Pestilog

Slovakia, MF

Ok, so in case you didn't read Kasia's comment from last week, a group of us went to Slovakia last weekend. We travelled to Poprod, in the north, and trained into the Tatry mountains for the weekend. It was beyond beautiful. The pictures that I gleamed off the net 2 posts ago do not lie.
Here is a map, so you can orient yourselves. Poprod is just to the right of the marker for the Tatra National Park.

I went with Wyatt, who I live with, Colin, who is in my department, and Peter, who lives down the street. Peter is currently an undergrad at Lewis and Clark here on exchange. His roommate Eli owns a Reed "communism atheism free love" t shirt. Its a small world. We stayed our first night in the nearest, cheapest hotel with vacancy. The four of us crashed in the tiny double room below. It was cozy, and olfactorally familiarizing, to say the least.

Poprad is a nice enough town. Its small, and industrial. This is a view from the hotel balcony, which is right by the train station. This is basically the view that the tourists get:

I have never seen a city with such a "good side of the tracks"/"bad side of the tracks" divide, though. It was amazing. There was an old, rundown commuter rail that ran through the City. To the west, it was sparkly and new. The town square was renovated and freshly spackled. New fountains, stores with hiking gear and fashion jeas, and trashcans on every corner. To the east, the city is much older, communist block buildings are crumbling and there is a significant population of Roma families living in a scattering of shanties. The whole neighrborhood is glittered with laundry drying on fences dividing small earthen lots. Its eerily beautiful.
Our first night in town, we bar hopped through the touristy side of the city. We ate dinner at a restaurant that Wyatt recommended (he had been through Poprod before), and it was absolutely amazing. The whole weekend, we ate so much peroghi and pasta and fried cheese and garlic soup. We made ourselves ill on white flour and dairy fat. We also consumed a ridiculous amount of beer. Ridiculous. Poprod has its own brewery, called Tatran. We didnt realize until half way through the weekend that this stuff is 12%. Oddly, we didnt notice. I think that means we're officially European now. Anyway, this stuff goes for 20 Slovakian Krowns per half liter. That is about 70 cents.

We also hit up a dance club. A small, Slovakian mountain town dance club. Holy Jesus. I havn't been part of a scene this ridiculous since I was at The Electric Cowboy in Muskogee Oklahoma in 2000. The girls were all in heels, jeans, and funky white tanktops. The guys all wore Bball shoes, huge fubu shirts, and bandanas. One guy even had a huge Adidas scarf tied around his head. Seriously, he looked like the karate kid. Nothing was weirder than the dancing though. There were a lot of mirrors in the place, and most of the girls spent the majority of their time dancing with themselves in the mirrors. This girl was particulary fond of herself. She spent hours ignoring everyone and everything except her own hair:

There is also only one dance move if you are a girl. You step from side to side like a jr high valentines dance, and wave your arms around in front of you like a sign interpreter. Its hilarious, and only bested by the way men dance. People have described certain dancing skills before as "epileptic fits". I tell you now, that all of those people are wrong, because it is nothing compared to this:

Ok, so onto the good stuff. We trained into Stary Smokovic from Poprod, and from there, went east into Tatranska Lomnica, which is near Lomnicky Stit, the second highest peak in the Tatrys at 2634m. This is a view from halfway up:

It was gorgeous. We took a lift to the peak, and walked along the ridge. We could see the range from all directions.


This is a pan shot that wyatt took from the top. He took all these pictures actually.

We stayed the second night in Tatranska Lomnica, then went back and spent the last half of Sunday in Poprod. I took a ton of pictures with my little AE-1. Maybe I'll scan some of them and throw em up on Flickr when I get them developed.

Then the shit hit the fan.

Suffice it to say, we were supposed to get on a train to Kosice. Certain members of our party got on the first train that said "Kosice" on the door, not realizing that it was headed in the wrong direction. Before we were able to convince our comerades of hte mix up, the train started moving. We were supposed to be home in Budapest at 8pm. But, where did we end up? On a train to Bratislava. BRATISLAVA! For the love of God. Please, do me a favor, and scroll back up to that map at the top. Find Bratislava. Connect the dots. Poprod-Kosice-Budapest. Now, Poprod-Bratislava. Holy balls. And we were SO far off the beaten path, that we hadn't met anyone all weekend who spoke more than a small handful of english words like "you, cigarette?" "yes" "ticket" and "train...up....you, up." Plus, everyone in Slovakia speaks german as a second language. None of us speak german. I had gotten by with signs and menus because it is relatively similar to Ukranian, but there is NO way we can explain this to a train conductor. You cant play stupid tourist when you cant communicate at all.

So, ok, we pulled into Bratislava at 9:30pm, already an hour and a half after we were supposed to be home in BP. We soon discovered that the next train leaving for Budapest departs at 5am the next morning. So, we were committed to a night in Bratislava. So, we crabbed some zsemlis and a few bottles of coke, threw our packs on, and headed out on foot away from the train station prepared for a long night. We headed into the "historic center" of the city, which is the Disneyland downtown of the city--a place where all the sandwhich boards in front of hte restaurants are in English, if you know what I mean. But it was still incredibly beautiful. They had a bright green laser that started at Michael's Gate and was bounced all through the neighborhood by mirrors until the main strip by the Danube. Very very cool.


We also hiked up to the plateau where stands the Bratislava Castle. The actual castle was closed, but we were able to walk around the retaining wall and see the whole city. These are some views from the castle:
Ah, the lovely Danube.

Bratislava looks awesome. Colin and I have talked about coming back to see it during the day sometime, as well as visiting some of the amazing little towns that we saw on our accidental train ride across the Slovakian coutryside (which totally blows the quite scenic Hungarian country side out of the water. Its beyond words. Imagine the Columbia Gorge, with lakes instead of a river, castles everywhere, deep forest, and small towns with creepy yet beautiful clusters of communist blocks painted up like a Cuban ghetto. My God. You have to see it with your own eyes.)
We headed back to the train station at about 3:30am, after sitting in a coffee shop for a few hours. Look how happy we are to be alive right now:

We made it back to Budapest at 9:30am. I slept for about 30 minutes on the train. Then I had class from 11, straight through till 8pm. It was not my best day. But it was awesome, and almost worth the whole trip, just to get to write this to my masculinities class:

Labels: Colin, Peter, photos, Slovakia, travel, video, Wyatt

posted by Veruka2 @ 10:14 PM