Slovak Starry Nights - a weekend in the High Tatras mountains So this weekend I went on an impromptu trip with a group of friends to Zdiar, Slovakia, a lquaint village nestled among the stunning High Tatras mountains near the border of Poland and Slovakia. Three of the seven of us incuding myself decided to leave right after class (as opposed to a night train that got there at 6 AM, not recommended). A note on train travel: a disadvantage of day trains is they often involve a lot of transfers. We had a total of 3 transfers, and then 1 [View Full Entry]

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And so we went onwards to Banská Bystrica (that's pronounced "bun-scar bis-trit-sa"), which along with nearby Zvolen make the two main cities in central Slovakia. We found some creepy little guesthouse which satisfied both of our goth sides quite well, very small and nostalgic, but also very noisy as the walls were probably made from a sheet of cardboard, so you could properly hear everything bumping around. We went for more amazing cheap pizza on the town square on wednesday night and were entertained by a cool little band playing some covers and some songs in slovak (including some translate [View Full Entry]

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I love travelling by train right, but trying to sit on a 4 hour train journey having just got up at 5:30 and being as excited as I was was not something I would recommend for anyone who is prone to fits or fainting. After crawling out of Holešovice station under a newly risen sun, Style of Eye's essential mix gave me sustenance through Kolín, Pardubice and Třebova while Laidback Luke's threw me through Brno and Břeclav and across the Slovak border to Kúty, bringing my total number of countries visited up another one. Then, we finally pulled into Bratislava and [View Full Entry]

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For our next stop on our backpacking adventure we made our way south by train to Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. We found out quickly that the trains in Eastern Europe operate a little slower than trains elsewhere. But, we arrived safely and only a hour late. Bratislava is one of the more random stops on this trip as we really didn't know much about it or what to expect. But I guess that is what made it exciting! Usually we've been able to rely on English or Spanish to get us by, but not here! Since our working knowledge of [View Full Entry]

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So with just 72 hours at home after returning from Toronto, it's back on the road. Or more accurately, back to the airport - Gatwick this time. I've been tracking the weather forecast and Bratislava currently has some very unseasonal thunderstorms, so it could be fairly unpleasant. However, I expect to be working pretty much continuously, so it probably won't matter! There are few direct flights to Bratislava, and even fewer at sensible low prices. However, Vienna is only 40 miles away so I'm flying easyjet to Vienna instead and planning to catch the bus. A word in favour of easyjet: [View Full Entry]

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Starting to wonder whether this plan to post on each country makes sense but I will try to keep it up for a bit longer. So what do we know about Slovakia? There was one of those filler programs on TV program that focused on British people who bought houses in Slovakia. It basically showed a beautiful country that had cheap houses and an easy atmosphere. Slovakia used to be part of Czechoslovakia until the Velvet Revolution when the Communist regime was removed and elections were fought by more than one party. Slovakia supplied a couple of Prime Ministers at least [View Full Entry]

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Jim - Write up 5 -5/11 We arrived at in Bratislava at 4 PM and took the bus to the hotel. It was warm, almost hot, and our tour leader, Ben (Carol) Szyplinski discovered we did not have Air Conditioning in the hotel rooms. This was something she specified with our travel agent. We now refer to Ben as our “Polish unguided missile”. It was not pretty. Needless to say, we moved to the Executive suites which have AC, Refrigerators, Digital TV and post Soviet Furniture. The only thing we don’t have is in-room internet access. Yesterday afternoon I walked down [View Full Entry]

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Yesterday we left the wonders of Poland to cross into Slovakia again. This actually turned out to be quite a journey. Luckily (or unluckily as it turned out) we didn't have to start this journey for a little while. Chris, our tour leader, told us to meet in the hotel reception at 12:10 to go to the bus station. This meant that we had the whole morning free to explore a bit more of Krakow. My roommate Susan decided to start the morning off with a bit of a speed walk around the walls of the old city. However since my [View Full Entry]

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Today we caught the train to Bratislava for a day trip from Vienna. Our tour leader had told us that there wasn't all that much to do in Bratislava and that we would probably only end up spending about 4 hours there before we headed back to Vienna. However we actually ended up spending most of the day there. We started the day by catching the 9:28 train from the Sudbahnhof and since it only takes an hour to get to Bratislava by train (apparently only 60kms away) we were there by 10:30. After a quick tram ride into town we [View Full Entry]

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Tatra Mountains - Tatranska Lomnica Day 14-15 (May 31-June 1) We had the morning to fill in, in Krakow and thought a visit to the local Shopping complex would be a good start. However, it turned out to be a public holiday for Pentecost, so waiting for the shops to open turned out to be fruitless. We filled in our time by catching up on our internet mail, as the weather wasn’t looking great. We then caught a bus to the border with Slovakia, where we then had a mini-bus that took us across the border to a stop where we [View Full Entry]

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