Dobry Den! We have been in Slovakia now for almost a week and we love it! There are almost no other tourists, a very low crime rate, everyone is very friendly, the temperature is hanging in at +14, and the prices for nearly everything are low (Mike is thrilled that beer only costs $0.85 for a half litre bottle in the bar!) What a great place! Too bad we have to leave so soon, but we hope to come back to this region of Europe to continue exploring after we have worked some in Ireland.
We stayed the last couple of nights in a little village in the Mala Fatra mountains where the autumn leaves were such brilliant colours. Outside the village, we watched a shepherd herding his sheep (although the dogs were really doing most of the work), saw many wild swans on the lakes, wild pigs on a closed ski hill, and hiked up (500 m up) some jagged peaks for beautiful, misty views of the valley. We spent the previous few nights in a Slovakian city called Kosice, where we were the only ones poking about in a medieval torture chamber.
It has been fun working in a totally new language again, and we have ordered some Slovakian mystery items in restaurants, but nothing that has turned out any worse than deep-fried cheese. Most people here think we are from Germany, and speak to us in broken German, which doesn't really help things much. We usually manage to communicate somehow in a chaotic combination of English, a few words in German, Polish and Slovakian we have picked up or might understand or can look up in our small 5 language dictionary, maybe a bit of Spanish and occasionally using some of Mike's sparse French, but mostly using wild hand gestures. This has given everyone some good laughs (think a young Slovakian girl who also speaks German asking Mike what time he wants breakfast, reading off a prepared English cue-card. He responds "Nine" (as in "o'clock"), she hears "nein" (no) in German , she asks "Nicht?" (none?) and he responds "No, no!" which confuses her more. Of course, in the end, finger and hand motions clarify things and it sorted itself out as it always does, despite our great surprise).
We have also been meeting lots of other backpackers on our travels, who have given us some good laughs, and great advice about places to visit, and hostels for when our hospitality club hopes fall through occasionally. The last guy we met was travelling around with a reindeer skin pillow from Finland! Our backpacks are filling up with completed journals (I am almost finished my second one) and warmer clothes for the changing season. We have socks from both East and West Germany and Slovakia, sweaters and boots from little villages in Poland, and some novels that we should really be trading in soon for some new ones. We carry more books than anything else!
We hope to put some more photos on our site soon, but not all the computers we find make this an easy task. Keep checking back though!
Sending all our love from Bratislava,
Carli-Ann and Mike
Sunday, October 24, 2004
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
Krakow
Hey to all of you slopping about in the snow over there in Edmonton! We are in Krakow (no snow yet)in southern Poland and we are heading to Slovakia tomorrow. Couple of highlights of the last few days: finding our own amber on the beaches in Gdansk on the Baltic Sea (!), visiting Auschwitz (Oswiecim) and Birkenau Concentration camps (very intense) and finding good vegetarian food in Poland (it can be done!). Soon, after the Czech Republic,we will have to settle down in Ireland for the winter, but we haven't given up travelling just yet! Keep us updated on Halloween events, I don't think they celebrate it or Thanksgiving at all here so we are a little sad, but can't wait to be emailed some photos! Carli-Ann and Mike
Thursday, October 14, 2004
Baltic Sea
Hey everyone, we made it to the Baltic Sea and are enjoying our time staying with a girl here in Gdansk from the hospitality club. She hitchhiked the world for five years (staying vegan no less) with her partner and is currently working on publishing the English version of her book about it. We are helping her a bit to edit it. She is giving us so much great advice about travelling!
The sea here is beatuiful, and you can find amber on the beaches! Though it is very sunny and the autumn colours are fantastic, it is getting pretty cold. But for urban travelling, that is not so much of a problem.
We did so many great things in Warsaw last week with our hospitality club family, like visiting the small, artsy community of Kazimierz Dolny and its castle, churches and monasteries, a gallery featuring the propaganda art of the socialist era, museums about the Uprising of the people of Warsaw during the Nazi invasion (it is the 60th anniversary), a (sort-of black, maybe greyish) huge market where you can find anything from guns to soap, a Polish drag queen show, and we learned so much about the history of Poland. We are glad that we could travel here to hear for ourselves what has happened historically and culturally in different countries, because history is written differently depending on your source.
We are taking it easy now while Mike gets over a flu, but there are still many places we would like to see.
Happy Canadian Thanksgiving over there!
Carli-Ann and Mike
The sea here is beatuiful, and you can find amber on the beaches! Though it is very sunny and the autumn colours are fantastic, it is getting pretty cold. But for urban travelling, that is not so much of a problem.
