5 best Christmas markets in Europe

the best tour of Prague isn't actually a tour

The hordes of Chinese sweep past, followed by the Russians, the Americans, the British. Gobs of single-ethnicity armies positioning themselves for better sights, better shots, each led by some embittered Czech, or expat perhaps, holding an umbrella high in the air, waving it around in circles, marshalling them onward, onward, onward! And they follow, mindlessly, thoughtlessly, carelessly, those lagging behind scoped out by the derelicts and ne’er-do-wells, hiding in the corners and near the beer stands of Vaclav Square. Up Na Prikope, past, around, down Myslbek, or any other nameless alleyway, towering sentinels of Baroque and neo-Romanesque and gargoyles and angels leering down at the masses. In a group one can never be truly in the city, bound by the authorities of the tour leader. You can’t linger long, you can’t skip through what’s interesting, you're bound. 

There, behind the trdelnik stand, lurks a ne'er do well

You're bound by the umbrella. The Segway. The bicycle. There are naturally benefits to any tour, but the real adventurer, those like myself, mock such contrivances. I will not be hedged in. I will not be defeated in my conquering of the city. But I do hours of reading; reading tour guides, history books, Wikipedia, whatever I can do to discover the city in advance, though I still manage to miss a lot.

There is another way though.

A couple of months ago, someone sent me an email from the contact page on my main site. They were working for a new startup.

Old Town Square in Prague. Don't buy beer in a café here, but in the street.

Just in the same way a museum has an audioguide, they were working on developing audioguides for cities. What are cities but great big outdoor museums anyway?

And wouldn’t I like to write and record an audio tour for Prague?

Why not? 

One that let's people follow along at their own pace, stopping when they want to stop, lingering when they want to linger? And even they can stop and wander off midway through and pick it up the next day?

One of the best views in Prague, 360 degrees around.

The route I chose wasn’t anything edgy. Just the route that I would want, first coming in to Prague. The King’s Road. The old coronation trail that the Bohemian Kings followed down, from one end of old town, through the old main road, across the medieval bridge, and up to the Castle. And the Castle is not necessarily something easy to find. So, I spent some time researching the more notable things and then set to work.

The process initially took a long time. I had to first mark the places on a map to coordinate the GPS triggers, and then write about each place. Their editor would then add a few notes, or question for clarity. Then back to me and then finally, after another approval, it would be ready for my sweet and sultry voice to vibe it out on the ribbon of the mic.

And there you have it, the final product.

Charles' Bridge

Now you too can have a super cheap audio tour from yours truly, guiding you through the Prague old town, telling you where not to get beers, where you can buy the best trdelnik, and find one of the best views of the city. And it’s like I’m right here with you.

It’s a brilliant concept really, and after trying it myself, I’d have to admit that my tour is awesome and highly recommended by the most trustworthy of judges of my work. And you'll lose 30 pounds and get a million dollars in a month. I promise.

Now, when I have guests, instead of giving them a personal tour for the thirtieth time (for me, not them), I can just have them download this excellent piece of bohemian Bohemian guiding.

And it’s all available just below. Along with some other off-the-beaten track routes in Prague, and other tours in cities across the globe. Bonus points are that you don’t even have to be there to do the tour. Instead you can just listen to the whole thing from the comfort of your home like a true armchair adventurer. There's no shame in that.

Here it is:

And welcome to Prague. Or not. Maybe even welcome to your armchair. But either way, you should grab a beer and send a "na zdraviye" my way. 

we are cocktail legion

An anonymous drink

Anonymous is many things. He’s a writer. He's possibly Shakespeare. He’s an artist. He’s that public masturbator that lives down the street. He’s an internet activist group. He is that guy who got arrested for revealing the identities of a ring of rapists.

Anonymous is also a coffee shop in Prague.

And a bar.

The coffee shop, near IP Pavlova, is one of the more uncomfortable places to sit with a computer, since all the seats are made of wood pallets and are about as comfortable as an introvert doing an unprepared stand-up comedy routine. Thus kind of defeating the theme of borrowing from an internet hacktivist group when you can't comfortably sit around on the computer. They do serve some pretty great brew though. The bar and the coffee shop are owned by the same people, and it shows in the standards and service of the staff.

But I’m not writing about the coffee shop. I’m writing about the bar.

