Part Two- Yet another piece to the puzzle…

“Appropriate what you inherited from your fathers, so that you possess it.” – Johann Wolfgang Goethe

Sunday morning I woke up to a “Valent” breakfast: yogurt, an array of breads, a choco-croissant (how did you know!), and Nescafe coffee. Valent’s wife, Dagmara, is in London for 2 months, helping out her daughter and son-in-law with their young son, Sebastian. According to Valent, this is the first time in 28 years of marriage he is without his wife, but to his credit he seemed to be managing quite well. After a few pictures in his backyard poolside, we made our way using GPS to his nephew’s apartment in Trnava, what Slovak’s like to call “little Rome.” Valent has quite a keen, dry sense of humor, but his reliance on GPS for navigation really was the icing on the cake for me.

Some interesting facts I found out about Valent: he was born and grew up in Vysne Repase, a village in the Spis region of Slovakia just south of the high Tatry. The village dates back to at least the 14th century. A historical pamphlet put together for the 650th anniversary of the village named 60 families that were native to the village around the time of Maria Theresa (1740s): the Fecko family was among these 60. Don’t ask me or my cousins about the change in spelling… One guess is that Fetzko is the ‘Hungarianized’ or “Anglicized” version my grandfather inherited. Who knows?! And how are Valent and Pavol Gura related? They are the descendents of my great-grandfather’s and great-grandmother’s siblings.

Back to Valent, his major at university was the science of “keeping trains from crashing into each other”… seriously, I think that’s what he called it. In other words, he has an engineering background, but also went on to study computer science. All this eventually led to jobs with Andersen Consulting and most recently Hewlett Packard. For HP, he has really traveled the world: Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Besides his daughter in London, he has a second daughter Datka, who lives at home and works at the Bratislava paper, Sme. Oh, and least I forget, they have a 30-year turtle Sissina (sp?).

After one mishap with the GPS system (it failed temporarily), we finally arrived in Trnava at Pavol’s, Valent’s nephew. Pavol is very close in age to me, is married to Mirka, and has a little daughter Sara. He and his wife had purchased their flat about 2 years ago and are gradually finishing renovations. Despite the fact it was situated in a typical socialist block of flats, their apartment was very bright and nicely remodeled. They explained that purchasing an apartment is a big ordeal, and land or a house even more so.