Simon en France: Trip to Slovakia

Another rather long post about what happened in Slovakia. This time about 29th and 30th of December. I´m sorry for the mistakes in the previous post (it was already late when I wrote it...). Once again for this post as well: Whoever finds mistakes may keep them!

29^th Dec - first official day & global village
New day, new funny stuff experienced. Dan, Kate and me decided to meet around 1230 next to the hostel where we were supposed to stay and where all other delegates were. At the agreed time - no sign of the other two. So I waited and waited. After around half an hour I received the following text message: “Simu we need your help!! Find us please! We are hanging for half an hour around different Dom Mladezi but can´t find the right one :((“ As I was almost a local in the area (the flat was just 5mins away) I found them immediately - of course ;-) They weren´t too far away, but didn´t find the right dorm building. I guided the upset, tired and hungry Dan&Kate to the check-in and the flat we lived for the rest of our stay in Kosice.

While relaxing there a bit, we got a message from the three other swiss delegates - they missed the connection in Vienna and told us that they will arrive late in the evening. We thought, that this can´t be true and can´t happen because they had important stuff for our global village. Beside, Dan and me had the took the same connection from Zürich to Bratislava two days earlier and spent 3 hours in Bratislava and managed to be in Kosice before the arrival time they mentioned. So, we made some remote travel management: First of all, we told them to go Bratislava at least and take the next connection from there - they somehow didn´t come up with this idea yet. Then we told them which train they have to catch there and they did it - our stuff for global village arrived in time :)

After these issues were solved we went again to city centre. Dan and Kate wanted to eat something, then we met again with Tanya (one of the Ukrainian girls) and the girls wanted to go to a place where they have the “icecreamiest ice-cream” ever. Dan and me ended up drinking coffee and the girls eating ice-cream - somehow Ukrainians are more used to eat ice-cream in winter than swiss...

In the evening we went to Kaufland in order to buy some bread for our fondue at global village. I decided that I want to eat something so, we went to the food corner in this mall and I bought a pita kebab. The others didn´t want to eat as they weren´t hungry yet. Dan even said: “I´ll eat at the global village!” - yeah Dan, this was a very wise decision as we saw later on… ;-)

At around half past nine in the evening, the global village finally started. We had a nice fondue served with white wine, some chocolate and of course some swiss tequila and we distributed stickers with swiss cross on it to everyone - by the end of the evening almost everyone was somehow swiss. There were even people who came to us and asked if we have stickers left!

Dan´s condition started to get bad already at around 11 o´clock - somehow he couldn´t executed his plan - how surprised I was… Anyway Kate and me brought him to our flat and I went back to the dorm where the afterparty already started. When I arrived there again, two of the other swiss delegates told me that they´ll go to sleep, while the third one started an intercultural communication with Slovakia… Soon after I returned to the dorm I already left again, went back to the flat and got some sleep as well…

30^th Dec - the day before THE day
On Saturday we planned to go skiing/snowboarding in a place called Plejsy which is about 40km from Kosice. After one hour with train and a nice ski-bus (picture below) we arrived in the ski resort. But there were just two problems: First, long queues at the “ski rental station”, second one, almost no snow - well they were producing artificial snow with some snow machines but that wasn´t enough for the whole resort. Still we started to queue in order to rent snowboards or skis. After some time we heard that there are no snowboards left - we decided to ski again after several years without skiing ;-) But as efficiency was somehow a foreign word we could see any progress. We went to another place to rent skis but there was as well a queue which didn´t progress. After some time we gave up, bought a one-way ticket for the chairlift and went up. It took us around twenty minutes go up the mountain and when we arrived we were almost frozen - therefore we went to the restaurant first. After some thing to drink and some food (yes Dan was hungry for once:) we decided to walk down at least…

When we arrived back in Kosice it was already evening and after showering we went to have dinner. I proposed the place where I´ve been on the first evening because it was pretty close and had some nice Italian food. But this time another funny thing happened: First I wanted to order a salad. The waitress said “Sorry we don´t have vegetables anymore!” Ok, I thought, somehow strange but anyway, then I´ll just take a Pizza al Prosciutto. Her answer: “As I already told you, we don´t have vegetables anymore because of the end of the year we didn´t order new supplies yet. You can have this Pizza, but there won´t be tomatos on it!” Hmmm, ok, whatever I´ll take it without vegetables. Dan ordered Pasta - so no problem with that. Kate wanted to have a steak - no problem with that either. But then the waitress returned and said: “Sorry, we don´t have steaks anymore…” After we finally got our meals and eat the other two wanted to order dessert - but guess what, yes they almost had nothing left. Well Kate ordered something with coconut and Dan with chocolat - what he got was something like hot Nutella… ;-)

We thought that we had our fun for the day already after we left our dining place, but noooo, we were wrong. We didn´t take the other swiss delegates into account. When we got to their room and asked how their day was, they came up with the following story: they were caught in a tram without ticket. And they thought they are smart - the only slovak guy there pretended to be foreigner who doesn´t understand as well and they played stupid foreigner didn´t know what to do and how to buy tickets. Well, somehow it didn´t work. Then they thought that they´re even smarter and showed their swiss IDs to prove there point - didn´t work out as planned because the controller took their IDs away. So, everything ended up in a bit a mess and each of them had to pay a fee in order to get their IDs back…

After they told us their story we went to a pub to drink some beer. Then we returned to the dorm and joined topalky party which wasn´t very good. So we went to a room of some slovak people where - at midnight - we did a pre-run of new years eve in order to make sure that we are well-prepared and everything will go smoothly the day afterwards!

to be continued...