We decided randomly with a friend to go for cocktails. I’ve been having trouble lately finding “classy” places to hang out that are still somewhat edgy, since mostly I just choose dive bar locations with questionable toilets. Toilets that either aren’t there, or that when the door opens, there’s not much else but for the entire bar to cheer you on. When I was prompted last year by a friend to go to a lounge, because he was there with his girlfriend, I couldn’t think of an appropriate place. “Nope, this one smells of beer, this one of vomit, this one of vinegar.” It’s a hard knock life, my friends.

Anonymous Bar at Michalska 12 then made the list of possible places to take out-of-towners who aren’t in for a rough night of drinking cheap beer. Cheap beer in Prague, mind you, is still better than expensive beer in 99% of the countries of the world. And ironically, that expensive beer is usually cheap Czech beer. Anonymous fit the higher class standard of being a cocktail bar and my standard of being a slight bit unusual.

The place is certainly classy, and weirdly extreme on good customer service. I almost felt offended, as I’ve been living in Prague for so long that I’ve come to see bad customer service as polite. All of these “hellos” and “good evenings” while passing the service staff almost seemed excessive, as though they were mocking us. But fine. They are legion. What am I to do?

Hideout of the Legion

The interior is a bit of a cross between what I imagine Kanye West’s house to look like and the set of the Nine Inch Nail’s Perfect Drug video. In fact, I think this was their primary motivation in design. The furniture were huge red lush old fashion arm chairs and couches, the ambiance dark with some soft electronic music going and on the wall a large sort of graffiti art interpretation of the Guy Fawkes mask. The music was nothing aggressive, just on the background, drifting along so you don’t have to raise your voice for conversation. The menu was full of weirdly named cocktails, the fun stuff of any cocktail bar. I got the 100% leather, which was a basic Manhattan with a shot of absinthe. My wife got a drink served in a syringe, and people at other tables had drinks served with toy guns, kaleidoscopes, and any assortment of novelties.    

The staff, as I said, is exceedingly friendly and quite knowledgeable on cocktails. My friend was bent on trying to stump the waiter, shooting out names like Witches Left Tit and the Vespa from the James Bond book, not the movie one, and the waiter was on top of the game. The drinks were expertly crafted and presented, with the waiter donning a Guy Fawkes mask as he serves the drink to carry on the namesake of the bar.

Getting our drinks

The place isn’t cheap by Prague standards though. The cheapest legit drink on the list is 175 crowns, or roughly 7 USD. Which, in the US that’s really cheap for an amazingly mixed drink. In Prague, well, that’s about 7 great beers. It’s a sacrifice to heavy drinkers like myself, but a worthy sacrifice. Now if only I could convince them to host an accordionist singer-songwriter like myself and pay him in free cocktails...   

In winter, it's highly advised to book seats. Call at +420 608 069. 

a dessert of dreams

The trdelnik "chimney"

There was a great disturbance in the Internets when the monster of pastries in the picture was released the other day. Cyberspace exploded and the shockwaves passed through the comments section of many silly tourists thinking they know the true history of the thing. “Oh, that’s so common in Budapest and can only be found there!” said one. “You can only get those at Christmas in Vienna!” said another. Well, I’m here to set the record straight. Living here in Prague, I can tell you all about those amazing little spirals of sugar and thinly sliced walnut covered dough.

A modified trdelnik cooker

Here in Prague, the treat is interchangeably called trdelnik and trdlo, which are both equally impossible to pronounce. It has its modern roots in the Slovak town of Skalica, where in the 18th century the Hungarian general, Jozsef Gvadanyi, decided to retire. A poet and philosopher, he had a clear sweet tooth, which was reflected when he hired a Romanian chef from Transylvania who brought the dish with him. In Skalica, the locals refined the treat and gave it its name. The name comes from the tool which is used to cook it – a metal chimney that the dough is wound around. It’s then placed and rotated over a coal pit until the dough is golden brown, after which they remove the pastry and dip it in sugar and sliced walnut mix. The treat is available year around in Prague and many other locales – especially in the Czech Republic and Slovakia – though in other places like Vienna it might be an only seasonal dish. It costs anywhere from 1 euro to 2 depending on what part of town you’re in. The two best trdelnik stands that I’ve found are on Na Porici, near the Mustek metro station, and at Malastranska Square in front of the tram stop. In most places they also cover it in Nutella for a few crowns more.