We did so many great things in Warsaw last week with our hospitality club family, like visiting the small, artsy community of Kazimierz Dolny and its castle, churches and monasteries, a gallery featuring the propaganda art of the socialist era, museums about the Uprising of the people of Warsaw during the Nazi invasion (it is the 60th anniversary), a (sort-of black, maybe greyish) huge market where you can find anything from guns to soap, a Polish drag queen show, and we learned so much about the history of Poland. We are glad that we could travel here to hear for ourselves what has happened historically and culturally in different countries, because history is written differently depending on your source.
We are taking it easy now while Mike gets over a flu, but there are still many places we would like to see.
Happy Canadian Thanksgiving over there!
Carli-Ann and Mike
Saturday, October 09, 2004
Poland
Hi! We have been in Poland, staying in a little village near Warsaw (the capital) since last weekend. We are staying with a wonderful Polish family from the hospitality club who are teaching us all about Polish history and geography, and their daughter is showing us around, including all the current Polish trends.
Last night we went to a Polish pirate bar that was well decorated like a ship, to listen to a Polish sailor band that she was friends with. The whole bar was dancing on the benches and the tables all night and drinking beer from one meter tall cylinders in the middle of the tables that held 5 litres of beer and you filled up your mug from a spout at the bottom. Mike was very impressed with the ingenious design. Carli-Ann drank the most beer she has had in her life, a whole 0.5 litre glass over 2 hours, only possible because it is not taboo in Europe to mix beer with fruit juice or lemonade or cola and drink it with a straw. She is not making it a habit however.
We have enjoyed walking the streets of Warsaw, and we have visited their National Art Gallery and Museum of History, and have been discovering many monuments dedicated to various important moments in WWII and before. The history of this country is so evident everywhere, and we appreciate having good hosts to ask our difficult questions to and to get some new perspectives from. We even cluelessly bumbled right through a Polish music video being filmed on the street, so we might even be on Polish TV!
Our Polish family will be taking us to some other little towns this weekend, and then next week we will be visiting the Baltic sea and then Krakow and the Polish Tatra mountains. Anyone who is geographically keen will probably notice that we are not taking the most logical path around the continent, but rather the scenic route. Mike was joking that we are trying to write our names across Europe.
An interesting fact: dogs in Poland do not say BARK, they say HAU. In Germany, the dog says WAU. In Japan they said WAN. We may not be fluent in Polish yet, but we are excelling in our international dog noises. (They found it hard to beleive that Canadian roosters actually say COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO)
We recently acquired a little, very basic dictionary that has Polish, English, German, Italian and French, so that is helpful to a certain extent. Mike is very brave about trying out new words in stores and post offices and what not, but Polish is a very difficult language to learn. Everything is pronounced very differently than how we would read it.
We put some photos online from Germany, and hopefully we will put some on from Poland too. We will update again when our adventures unfold further! Thanks to everyone who has been keeping in touch with us. It's great to hear how everything is at home!
P.S. We are thrilled to discover that the occasional perogi is filled with cream cheese and berries!
Last night we went to a Polish pirate bar that was well decorated like a ship, to listen to a Polish sailor band that she was friends with. The whole bar was dancing on the benches and the tables all night and drinking beer from one meter tall cylinders in the middle of the tables that held 5 litres of beer and you filled up your mug from a spout at the bottom. Mike was very impressed with the ingenious design. Carli-Ann drank the most beer she has had in her life, a whole 0.5 litre glass over 2 hours, only possible because it is not taboo in Europe to mix beer with fruit juice or lemonade or cola and drink it with a straw. She is not making it a habit however.
We have enjoyed walking the streets of Warsaw, and we have visited their National Art Gallery and Museum of History, and have been discovering many monuments dedicated to various important moments in WWII and before. The history of this country is so evident everywhere, and we appreciate having good hosts to ask our difficult questions to and to get some new perspectives from. We even cluelessly bumbled right through a Polish music video being filmed on the street, so we might even be on Polish TV!
Our Polish family will be taking us to some other little towns this weekend, and then next week we will be visiting the Baltic sea and then Krakow and the Polish Tatra mountains. Anyone who is geographically keen will probably notice that we are not taking the most logical path around the continent, but rather the scenic route. Mike was joking that we are trying to write our names across Europe.
An interesting fact: dogs in Poland do not say BARK, they say HAU. In Germany, the dog says WAU. In Japan they said WAN. We may not be fluent in Polish yet, but we are excelling in our international dog noises. (They found it hard to beleive that Canadian roosters actually say COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO)
We recently acquired a little, very basic dictionary that has Polish, English, German, Italian and French, so that is helpful to a certain extent. Mike is very brave about trying out new words in stores and post offices and what not, but Polish is a very difficult language to learn. Everything is pronounced very differently than how we would read it.
