Kolya on 19/12/2011 at 19:06
So my neighbour is screaming at his son again, which I don't know if I can appreciate as the damn bugger keeps screaming himself all day. And that made me feel all christmassish in an Yvonne Parker way if you know what I mean.
So I thought we'd tell each other some Christmas stories to warm up to the season. Here goes... No wait, first a glass of gin.
Kolya on 19/12/2011 at 19:22
Okay, so a long time ago I lived in a town where around Christmas time there would always be lots of snow. Our way from school led me and a friend through a big park below and around the château that had once been built by some minor king as a country side folly. In the summer we would bike through all corners of this park and in the winter we rode sledges down the hill from the castle.
We planned to do that again that day when my friend pointed at some black spot a bit down from the path we were taking. You see we knew that park in and out, better than anyone I guess. But we'd never seen that. What had just appeared as a black spot in the hillside revealed itself to be a big black hole. Right into the ground. It didn't seem to be too deep and very new. We could see some snow and grass that had fallen down onto the stones below when the ground collapsed. Christ we were so wrong.
We separated and hurried home to come back only an hour later to do what every boy of ten years age would do: Investigate. We brought with us a rope and two lights. We fastened the rope to a nearby tree and climbed down, me first. First thing I noticed was that it was a lot deeper than we had thought. What we'd seen from above had been only the part of the collapsed ground near to the entrance. Soon the rope ended and I still hadn't reached the ground. That was the first time I thought about going back. But the climb hadn't been too hard so far. The stones I stood on were all actually hewn, so I decided to go down all the way.
When I finally found flat ground to stand on I switched on the light to look for my friend who came close after me. Only when he was besides me and had out his light as well did we actually look into the cave. And we were both stunned as it wasn't a cave at all, but some kind of huge cellar room, about 4-5 meters wide, 2 meters high with a stonebuilt arc from one end to the other. This was of course a great discovery and we decided that we had to go on investigating. So we did. As we slowly walked along we soon learned that it wasn't just a room but a tunnel.
Soon the small patch of light behind us had vanished and we were still trotting into the hill below the château. There wasn't much to see, some mushrooms here and there, spiderwebs of course but not very big. Otherwise it was surprisingly tidy and the ground was completely dry, consisting of stamped earth as far as I could tell. But eventually we found a stairway that forked from the main tunnel upwards. So we thought of course that this must be an alternative entrance and climbed it.
The stairs were very steep, there was no railing on either side and they went up quite a bit it seemed. So at some point my friend told me he didn't want to go any further and he'd rather go back. I thought that it couldn't be much further to the ground, but it was hard to estimate. Eventually he agreed to wait a few minutes for me.
I took the stairs with some more speed now only to find my way blocked by a door. I don't remember what kind of door it was but I definitely opened it, although only a small gap, before closing it right again. I ran back down yelled at my friend to run and we got back to the entrance and back out and away from that hole before you know it.
Kolya on 19/12/2011 at 19:37
Here's what I had seen:
A well kept parquet flooring, bright lights coming from a chandelier above, paintings on decorated walls and two people looking at me, like I was a ghost.
So yeah, it seems like we found an entrance into the chateau. The people I saw most likely were visitors or staff. And we certainly were not supposed to do that.
Of course me and my friend inspected the hole a few days later only to find it had been filled up with boulders and hard dirt. That's not quite the end of it though, because shortly after Christmas a story went around that small town which went as follows: Some clever guys had broken into the same château and stolen several extremely precious paintings - and gotten away with it! In all likelihood they had made it into the West and sold these paintings for millions. All because of the laughable security they had up there. Seriously.
<embed width="650" height="480" src="http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/aUyKdaNKHzo&rel=0&showinfo=0&hd=1&iv_load_policy=3&cc_load_policy=0&fs=1" />
Martin Karne on 20/12/2011 at 11:53
So I take it, you two weren't accused of stealing from commie motherland and didn't got sent to a baby prison camp and getting STASI indoctrinated, what a good luck, not to mention that you could've gotten into some real police troubles "there, more thieves! Get them, now!".
Kolya on 20/12/2011 at 12:24
Indeed. I still don't know if the others were there before us or after us though. Either way, why didn't they secure the place properly after the first time? Guess they didn't expect this to happen again so fast. Or the others took a different route and these events were completely unrelated. I don't know. Of course there was nothing in the newspapers about this, because you know, this kind of thing didn't happen in the worker's paradise.
The best explanation I have is that the responsible staff really had no idea what treasures they were guarding. Few people even had a sense for financial wealth or expertise on art. Most people were approximately on the same (low) level and even if you had some money, there wasn't much you could buy with it. So why would anyone bother stealing some old paintings, when having an influential friend high up in the party ranks was much more worthwhile altogether? The answer of course was the class enemy, the imperialistic bourgeoisie of the West. :D
Not long after that we moved to the West. Due to the way the state organised these things I didn't have time to say goodbye to my best friend and I never saw him again.
Anyway, who's got a Christmas story to tell?
demagogue on 20/12/2011 at 16:03
The most colorful Christmas time I remember is when I was teaching in Japan. I took a trip to Thailand over the break and joined an ad hoc tour group (all around my age) on a trek through the north in the mountains. I'm still in touch with a guy from Bogota now. We got to ride some elephants. (Ours was the troublemaker elephant; he kept pulling down branches with his trunk to scratch his head, but the branches were long and it just meant he was swatting us.)
