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Thursday, September 27, 2012

High Tatra Ritz - Hotel Gitka

Through all the seas of all Thy world, slam-bangin' home again.
Rudyard Kipling, "M'Andrew's Hymn"

The High and Low Tatra mountains are rated among the most popular locations in Slovakia throughout the year, with Tatranska Lomnica, Skalnate Pleso and Hrebienok the most attractive destinations in the High Tatras, and Chopok in the Low Tatras. High Tatra. If hotels used to mimic wealthy homes, now the ideal home looks like a hotel. Jozef Imrich reports—and starts by getting a hotelier round to inspect his place... Hotel High Tatra aka Gitka 

An exhibition just under way at Prague's Leica Gallery offers a rare and illuminating insight into the poverty and drudgery experienced by many working-class people in Czechoslovakia during the economic crisis of the 1930s. Indeed, "Stern Light: Socially Conscious Photography in Interwar Czechoslovakia," composed of works held in private collections, is the first show of its kind in Prague Stark black-and-white photos portray mý old countrý

There are myths that touch internal chords that we don't really understand. Something about High Tatra speaks powerfully to me, so much so that my heart lifts each summer when I think of my childhood. The scale is right, the people agreeable, and there's even a clean air ... If my life were somehow to arrange itself differently--very differently, to be sure--I could see myself living there.