The Hills are Alive....

Hills! Yeah, right!

So, I spent this weekend in the High Tetras (the highest mountain range in Slovakia) with Petra, my host father, Laco, and Beth. Hills, HUGE joke. Those things are NOT hills. They're MONSTROUSLY huge! I believe that Petra said they were the lowest of the five highest mountain ranges in the world, but I could be mistaken.

At any rate, Beth and I, err, well, cut school, and drove for about.... four hours or so to get to the town where we were staying. I don't know where it was, please don't ask. We just called it "The High Tetras". At any rate, we got to the appartment, which was more like a condo, dumped our stuff, and then went on the tram to go slightly higher up. From there, we took a hike down to this really cool waterfall, and ate dinner at a little cabin turned restaurant on the path.

Beth and me infront of the waterfall

I had Bryndza halušky, as did Petra, and Laco and Beth went with bacon and saurkreut halušky. You have to eat halušky in the mountains. That's where halušky was created, and that is where some of the best halušky ever is made. For those of you who are interested, this is halušky:

At any rate, the next day we took the train to a nearby lake. It was formed by a glacier having moved there in the past. This sort of lake is called, and forgive my spelling, a pleso in Slovak. We walked around it, and then decided that it would be an ever-so-lovely idea to hike to another nearby lake. It was gorgeous, I will definitely give the trail that, but it was also long, and the ground was very uneven at points. That would have been ok, except that some of these points where it was uneven? Yeah, right next to a ledge, so that if you slipped, you would join the ranks of the Polish and Czech tourists who die in the Tetras every year. Oh, and in case you're thinking "Pssh, the safety rails would catch you!", the Slovaks aren't law suit happy. Read: They expect people to have a modicam of common sense and to know things like "I shouldn't touch the moving wall infront of an elevator" or "it would be a really bad idea to get close to the edge of the path, as there's nothing but a steep incline next to it", and therefore see no need to put up railings. Or, for that matter, a second set of elevator doors, but that's another story. Suffice to say, that by the end of the hike to the second pleso, I was more than happy to be done with the hiking. Sure, we had to walk back to the train station, but we went via the road this time, instead of the scenic trail we'd taken before.


We then proceded to go attempt to have dinner, and Beth and I learned the reason the Tetras are not as popular a vacation spot as one might think: The service in restaurants is terrible. Only one restaurant in our village, who's name escapes me, was open on a Saturday evening. Not good. Not good at all.


I also learned something mildly amusing: Apparently, about thirty people die every year in the High Tetras. Pretty much all of them are Czech or Polish tourists who do stupid things. No one knows why, but you never hear about the Slovaks, or Russians, or Germans, or Austrians doing crazy things, it's always the Czech or Polish people. A Czech mountain climber died while we were there, actually. Yikes.



So, on Sunday, we headed back to Bratislava. We decided to stop by the Bojnice Castle on our way back. It's probably the closest thing Slovakia has to a fairy tale castle. I was half expecting some chick to come out and start singing "Some Day my Prince will Come"




So, after the very lovely castle, we went and got lunch at a pizzeria type place. I had a Slovak dish called knedliky. It's like dumplings stuffed with somesort of fruit jam with some sort of topping on the dumplings. The variety I had in Bojnice would probably be considered highly illegal in the US.



See the grey, powdery stuff on the knedliky? Yeah. That's a lot of poppy seeds. Poppy seeds are illegal to sell in the United States because of their use in opium manufacture. So. I wouldn't try to find blackberry and poppy seed knedliky like these in the US. You will fail. Just like you would fail to find Tartar (a Hungarian dish consisting of raw meat and spices. It's totally awesome!)in the US. Americans, so picky about cooking requirements....


Then we went back to Bratislava, and proceded to have a completely normal week! Nothing untoward has happened, nor has anything earth shatteringly great occurred either. So. Yeah.

And that's all there is. There isn't anymore.