Eskimos and Hochschornes

One of the previous bloggs I wrote, (bloggs has two g's right? The computer tells me I'm wrong no matter how I write it but the website your on right now writes it with two g's so I will to) well before I get sidetracked I should probably tell you about some Eskimos and some Hochschornes because you probably don't know any and I don't want this post to be to disappointing.


Unfortunately I do not know any Eskimos, sorry to let you down but I'll get to that later. Fortunately I do know some Hochschornes. (this is the last name of a family in case you where confused) The Hochschorne are a very water-oriented family, what I mean is that everyone in that family is an incredible white water kayaker or canoer or something along those lines. 


The Hochschorne twins are Olympic gold medallists in the C2 canoe division several times over. They are the most successful Slovak athletes and certainly among the most successful athletes in the entire world.


My father knows both parents of the Hochschorne twins, their mother is currently teaching me to kayak. Their father is their trainer and manager and everything like that.


I was recently at a man-made white water facility, at that facility was not only the Hoksici twins but also the Japanese white water slalom team. There we saw the twins father who my father knows, we talked for a while and watched the twins train, they were really, really good.

Hochschorne brothers

Me with the Hochschornes in the background

As I have talked about the Hoksicis a lot a feel the time is ripe to discuss Eskimos. When I say eskimo, I don't mean a person, or in fact, any living being at all I simply mean a roll in a kayak, the link below is an example.

Having such an excellent teacher as Gaba Hochschorne (the Hochschorne twins mother) I learned to do an eskimo roll in around three weeks (I go kayaking twice a week) I think this is considerably fast. I'm not really sure if everybody else thinks so but I can think what I like.


Here are some pretty awesome photos of my eskimo. My very own personal eskimo.

Coming around

I'm actually coming out of the water

I love this photo

Me and Dennis

Different angle

Finishing up

This is what I've been up to lately. Since I told you what I'm doing you really, really, really, should probably consider commenting on this and telling me what's up.

Painting

The apartment my father used to live in when he grew up in Bratislava is now quite dilapidated. Although it is a living space, when we came it was uninhabitable, well at least not a pleasant place to live. In the beginning there was no heat, not for the house, not for the water, not for anything.


Now there is hot water and heating for winter. Even though there is heat there are still several problems in the apartment, these problems include but are not limited to; there is only one bed and four people (me and my family) are soon going to be living there, there is very little furniture (as in three chairs, two tables and some shelves), there is no refrigerator and the walls need to be painted.

Since there are so many problems we (my father and I) decided we should probably try to do something about these problems before we start to live there, which we will very soon.


My father has been working on painting for a while, so far he has painted the kitchen and some sections of other rooms. Today I spent my entire day helping him painting the apartment.

Fast hands

My fathers feet

We started and finished the first coat of the entrance room, which is considerable progress for one day.

Painting, painting, painting

I woke up in the morning and left to go paint and that's what I did pretty much the whole day. That's what I've been up to lately.

Kids Day

Today at my school we had Kids Day, which as you might have realised is a special day for kids. A boy named Oliver and I wear running the sword fighting event. As you can probably imagine this was an interesting experience for me.


Kids day worked like this, all the classes of little kids (I'm not exactly sure what grades) would go with their teacher, all around the central part of the school and participate in all the different events available. After participating in an event whoever was running the event would give the class a small slip of paper with an icon having to do with the event on it. The class would glue the slip of paper onto a larger paper.


Their were many crazy events of which I don't think would fly in the US, for example their was a rope going from the upper floor the the main door in the school, the kids would put on a harness and use the rope like a zip line. This wasn't the only crazy event, their were many more including blind soccer, blind eating and many others of which I have forgotten.


As me and Oliver were  in charge of the sword fighting it was up to us to explain the rules and make sure nothing bad happens. We were to explain the rules to every group, the rules were that if you got hit in the leg you had to jump on one leg, if you got hit in the other leg you died. If you got hit in one arm you have to put it behind your back and put the sword in your other arm. If both of your arms were cut off you died. Nobody was allowed to hit anybody in the head and you weren't supposed to hit very hard but we weren't really worried about that last one.


Since my Slovak isn't that great Oliver handled talking to the teachers and I was the practice dummy. Oliver would show the kids where to hit by hitting me with the sword and explaining the rules at the same time.


After a few times of going through this is started to get a little tiring, watching little kids try to sword fight isn't exactly that intriguing. Most of the kids didn't realise the point of a sword fight is not to hit your opponents sword, but to hit their body.


We had exactly the number of paper slips so that each group could have one slip, after every group left we thumbed through the reaming papers trying to somehow magically make them disappear. After a while we did run out of slips of paper, not everybody had finished so we just chilled and watched what everybody else was doing.


After everybody finished we didn't have to stay, so I had lunch then left. Over the course of the day I saw more then enough children for two or maybe even three lifetimes.