich Lynch