Over Christmas eve and day, we spent it in an indigenous village. Everything was handmade, the cabins, some of their clothes, the lifestyle--but I did see a satellite dish tucked in the back of one place and one kid playing a gameboy. One woman pulled a chicken from the yard earlier in the day to literally eat later, chopping its head and tossing it in some boiling water to de-feather, but it made a good soup with the coconut milk and hot spices. Over Christmas Eve they were singing Christmas carols to *us* and did a cute dance.
After the tour, I went back to traveling alone or with a Japanese person I met. In Ayuthaya, there was a taxi driver that gave us a free tour; he wanted to be hospitable for some reason. But we bought groceries for him and went to his place for his wife to make dinner, and he played Imagine on a record so we could do a kumbaya thing, like three peoples in harmony, American, Japanese, and Thai.
I was in Bangkok for New Years, which was appropriately crazy, but I was happy to get out and go to Ko Lanta, the least developed and most beautiful IMO of the major tourist islands (that later got directly slammed by the tsunami), to do some scuba diving and two of my teaching friends were getting married on the beach. I was the only witness they knew at their wedding. They're Americans, but the ceremony was Buddhist, and we didn't really know what to expect. At one point he put a stick in a bowl of water and waved it at us to slosh water over us a few times. Then he tied a rope between the two couples. All the time chanting something in ... some language. They were barefoot and had a kind of tropical formal-ware tailored. It was all very cute.
It was a nice trip, compared to the reputation Thailand gets.
Martin Karne on 21/12/2011 at 14:53
I remember a time when Christmas was a magic period, full of ambiance and commercially exploited songs from Dean Martin, et all, in Italy Christmas can be more American than America itself, but I miss the days of youthful hope for a mysterious gift wrapped and boxed for us.
Anyway I'm digressing, it was a time of long gone magic, when one day in middle of the Christmas season a friend and me, walked over a hidden spot we knew as the
"roggia" (the water stream, a small stream), that was walled in our small village just outside the main city somewhere in Northern alps of Italy by 3 kms.
Once in a while we used to do some exploring around the place up and downstream, the main problem was that being walled between a small country road and some houses the access was supposed to be done a la
"Thief in the night" but in full daylight, back when we were 10-12 years old it was as late as we could hope for, around 5-6 pm (17-18hrs).
In one of our many excursions to the area, we promised our selves to go upstream as far a we could get (no climbing gear and ropes or anything so it was a rater limited chance), so as we had proposed so many times, we get climbing, higher and higher, until we reached a plateau were still was an unused Austrian outpost, a very small concrete cabin dating from before the beginning of the WW1, when the Austrian army had retired to their homeland for unknown reasons just before the war broke off in 1914, and left behind all of their sniper posts.
Luckily for us, that winter never had any snow so it was safe to go there in winter time.
Not having seeing the end of the day, at about 7pm we started going back to where came up, only this time we decided to switch to the other concrete sidewalk (very narrow and left in place in a few places alone), the other choice was to step near the rock walled stream bed, in anyway it was possible to keep yourself all dry because the stream was never huge and the bottom of the bed was "V" shaped, none the wiser and getting darker, we decide we're thief like enough to walk along the upper borders along the stone walls that were about 1meter tall (3 feet and something).
When we find ourselves at pointblank with the mouth of a shotgun and an old lady pissed off like no other, who order us to come off the stream and walk over where she is standing, then she starts asking "what are you boys doing in here near my house?", "we were just exploring around our neighborhood lady, please don't kill us!", and here is where time froze over waiting for our release from this amazon-witch-old lady trying to kill us for just walking around the stream, there was anyway to get off the hook?
Fortunately there is some spark of goodness in this old woman, and let us go to never see her again, this incident however didn't stop our future exploring endeavors, as we were saved by divine grace or some lapse of reason.
But for the time being though it was as much as getting close to death, at 5 cm (2 inches) of it.
Once the main threat was over, we kept going back home as nothing happened, like any other mindless boy of that age, ignoring how close to an unfortunate end we came back then.
Oh yeah, it was a nice Christmas and I did enjoyed my toys, thank you very much for asking.
;)
If you want to know it was a spaceship that made some sounds responding to movement.
If you really care about it, it was a Starbird by MB toys, and here is the video, as well a website for it.
(
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORtzJ3gZ5ho)
(
http://reflectionsonfilmandtelevision.blogspot.com/2007/10/retro-toy-flashback-68-star-bird-milton.html)
More on Austrian abandoned forts, sorry the only pictures I could find are this website or others are in Italian, just scroll down for some examples of forts and outposts, our finding was one floor with 2 windows and a door.
(
http://fortinorditalia.altervista.org/valsugana_cismon.html)
In here there is a picture of the walls surrounding the Roggia and the water fountain.
(
http://img811.imageshack.us/img811/8792/roggiaandfountain.jpg)
(new image link)
Kolya on 21/12/2011 at 23:58
What a crazy old dame?!
The pictures on that site are great, but the last one you linked doesn't work for some reason.
Martin Karne on 22/12/2011 at 00:07
Quote Posted by Kolya
What a crazy old dame?!
The pictures on that site are great, but the last one you linked doesn't work for some reason.
Dame? Wanna get some donkey slapping, boy?
:erg:
Kolya on 22/12/2011 at 01:54
I meant the shotgun lady of course! :D
Thanks for fixing the picture.
