It was time for my brother's wedding.
It turned out to be a really enjoyable time.
Bojnice was a really beautiful place, and just going out and exploring the quiet streets and the atmosphere is something I've never experienced anywhere in Australia before.
The trip was also a real eye-opener for me, I saw things I didn't believe possible. We travelled to a secluded valley in the shadow of great rising slopes, and there a village concealed in the crevice between two peaks.
As I watched from the window of our rented chalet local villagers washing their clothes in the stream running through the base of the valley, and the aged men tending to their meagre front gardens, a thought occurred to me that this was scene had probably barely changed in 500, 800, 1000 years. A millenium!
Wars had been and gone, the Final Frontier breached, governments formed, peaked, collapsed, The Velvet Revolution occurred, The Berlin Wall was torn down, Socialism was removed, and these people hadn't moved. Everyday their world continued on all the same, regardless of the rest of the globe.
It was refreshing to think that they didn't know what the rest of the world was doing, and even more, they didn't care. Their world consisted of the same processes, year after year, generation after generation.
To me, this was a confronting reality. So many things in life were now deemed to be unimportant by this new perspective. These people were "simple" but they weren't unhappy - they had no reason to be so. Is there really a convincing argument as to why modern life is better?
Life in this modern context is just more packed of things that distract us from what is inescapable. Life is more complex than ever before, but these few dozen villagers showed that it can be enjoyed at a wholly base level, and that these "advances" may not be they're all cracked up to be. I guess, I took away that life should be enjoyed for what it is, rather than what you can pack into it. It's both more wholistic and simple than what we make it.
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