We put some photos online from Germany, and hopefully we will put some on from Poland too. We will update again when our adventures unfold further! Thanks to everyone who has been keeping in touch with us. It's great to hear how everything is at home!
P.S. We are thrilled to discover that the occasional perogi is filled with cream cheese and berries!
Saturday, October 02, 2004
Berlin
Hey! We have been partying in Berlin for the last five days and have had a great time! We hoped the capital would be a fun place to visit, but we were not prepared for how much life and vitality and culture and history this city offers.
We stayed for two nights in Nuremburg, visited the Nazi Party Rally Grounds which has a fantastic museum built into it with an astonishing and powerful architectural design where we walk through great glass hallways piercing the building like shafts of light, visited the toy museum, and tramped all over the city, most things rebuilt since the war, both in the old design but modern buildings too.
We then hitchhiked to Magdeburg, (we were actually aiming for Berlin but when a ride told us he was going to Magdeburg, we thought that this would be a good opportunity to see the city my grandma Ursula was born in), a city that used to be in East Germany. It was almost completely destroyed during the war and then rebuilt under the direction of the USSR, then when Germany was reunited, it’s factories closed and now there is high unemployment but still so much history. The ruins and buildings are from so many different eras and there is so much contrast between them. We spent a lot of time just walking around the streets, looking at statues glorifying various parts of their history and exploring parks. It was a very worth while stop, especially because it was so different than all the other areas of Germany we have visited.
We took the train to Berlin and are staying with a new friend from the hospitality club who is taking such good care of us. We have seen so much of the vibrant city, every part of it has the feeling of a place that has been through so much and is constantly reinventing itself. We stopped by Checkpoint Charlie where they documented the history of the Berlin Wall and the various, inventive manners that people tried to escape East Germany, both successfully and unsuccessfully, visited the intense Jewish Museum, another architectural marvel, and we have seen parts of the wall and bought our own tourist chip of it. We have eaten Nepalese and Turkish and Indian and Italian food (we are getting a little weary of traditional German food), checked out an Australian gig, and an awesome club with a fire-breathing dragon on the ceiling (like we needed it to be hotter in there), drank wine while lounging in a giant spittoon-esque empty fountain under a full moon in front of the National Gallery in the Lust-garten, Mike has sampled many good German beers, and we have had great guided tours by our friend through all the artsy and dreary and hidden parts of the city, both eastern and western.
We are planning to go to Poland tomorrow, and then to the Czech Republic hopefully and then we will see how much longer we can afford to travel and how the weather holds out. I have to go buy another sweater and some mittens today, I think.
Still having a blast and we are so excited to be experiencing this part of the world!
We stayed for two nights in Nuremburg, visited the Nazi Party Rally Grounds which has a fantastic museum built into it with an astonishing and powerful architectural design where we walk through great glass hallways piercing the building like shafts of light, visited the toy museum, and tramped all over the city, most things rebuilt since the war, both in the old design but modern buildings too.
We then hitchhiked to Magdeburg, (we were actually aiming for Berlin but when a ride told us he was going to Magdeburg, we thought that this would be a good opportunity to see the city my grandma Ursula was born in), a city that used to be in East Germany. It was almost completely destroyed during the war and then rebuilt under the direction of the USSR, then when Germany was reunited, it’s factories closed and now there is high unemployment but still so much history. The ruins and buildings are from so many different eras and there is so much contrast between them. We spent a lot of time just walking around the streets, looking at statues glorifying various parts of their history and exploring parks. It was a very worth while stop, especially because it was so different than all the other areas of Germany we have visited.
We took the train to Berlin and are staying with a new friend from the hospitality club who is taking such good care of us. We have seen so much of the vibrant city, every part of it has the feeling of a place that has been through so much and is constantly reinventing itself. We stopped by Checkpoint Charlie where they documented the history of the Berlin Wall and the various, inventive manners that people tried to escape East Germany, both successfully and unsuccessfully, visited the intense Jewish Museum, another architectural marvel, and we have seen parts of the wall and bought our own tourist chip of it. We have eaten Nepalese and Turkish and Indian and Italian food (we are getting a little weary of traditional German food), checked out an Australian gig, and an awesome club with a fire-breathing dragon on the ceiling (like we needed it to be hotter in there), drank wine while lounging in a giant spittoon-esque empty fountain under a full moon in front of the National Gallery in the Lust-garten, Mike has sampled many good German beers, and we have had great guided tours by our friend through all the artsy and dreary and hidden parts of the city, both eastern and western.
We are planning to go to Poland tomorrow, and then to the Czech Republic hopefully and then we will see how much longer we can afford to travel and how the weather holds out. I have to go buy another sweater and some mittens today, I think.
Still having a blast and we are so excited to be experiencing this part of the world!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