Good Food and the line

Recently though, a place has been serving a new variation of trdlo (pictured above). Seeing the sudden immense popularity of it, and that the trdlo is one of my and my wife’s favorite winter treats, we decided to go and investigate this Bavarian bounty of dulcitude. As we approached Charles Bridge walking down Karlova street, we saw many people with all sorts of delicious variations of it. Our excitement was growing. When we found the place that was serving it, Good Food Coffee & Bakery, at Karlova 160/8, we found a line that seemed to go on for some one hundred meters. We jumped in and got lucky, many people gave up and wandered off.

We found that Good Food had modified the design of the trdelnik to make it into a cone so that various things can be put inside. They have the standard “chimney” option, which is filled with ice cream, and they also have a strudel option, with apples, walnuts, and raisins, as well as one with strawberries and cream. Most of the options are from 80 to 120 crowns.

To be honest though, after tasting it, I couldn’t figure out what the fervor was all about. The pastry itself was not the best I’ve had – which can be found at the above places – and the soft serve ice cream was pretty substandard. The popularity seemed to be based off the pure novelty of the product rather than the actual thing itself, and the fact that all these tourists probably didn’t realize that there were trdelniks everywhere for much cheaper and with far better flavor.

the mastery of silence

The Rudolfinum

The other evening, the wife and I had the pleasure of watching Khatia Buniatishvili, who is perhaps currently one of the top virtuoso piano players making the classical circuits these days. The stage at the Rudolfinum was bare but for the black, shining grand, with the elegant neoclassical backdrop that looks somewhat like an ancient Roman temple towering behind. It was a treat to finally see the Rudolfinum in its purpose as a temple to fine music. It was built some 150 years ago in 1884 and has bounced back and forth in its purpose. Though built by a Czech bank, much of the Rudolfinum’s architecture centered around Classical and German art, with the statues being of musicians who had never even stepped foot in Prague. This brought a lot of notoriety among the Czech locals, but it didn’t stop the Philharmonic from making its home there, along with the Kusntverein fur Bohmen (the Fine Arts Society). Because of that though, finally a Czech artist would be brought to light in the theatre, as this became Dvorak’s home theatre and the stage adopted his name. After the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the birth of the short-lived First Republic, the theatre was repurposed into the chamber of parliament, where the building was somewhat ruined from its original stature – politics indeed usually has such an effect. It was finally the Nazis who liberated it from the dull life of politics and returned it to its original German-inspired purpose and it became again a hall of the arts. They repurposed it back to a concert hall, along with a renovation improving the acoustics, and they added another smaller concert hall to the structure. See the Czech book Mendelssohn is on the Roof by Jiri Weil for a nice adventure story on all that. The Communists generally left it the same, though they added a big red star outside in the garden and renamed the square, "Army Square" or something equally as intriguing. When the Czech Republic became a democracy again, they did a final restoration of the building, bringing it back into full glory.

Truly though, the night wasn’t defined by the building, but rather by the contents. Khatia Buniatishvili is a remarkable player, both for her ability and her beauty. And frankly, I think it must be a challenge to be respected for your skill when you’ve got the T&A to keep everyone distracted. The people in the audience were absolutely raucous after the performance, and I can’t but sadly reflect it was more for her looks than for what it should have been for – her tremendous skill. She was born into it, starting the piano at the age of 3 and performing her first concerts in Tbilisi at 6 years old, something of a wunderkind really. Now she prefers to play Liszt and his like, perhaps because of that style’s vehement, whirlwind carriage, of the flashy salutes to style and the overindulgence to emotion over refinement. Liszt was known for his flourishes and his improvisation, adding all sorts of character to what had already become thought of as stodgy and uptight music, Beethoven and Bach, by his era. And as Liszt was known for flaunting his emotion physically, for falling all over the piano, throwing about his wigged hair, so is Khatia known for an over sexuality as she embraces the piano keys as she would a lover, as though the piano were her only actual true love, despite what she might think of any person. One even wonders if someone of her skill level is even capable of loving anything else but the product of their ability, as that product is so beyond what most might even dream.

