Our Trip to Slovak Paradise

After our week in Vranov nad Topľou, Lisa and I took a relatively short trip toward the center of Slovakia. Our plan was to meet up with our friend and colleague Jack for the weekend in a village called Smižany (pronounced: Smee-zha-nee.) Besides being the largest village in Slovakia—or so one of the teachers had told us—Smižany is better known for being adjacent to Slovenský Raj, one of Slovakia’s best national parks which literally translates into ‘Slovak Paradise.’

After traveling for several hours, we arrived in the village and had to walk about twenty minutes away from the train tracks to reach our accommodation—a cute little dwelling that sported comfy rooms, a very welcoming staff and an incredibly convenient proximity to the national park.

Beneath the Mountains

[Warning: There are very few pictures to accompany this post. That is because Lisa was off teaching in a town called Snina and is the keeper of the camera—seeing as it is her camera. I apologize in advance.]

Aerial view of Spišská Belá next to the Tatras.

We left Levoča and I made my way to a place called Spišská Belá for a week of solo teaching. Spišská Belá is a cute town that is situated along a main road that leads into the High Tatras mountains. Consequently, from the town, one can catch a breathtaking view of the mountains on a clear day. Fortunately for me, Spring decided that this was the week that it would awaken—ending this year’s brutally long Winter for good—and I was able to see the mountains most days during my stay. The walk to school was about 10 minutes long every morning, but it was one of my favorite parts of the day; once I got past the gas station, the landscape opened up invitingly and the mountains became available to any desiring onlookers.

Quite stunning.

A Winter Tatra Trip

On Easter Sunday, Lisa and I traveled from Kraków to the town of Zakopane which is directly over the Slovak border, resting right up against the Polish side of the Tatra Mountain chain. Zakopane is a charming mountain town that we had actually visited before—on accident, that is. We once took a bus from northern Slovakia into Poland and hiked through the national park, trying to spot a series of lakes that is apparently very gorgeous. We never found the lakes, though, due to two things. First, the fog was so thick that, had we been in the right place, we would have had no chance of seeing them anyway.

Secondly, we were not in the right place.

At any rate, after the 35 minutes or so that we rushed through Zakopane last time, we knew that it was a place to revisit.

Ždiar, Giraltovce & Beyond!

Because I haven’t posted anything in a decent amount of time (I have a couple posts that I am working on simultaneously right now), I am going to have to squeeze a significant amount of information into this one post. I want to make sure that I do not get behind—the longer I wait to report on something, the less detail I will remember. Make sense? So maybe this post will be a real roller coaster of tales and insights. Maybe not, though.

***

So, like I said in my last post, Lisa and I made our way to Ždiar, Slovakia (pronounced: Zhih-dyarr) and stayed at the hostel known as The Ginger Monkey. Quite an experience, to say the least. The bus that took us up through the mountainous region did so after it had become fully dark outside. It wasn’t bad timing since I had a piercing headache at that point—I get dehydrated quite easily—but was semi-problematic since we had no idea how to make our way to the hostel. In fact, we didn’t even know when to get off the bus. To make a long and boring story short, the Australian girls sitting behind us that had been speaking English for the entire bus ride were actually going to the same place and were able to guide us there very easily as well as give us the low-down on the living arrangements. Things were good so far. They were only going to get better.