Blogs from Slovakia, Europe - page 29

Where to start !! Met Mirka in Vienna and saw U2, fab as ever of course then the train to Poprad where her sisters Boyfriend Marek picked us up and we went to the High Tatras mountains. Followed by eating and drinking on a grand scale. To say Slovakians are friendly and generous is an under statement. To start with you must have a shot to say hello, then to balance the legs, then for many other reasons finished by one to say good night. i was wrecked , dont remember anything after trying to say orange juice in Slovakian!! my glass was never empty and the eating is non stop, as Marek said Slovakians only have one meal a day from 8am to 8pm !! Went up to the high tatras with marek up to ... read more

Day 15-Budapest to Prague 8/31/10-Tuesday Want to know our weather? No you don’t. We had rain and cold today. You’ll see in the photos. We wound down our cruise today. Last night we had a nice cruise around Budapest on the Danube. We would have been happy to have a few more days here but we are excited about the next stop, Prague. The trip north was on a motor coach. There were about 35 people from the ship that were joining the final leg of our trip to Prague. The scenery was interesting but nothing unusual except for a large number of wind turbines. On the way to Prague we made a stop in our sixth nation, Slovakia. We stopped in Bratislava, the capital city. It is a city of about 430,000 people on the ... read more

Top Times * Seeing some of Europe's best castles * Getting the van exhaust fixed for next to nothing * Glad to be in something more substantial than a tent during a ferocious storm “A dainty of bungalow”. This was the helpful english-translated name of the dish Dave ordered off the menu (it ended up as chicken and sausage goulash). That sums up the only minor problem with travelling here for native English speakers; that the Slovak and Czech languages are almost the same (and close to Polish), but with the myriad of letter accents and unusual pronunciation, its difficult to communicate. Since German seemed well known and English less so, we generally resorted to communicate with a bit of Deutsch as best we could, and got by fine. Campsites here by this time were getting ... read more

Linda and I make a 5 hour walk in Slovensky Kras. This is a canyon in the Karst mountains, only an one hour drive from Kosice. We are looking for endemic plants. The area is full of caves, but one of them is special. It is only a small cave called Ochtinska, not far from Roznava. It is the only aragonite cave of Europe. In all world there are only two of them. I belief the other one is in Argentinia. Aragonite is like the common calcite made up of calciumcarbonate, but the hydrochemical and climatic conditions under which crystallisation takes place, differ. This results in needle like crystals. To prevent damages by carbondioxide people breath out, only small groups of visitors may enter each hour. ... read more

Today was the day I fianlly decided to take on the XXL pizza challenge, wellin the end I didn't have much of a choice because I told Martin I was thinking about it then he went and told EVERYONE that I was doing it. I eat a decent size lunch at 3:00 pm knowing that I need to strech my stomach out a bit to prepare for it. After lunch I just chilled out reading and watching movies because once again it was raining. The time has come to go to the pizzeria, thank goodness it took them an hour to finally bring my pizza because by then I was so hungary. I did awesome on the first half but then my mind caught up to my stomach and I slowed right down. The last slice ... read more