East to West: Koŝice to Bratislava

So, after visiting Prague for the second time (the subject of my last post), Lisa and I made our way to Koŝice—where our company is based in eastern Slovakia—to work on a few things: paperwork regarding work permits, the opening of a bank account so I can be paid, and attaining a cheap phone. All of these things happened and, while they took an entire week, don’t really seem worthy of taking up a substantial part of my blog. There are a couple worthwhile things about Koŝice that deserve some attention, though. First, we found possibly our favorite restaurant so far—Med Malina. It is a Polish restaurant and its name literally translates into “Honey Raspberry”, which is apparently a phrase that is uttered by Polish people when they eat something that tastes really good. Like ‘Mmmmm’—but more creative. The menu is very reasonable in price and they offer all the traditional dishes that you’d want to see—haluŝky, pirohy, garlic soup, goulash with cabbage and sausage, etc.

We may or may not have visited it three times in two days…

Secondly, situated in the main square of Koŝice’s Old Town (right next to a Gothic cathedral which is very impressive architecturally but pretty eerie at night since they don’t keep it lit) there is a fountain known as the musical fountain. Basically, it is a pretty generously sized fountain with anywhere from 15-20 streams of water that shoot randomly up in the air like geysers. But, like the name clearly implies, they do so while accompanying music blaring from the speakers which are located behind various benches around the fountain. It’s kind of a pleasant idea, really—maybe if accompanied by some solid orchestral pieces or something poignant like that.

But this is not the case.

Praha

So, as I have mentioned a couple of times now, the past two weekends for me have been spent in the famed fairy tale land of Prague—also known as the golden city. It has been named so because, in the past, all of the lead rooftops throughout the city were once coated with a thin layer of gold.

A ludicrous waste of wealth, you say? Maybe. But I’m sure it did create a pretty bizarre & dreamlike effect.

These are the things that happened to me in this mystical city.

***

The first weekend I was there alone since Lisa was off in Frankfurt visiting family. I arrived after about 8 hours of traveling on a couple different trains (about 2 hours of which I had to sit next to a couple who were probably somewhere in their high 20’s and were definitely too old to play the game “poke the other person and then giggle for 30 seconds”—this didn’t stop them, though. I imagine it never does.) I arrived at the main station and instantly headed for a McDonalds in the famed St. Wenceslaus Square in order to use the free WiFi and figure out where exactly the hostel I was staying at is located. This maneuver has become pretty routine during my travels. McDonalds has killer, free internet.

Mushrooms & Communism

This past week, we were teaching in a small village called Naĉeradec (pronounced: Nuh-chair-uh-ditz.) It’s a little place that is about two hours south of Prague by bus. There are approximately 600 people that live there and, surprisingly, it is one of the bigger villages in the area. It has a proper town square, a couple little grocery stores, a church (the original foundation of the building is from the 12^th century) & even a pub. Still—it’s very tiny, though. As far as teaching goes, the students here didn’t speak as good of English for two reasons: they were slightly younger than the students we usually teach and their English teachers don’t actually speak that good of English. So, we had to work a little bit harder to get any sort of worthwhile response from them for five straight days. But that will happen, I guess. Their school lunches were more than adequate, at least.

“The Roma Problem”

I just sat down to write something quickly about my visit to Prague this weekend but realized that I had already written something while I was in Giraltovce, Slovakia that I never managed to post. So, with that said, I’ll edit this a little bit and give it to you because I think it is worthwhile and will give you some information about Prague and my current situation later on this week—most likely.

***

I want to bring up something a tad bit more serious than anything I’ve rambled about in the past. In Slovakia (and, in fact, across much of Europe and other places in the world), there is a group of people known as the Roma or the Romany—that is, if you want to be politically correct. If you want to be slightly less politically correct, but want people to know what you’re talking about, you can simply call them Gypsies.