It’s that passion though that puts Georgia as a future powerhouse of the arts as it continues towards a path of globalization – at least it was on that path, recent events show that the current administration seems particularly pressed to get off of that path. Many people comment on the brilliance of skill that many East Asians have in piano, though lamenting the lack of emotion as their culture tends to prefer discipline. And indeed, with enough discipline, anything is just about manageable, even playing Rachmaninoff’s Second – I personally got the honor to watch one such Asian, Yuja Wang, play it. Could I tell if it felt emotional or not? I think on many songs, like the “Rach II”, the playing is so technical and intense that only the most trained ears can tell. The common listener only sweats at what seems like a tornado of sound and skill. But perhaps too much discipline does cover up the emotion of a piece, and this is one thing that makes Georgians on the next level of music, since they’re so willing to let their passion and inspiration override any sort of discipline. This works both to their advantage and disadvantage in life, but especially to their advantage in music.

Liszt rocking it

The night’s program was generally an ode to Liszt – a perfect ode for a Georgian pianist, being the temperamental well of emotion that the man was. Liszt – a man whose name I could never figure out how to pronounce until recently, it’s “lisht” by the way – was a 19th century Hungarian composer who spent a lot of time in Vienna and Paris and was kind of a dullard at piano starting off until he saw a charity concert by Paganini in Paris, when he said, “I want to play piano like that guy plays violin.” Now we’re not talking about sitting at the tavern playing some Irish jigs violin, Paganini liked to play violin ala The Red Violin in that scene where the guy is playing while he’s making love to his mistress. It’s not the type of music you’d want to listen to at the bar, as it takes your full concentration to understand and analyze the music, while at the same time you’re left stunned by the giant of talent that sits before you. Indeed, if someone played that sort of music in a bar, most people would probably be left confused and mildly depressed. So after Liszt was victimized by this villain with a violin, he started a real and furious study of piano, really getting down all the scales that he would later put into his songs. Scale after scale after scale. He was probably the first composer to really consider scales and practice exercises as musical pieces, as many of his pieces just sound like stellar practices, with the clouds of the crazy loud technical practice breaking away into a kind of heavenly melody, serving as the eye of a continued storm of technique.

Khatia Buniatishvili in the Rudolfinum

Khatia didn’t start with Liszt though, she started with one of Liszt’s biggest fans, Ravel, who had a big man-crush on the Franciscan tertiary pianist and who I never really cared for but apparently the French love. She wrapped it up with Stravinsky’s Petrushka excerpts, who I think is much more worthy of praise than that Gaullic composer aforementioned. Stravinsky combines the insane technical work of Liszt and his heavenly melodies, but instead of having them at different parts of a piece, mashes them altogether in a giant meat grinder of stress and trauma. Nothing is safe with Stravinsky, as he quite willingly tears down every border in his genre of music, in a lineage that is a logical progression of Liszt’s work. Stravinsky, along with the other Russian piano whizz, Rachmaninoff, were probably the last of the real Romantics, the last of the great composers to make music “really live” in Rachmaninoff’s words, before classical music gave way to modernism and became less of a masturbation of talent and more of a repetition of a single note and the mastery of silence.

a Tale of Two Strudels

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of industry, it was the age of waste, it was the age of wealth unheard of, it was the age of the basest poverty, it was the age of really amazing strudel, and it was the age of abominatory things made from apple. I have tasted the delicacy that is strudel across many a land - and by delicacy I mean some sugary apple slop plopped between two sheets of dough and baked on high. Really, not an overly delicate thing, kind of hard to mess up. Strudel was always a basic desert for me, nothing to get a craving for, until venturing into Kavarna Adria on Jungmannova Street. And then I realized what truly I had been missing, what the ideal of strudel and its heretofore introduction of the reality meeting said ideal. Upon walking into Kavarna Adria, I had left the cave of what I had known to be strudel, and emerged a changed man, a strudeled man.

The outside of Palace Adria

Like most cafes in Prague, Kavarna Adria has nothing to brag for in regards to service. Not kind and not rude, the service is simply there - the exact ideal of service in 19th century Europe, none of that fake American smiling coming from employees making below minimum wage working 12 hour shifts. The service at Adria though is actually a lot better than many Prague spots. The interior is in the what I call First Republic style - which is to say looking like your Viennese cafe of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire, the kind of place that Kafka or Freud would have sipped on coffee and ate their strudels. It was artsy for the time in the art nouveau that was all the rage back then - Kavarna Adria specifically was a really edgy Cubist joint, everything quite square and pointy, with dim, covered electric lights casting a pale pall across everything. The outside looked like an Italian castle was processed through Google's dreamscape set on floral, with small floral details where there shouldn't have been. Situated three flights up, the balcony was high above Jungmannova, with a great view of the surrounding buildings whose styles straddled time like the foundations straddled the square below. 

