Funfare for the Common Man

Though I don’t think it was intentional. I hope. It’s amazing, the number of words that exist in other languages that are untranslatable into English. German is especially rife with epic words that don’t seem to have a direct equivalent into English. Take Vergangenheitsbewältigung , for example: ‘coming to terms with one’s past.’ Less dramatic in size, but perhaps heftier and more foreboding in scope is Waldsterben : ‘forest-death’ (though I think it actually means the death of forests themselves, not people in forests). Either way, I very nearly succumbed to some form of Waldsterben on my recent trip into the Carpathian wilderness. 1. This is my final post about this trip. 2. This is post 7 (out of 10) of my August 2020 Challenge. 3. In my last, post-modernish post, there were no bears or boars threatening to eat us. 4. I really don’t think my wife wanted to kill me, truly, honestly, I promise. This was our 4th trip out west. All four trips have featured some sort of adventure/misadv...

A study in contrasts: urban v rural Or, city v nature, Part 1 And Part 6 (of 10) of my August 2020 Challenge. August 2020, the Carpathians:  It was the ‘wild’ I was looking for, and it was the ‘wild’ we got as we ventured west to the Carpathians, that magical land where ‘time stands still’ to quote myself from a post from May 2013 and though the place we stayed is fairly touristy by Ukrainian standards – Yaremche – it still had a few areas off the beaten path or track that offered thrills and adventures and it actually was a bit unintended this adventure because really what we wanted was a standard trail and my map seemed a bit dated and unreliable but we thought the trails on there could be found but we weren’t able to so we just traipsed our way up through and over a massive hill not quite a mountain but a steep oh-so-steep hill and by the end of this trip – as you shall see but I won’t actually share a photo – my legs were scraped, bleeding, scratched, bitten bitten bitten – the...

Part 1: Embracing the wilderness  (And part 4 (of 10) of my August 2020 challenge) Out in the wild, cut off from the world: a treat. When you read Trip Advisor or Booking.com reviews, you probably notice lots of people complaining about bad wi-fi in their hotels.  The place we stayed in the Carpathians, in Western Ukraine, didn’t even have wi-fi. I didn’t know that before I booked it. I didn’t even check, nor did I care. When we got there and I found out, I shrugged and said ‘good!’ Less temptation. I can say goodbye to the world for 8 days of peace and solitude. No social media. No keeping in touch with people. No news. No sport. Just fresh air, hiking, relaxing, reading, eating, drinking… [Here’s the part where more socially-connected, millennial readers will say, ‘who needs wi-fi when you have a smart phone with 3, 4 or 5G?’ And I will respond ‘but I don’t have a smartphone!’ And then they will come back at me with ‘yeah, but doesn’t your wife have one?’ and I will retort w...