September 18, 2003: Medieval Days

Archery Practice!

My palm pilot has run out of power, and I seem to have fried my charger so I am no longer able to instantly put up -- albeit fuzzy and low resolution -- digital photos. I will add some later when I get my film pictures back. . . but today, of all days, I wish I could put up some photos right away to illustrate what we did.

We drove to a nearby castle where the FSU students put on a huge medieval festival for us, complete with the kinds of things one associates with a renaissance fair -- archery and strength contests and paper making and juggling and candle-making and dancing and jousts and people dressed in awesome costumes. Each of the women had gotten a dress tailor-made for them by a local seamstress in a typical Medieval style (Why don't we still wear dresses with sleeves down to the floor? I think we need to bring that fashion back in…) so they all looked perfectly in character. The men, on the other hand, were wearing theater costumes -- crimson robes, yellow tunics, green capes. My favorite was Jan, in what I can only imagine was supposed to be a black monk's outfit -- a cape with a hood. Except that he is tall enough that somehow when he put on his hood he looked like Andre the Giant in The Princess Bride. I tried to express this to him, but none of the Germans knew the movie, which might have something to do with the fact that at the time the movie came out they were all a) ten and b) living in a Soviet bloc country. Without immediate palm pilot photos to put up right now, you're just going to have to trust me that the effect was mesmerizing.

How Andre the Giant is this???

I have this duck photo habit -- whenever I see ducks I waste an entire roll of film trying to get the perfect duck photo and then when I get home I am always so annoyed that I have 36 really bad pictures of really small ducks. I have a feeling the roll of film I took today is going to be like that. It's sort of all Jan, all the time, and I know when I get that roll back it will be pictures taken from far away, or as he's just moving out of frame, or from behind, all because I was convinced that one of them was going to perfectly illustrate the quintessential Andre-the-Giantness of him.

And, of course, I have now dedicated a duck-photo-like amount of space to him in this journal. But it is late at night, and I have promised myself that no matter what I am mailing in a manuscript of the Einstein book I was supposed to hand in two weeks ago (Yes, I've been working every morning while here. . . ) so must get to sleep. But suffice it to say that if there were photos you would see lots of Jan, and then you would also see me juggling and passing with the town "fool", getting really bored making candles -- after half an hour the candle was still only half an inch thick -- and, of course, most importantly slaying a dragon with a bow and arrow (actually I kinda hit the flames, not a body part, but that's close enough -- I'm sure if it had really been medieval days, there would have been some nice Andre the Giant guy who'd come along and save me. . . )