Life with Dana & Tibor and their family has settled into an easy routine. The day starts around 6am, as their kids go to school early. Their kids are tough. Mischa and Tomi are on the school bus before 7am in the cold and driving snow. After getting to Proprad, the major town about 20 minutes drive away, they have to walk another 20 minutes to school. Both kids are highly intelligent and they love going to school. Mischa speaks perfect English and Tomi is a whiz at mathematics. Tomi also loves to invent board games and so far, Graeme spends most of the early evenings playing Tomi at his own games!! Graeme and I were both soundly beaten on our first night, but Graeme appears to be staging a significant come back tonight while I am writing this blog.
Dana & Tibor’s house is just lovely. A real log cabin, it is kept toasty warm by a fascinating wood burner. While the firebox is small, the heating unit is huge. It works by heating a circuitous flue system inside the brickwork. The brickwork absorbs the heat and then slowly releases it throughout the day. They only use 2 small boxes of firewood per day, once in the morning and again in the evening. This system heats the entire house.
2/ Andy writing away beside the magnificent fire!
Today, Dana set us loose to explore their surrounding country-side while they had business and stuff to do with the kids.
Armed with Dana’s itinerary and road atlas we headed off to explore the villages and historical sites in their region. The largest city Poprad, is about 15 minutes drive from their village. We like Poprad! It’s about the only town name in the immediate vicinity (and probably the whole of Slovakia) that we can pronounce. The Slovak language is a challenge. The spoken language is lovely. To us, it sounds to us like a mixture of Italian and Russian. But it’s not a harsh sound like German. The distinctive feature of the written language is the abundance of circumflexes, umlages, accents and graves. Without understanding their significance to the pronunciation of words, our attempts to speak the language have met with uproarious laughter from the Hrmodka family!
After a fairly late start in the morning, our first destination was Spisske Podradhie and one of the largest travertine castles in Central Europe. Getting there proved as challenging as always for us. Penelope (the GPS system) was no help at all. She hadn’t been to Slovakia before and once we strayed from the main highway, she was lost. And so were we! We actually ended up in a village called Spisska Nova Ves, which, as we learned later was Tibor's home town. Finally we made it back on route and found the famous Spissky Hrad - a derelict limestone castle perched on a lonely hill in the middle of surrounding paddocks.
After circumnavigating the castle, we found a lovely spot for lunch. Serving traditional Slovakian food we enjoyed a delicious cabbage soup, noodles,beer & coffee all for E$12. The cheapest meal we've had in Europe so far!!
After lunch, Dana's itinerary took us to the historical walled city of Levoca. Here we wandered around the town's courtyard looking at the shops. The shops and businesses are so different than what we are used to. There are no big display windows. Only a small selection of goods are shown in a small window to the street. To enter the shop you have to go into the building via a large centre corridor and each shop lies to the left or right. I guess this style of display is a relic of the communist era, when really there was nothing much to offer for sale and large window displays were pretty pointless!!
Finally on the way home we visited a thermal spring area. We were disappointed not to have brought our bathers with us, as a swim in the hot springs would have been a lovely escape from the -10C temperatures of the day. There are loads of hot springs in Slovakia, and taking the waters is a very popular past-time for Slovakians. The winters here are generally long and very cold. You can understand the attraction!!
Well it really wouldn't be a road trip without us getting lost. And today was no exception. Not only did we accidently divert to Tibor's home town in the morning, as we started for home we took a wrong turn in Poprad and ended up in the Whirlpool factory complex. It took us nearly 15 minutes to find our way out again. As we drove around and around, it reminded us of being caught in an endless spin cycle. Dana & Tibor were amazed that we could have found the Whirlpool factory let alone get lost in the complex. Aaaah ...but we explained that we especially "geographically challenged". We're not sure they understood this term, but they certainly understood that n0-one they knew could possibly get lost in the Poprad!!
Tomorrow, we are back under supervision with Tibor & Dana. We are going to do a walk in another National Park area of Slovakia - we can't wait!
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