It was there that the Mrs. and I first had our first Praguer strudels, in the dark winter of 2015. Perhaps in February, but it was definitely wintry weather, which means it was the perfect setting for a steaming strudel. It was brought before me on the platter, giant in size, fresh, the apples melting almost into the sauce, mixed in with walnuts, with cinnamon and nutmeg generously sprinkled over. On the side were three great dollops of cream and some home made ice cream. After my first bite, I finally could understand scene from Inglorious Basterds, where Hans Landa nearly has an orgasm over the strudel, and some strange and powerful tension built either over the strudel or the murder of Shoshanna's family, it's quite hard to tell. Here's the scene if you want to know what I mean (fast forward to 2:00):

Understanding that the Adria strudel was the very Platonic ideal of strudel, it became my new fascination in restaurants in Prague. Was this a common achievement that was before me, or was it a rarity? Authentic strudels - that is, those made in Germany or Austria - simply paled to it. I went to many restaurants afterwards and tried many strudels, many were absolutely delicious, yet they were still just shapes brought before the flames, just shadows on the wall. Until finally I went to Cafe Imperial, where I realized the truth about the great diversity of strudels.

I had passed by Cafe Imperial many times, each time peering in with peaking curiosity. It was another First Republic cafe, this one situated near Palladium in the heart of the wealthy locals district of the Old Town - by locals I mean rich expats, by which I mean mostly Russians. The original structure had been erected in 1914 as a last ode and testament of the collapsing Austrian Empire. It was recently renovated, setting it up as a top class destination restaurant. Indeed, the magnificence of the interior itself makes for a worthy visit. The interior breathed art deco. It was as though Dionysius created the place for to be his own dining room. Inside were huge white marble columns, carved from top to bottom with Greek mythological scenes. The back wall was also a giant white carving, a relief of perhaps two maenads holding a covered platter of the remains of a cowardly Orpheus after his vengeful murder at the hands of nude, lustful women. In this setting of the dictionary definition of decadence, and also with a glance at the prices, I thought I was assured to have a divine experience, expecting the pastry to have been made by the dying god's own thyrsus. If only the experience didn't stop there.

The waiter quickly guided us to a seat near the kitchen. It wasn't the best of tables, but as we weren't dressed in fine dining clothes, I didn't really mind. We spoke in Czech, but as we sat the waiter snatched the Czech menus from our hand and replaced them with English ones, along with the word, "English" spoken in a slightly threatening, slightly disgusted tone. But we already knew what we wanted. We were there for coffee and strudel, which we thought was a pretty standard thing at a place that advertises on its website that "coffee and pastry are always important in a Cafe of such style."

What followed next is what I understand how many religious conservatives see homosexuals as. What was placed before us was a real "abomination of the Lord", in such a way that no man could ever manage while lying beside another man. My soul was awash in shame and disappointment over such a cold, dead pomaceous atrocity that lay on the plate before me. It seemed as though they had cooked the thing last week and it had just sat there and possibly fermented during the delay, holding its own bacchanale of yeast and microbes. We had even watched the waiter gather our order together only a few feet away, in full view, with us whispering that it couldn't be our strudel, not so fast, not even heated up, nope it was our strudel. With those two clanks of plate that echoed off our fine oak table, served as though at a nameless Czech restaurant in the darkest dives of Sporilov named U Haseka or U Debilu or something such as.

I thought, maybe cold strudel was their specialty. Maybe it was part of the atmosphere. Back in 1914, it wasn't really possible either to just put something in a microwave behind a wall and heat it up a little, tricking the clientele into thinking it's fresh. That's all I had really wanted was a little bit of trickery. But maybe, just maybe, it was delicious cold. 

