All in One Weekend

Alright so the past weekend was kind of a rollercoaster. It started out with me managing to get lost in Zilina. Thats right, as small of a town as this is, I conquered the feat of running around in circles while trying to find the main bus station. Once I left my office, I was so disoriented but at the same time so sure in my mind of where I was going... WRONG. It was so frusterating not being able to ask for directions either. Luckily I had Katka, a friend of mine from the local AIESEC come and find me. Bad news was that because I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off, we missed our bus to a conference that we were going to. Don't even ask me to pronounce the name of the village. So off to the train station, another bus, blah blah blah, and we end up in the middle of nowhere in Slovakia. Seriously though, we came to a set of cabins where the conference was occuring, no phone signal or anything. Miriam and I felt a little out of place because there was a lot of younger people at the conference and the majority of sessions planned with in Slovak language.

Castle in Trencin

The solution as we saw it was to head to another city and do some more exploring. We got up on saturday mornign after getting only 3 hrs of sleep, and walked about 5km to the nearest city bus stop. With minimal knowledge of Slovakian we managed to get to Trencin. This city boasts a beautiful castle atop of a hill. We did the castle tour (you always have to do the castle tour otherwise you only get to see the outside). Unfortunately for us that was in Slovakian too, so we walked around the castle and looked all of the paintings, artifacts, etc. without understanding the stories behind them. This is the first castle that I've been to that allows you to take pictures inside including pictures of the art work. Flash photography is probably not the best thing for 18th century paintings. I was amused by some of the spelling mistakes that I found printed in English beside the paintings. Last I checked Queen is not spelled like "Qeen." Miriam couldn't get over the fact that I take pictures of everything and anythign. Memories hello...



At night we found a great Mexican restaurant and had a good bottle of wine, Frankovka. We checked out some of the nightlife, which was pretty good for a smaller city. Bedtime came early due to the lack of sleep the night before but boy did we ever make up for it. 11 hours of sleep will certainly rejuvinate you. Once we got back to Zilina, we went shopping for the essentials for our place, and now we are nicely settled in. Anyone want to come over for coffee? cuz we have mugs and everything..

Check out the pics from Trencin.