Two weekends ago, a good friend from law school met me in Krakow, where we hung out for a couple days, seeing the city and making a side trip to Auschwitz before picking up a rental car to go to Slovakia. You may be asking, “Why Slovakia?” Several Slovakians whom we met along the way had exactly that question for us, and our response was, “Why not Slovakia?” Rural Slovakia is beautiful – wild forests, old castles, farmland, countless villages, each with its own steepled church – and plenty of time to observe it all as you’re stuck driving behind a tractor.
My friend is also Asian, and I think we have discovered the last two places on earth that aren’t completely overrun with buses full of Asian tourists – Spissky Hrad and Bardejov, Slovakia. Krakow was an entirely different story, with the city center swarming with tourists from all over the world (especially drunk British men – apparently, flights are so cheap, British men drink so much, and drinks in London are so expensive, that it’s cheaper for them to fly to Eastern Europe to party than to go to their local pub).
Slovakia, on the other hand, hasn’t yet been fully noticed by the outside, and is only just starting to connect to the outside world. We were often hard-pressed to find anyone who spoke any of the five languages we had between the two of us – English, French, German, Korean, and Chinese – a rare occurrence in Europe, where people tend to be bi-, tri-, or multilingual.
A good quick test of how closely a place is tied to civilization and the modern world is the Internet and the water supply. Can you find a computer with an Internet connection? Can you drink the tap water? If the answer to both those questions is yes, then you’re in a modern “First World” country. If the answer is no, then you’re being a bit more adventurous, and are hopefully reaping other benefits in terms of photo ops and cross-cultural understanding. The first Slovakian town we stayed had no Internet café, and even the locals didn’t drink the tap water. The second place we stayed had a computer connected to the Internet, but the computer was running on only 32 MB of RAM, so I think that still gets some points for remoteness from the modern world.
Rather incredibly, my friend and I didn’t get lost on our three-day road trip, despite several factors that were running against us: neither of us has a sense of direction; we don’t speak (or read) Slovakian or Polish; and we didn’t have GPS or a map of Slovakia. That’s right, we drove for two days without getting lost in the Slovakian countryside, with nothing but the equivalent of printouts from MapQuest. We were pretty proud of ourselves, and one of our big regrets is that we caved in and bought a map of Poland (which we didn’t really use, anyways).
The trip was a blast, although I don’t think I’ve ever missed fresh vegetables so much. Polish and Slovakian food (and perhaps Eastern European food in general) is very heavy on meat, potatoes, and pickles. In Slovakia, I ordered a pork chop, and was told to pick a side dish. I asked for vegetables, and the waitress said that there were boiled potatoes, fried potatoes, French fries, potato pancakes, and roasted potatoes. I ordered a salad, instead, and when it came out, it was a plate of pickled carrots, pickled cabbage, and pickled red cabbage. The pork chop was breaded, deep-fried, and topped with a fried egg and a slice of ham. At a restaurant in Poland, the pre-meal bread came not with butter, but with a pot of lard studded with chunks of bacon fat. Delicious? Yes. Nutritious? Perhaps not.
My friend is also Asian, and I think we have discovered the last two places on earth that aren’t completely overrun with buses full of Asian tourists – Spissky Hrad and Bardejov, Slovakia. Krakow was an entirely different story, with the city center swarming with tourists from all over the world (especially drunk British men – apparently, flights are so cheap, British men drink so much, and drinks in London are so expensive, that it’s cheaper for them to fly to Eastern Europe to party than to go to their local pub).
Slovakia, on the other hand, hasn’t yet been fully noticed by the outside, and is only just starting to connect to the outside world. We were often hard-pressed to find anyone who spoke any of the five languages we had between the two of us – English, French, German, Korean, and Chinese – a rare occurrence in Europe, where people tend to be bi-, tri-, or multilingual.
A good quick test of how closely a place is tied to civilization and the modern world is the Internet and the water supply. Can you find a computer with an Internet connection? Can you drink the tap water? If the answer to both those questions is yes, then you’re in a modern “First World” country. If the answer is no, then you’re being a bit more adventurous, and are hopefully reaping other benefits in terms of photo ops and cross-cultural understanding. The first Slovakian town we stayed had no Internet café, and even the locals didn’t drink the tap water. The second place we stayed had a computer connected to the Internet, but the computer was running on only 32 MB of RAM, so I think that still gets some points for remoteness from the modern world.
Rather incredibly, my friend and I didn’t get lost on our three-day road trip, despite several factors that were running against us: neither of us has a sense of direction; we don’t speak (or read) Slovakian or Polish; and we didn’t have GPS or a map of Slovakia. That’s right, we drove for two days without getting lost in the Slovakian countryside, with nothing but the equivalent of printouts from MapQuest. We were pretty proud of ourselves, and one of our big regrets is that we caved in and bought a map of Poland (which we didn’t really use, anyways).
The trip was a blast, although I don’t think I’ve ever missed fresh vegetables so much. Polish and Slovakian food (and perhaps Eastern European food in general) is very heavy on meat, potatoes, and pickles. In Slovakia, I ordered a pork chop, and was told to pick a side dish. I asked for vegetables, and the waitress said that there were boiled potatoes, fried potatoes, French fries, potato pancakes, and roasted potatoes. I ordered a salad, instead, and when it came out, it was a plate of pickled carrots, pickled cabbage, and pickled red cabbage. The pork chop was breaded, deep-fried, and topped with a fried egg and a slice of ham. At a restaurant in Poland, the pre-meal bread came not with butter, but with a pot of lard studded with chunks of bacon fat. Delicious? Yes. Nutritious? Perhaps not.
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