Containing my disappointment

I had a bite. It tasted as it looked. Stale, slightly fermented, perhaps with a touch of mold. I would have demanded something else, but for the way the waiter had shamelessly prepared it and put it on our tables. The Mrs. said, "Complain!" but I said, "To what use? If he's not even going to heat it up, and he's going to do it all in front of us, I don't think it will do much good. It's sad though, this interior had really got me excited as though I found a new spot. Even if we requested cream, I doubt we'd want to know where it came from!"

But as is the story with most Prague places, the more wonderful it looks, the more terrible it is in reality. The plain, Cubist Kavarna Adria will always hold the place of fine strudeling in my heart.

Prospero's fancy

Protection from the bureaucratic rain

In the last blog, I introduced the Prague Quadrennial and the main Georgian exhibit. The Quadrennial is the Olympics of theatre set design, a showcase held everyone four years for performing artists and designers across the world to celebrate their love and dreams and to show off the hard work that they’ve done. Yesterday I went to Kafka’s House, where most companies that were presenting were associated with schools or governmental grants, since those were the only groups that could afford to come and make such presentations. Some governments and companies cared more about the production, others didn’t, and that could be seen in what they displayed. Some presentations were simply pictures or videos of what they’ve done, others were transformations of the room and the space, yet others made the viewer part of the performance. Indeed, the best displays were the ones that provided the viewer with a unique artistic experience, that, whether through interaction or emergence, provided a link between the viewer, the artist and the art.

The name of the exhibition hall isn't a chance name or a touristic trap, it was actually the house where Kafka was born. It was first built as an administration hall for Benedictine monks, though when the author was born, it was being used as a theatre and for apartments at the time. Kafka's family soon moved to a place on nearby Wenceslas Square. The building suffered extensive damage in a fire, the interiors were renovated in the Socialist block style and now it's used as an exhibition hall. 

Two types of exhibits were my favorite. One type was unanimously presented by universities, where the designer-professor gave their students an idea - “Empty life” - or a play title - “No Exit”, “Romeo & Juliet”, etc - and told them to design a set or figure or something based off the title. My favorite among this theme was Hungary’s display, called “The Collector’s Room.” The aim of the project for the students was to work on the basic skills required of set design - to understand a character’s background and thematic interaction. “Each student imagines a Collector with a different passion in collecting,” then the student must make a diorama of where the Collector lives. This is even meta-interesting, since art itself is the perfection of obsession. What makes me think of myself as an artist, for example, isn’t simply that I write. Anyone would write if you dangled some dollar bills on a string and hook in front of them. But I - like other artists - am compelled to do so. For reasons that don’t make any real economic sense.

Brazilian labyrinths

Another favorite was Brazil’s showcase. Each student designed a book showcasing the concept of a play, presenting also pictures of the set. These books had to mimic that concept though. If the play were an adaptation of Borges’ “Labyrinths”, for example, then the book had to be a puzzle to open.

The successful concept for me was when there was an attempt to engage the viewer, to make them part of the show. Serbia had people sit down and then tied strings across the room, making them willing flies in a giant web. Lithuania had a projector with a scrolling skyline displayed on the wall and invited their guests to draw. Most people attempted to draw parts of the skyline, others just wrote tag graffiti like “Anichka was here,” the creative spectrum was all over the wall. Estonia was perhaps one of the best here, presenting Kafka's "A Report to the Academy", where there was a diorama in the exact middle of the room. Inside the diorama was the figure of a man watching television. On the television was a weird sort of stop-motion animation. Along the walls of the actual room were three people in costumes. One as death, one as a bronze-statue street performer and the last was someone lying face down. The first two were constantly staring at you, in the same way you tried to stare at the figure in the box, which was staring at the television screen. 

BAR III/IV

My last mention before I leave off with some random pictures of various projects is Austria’s presentation, called BAR III/IV, which was an exhibit not really marked in the main corridor. I just entered a door that didn’t say not to enter - which I have a habit of doing - and I found myself in a very small bar with room for four people - there was my wife and two others. Also an Austrian student who was sitting behind the bar smoking cigarettes and telling people to help themselves to some wine. Naturally, everyone stared uncomfortably until - never being one to pause about free booze - I poured the wine out into everyone’s glasses, we toasted, we drank, the student took some pictures and carried on smoking. The bar was, of course, a set, built inside another room, and through this bad cover or that, you could see the room beyond the room, and you could see that you are merely Prospero’s fancy.   

Uruguay, "Relationship"

Slovakia, Ice on books