Let me begin by saying that lunch certainly was a big hit with us. There's nothing like being handed a big blue bag and peeking at its contents while sitting in the bus. One huge sandwich (and I mean huge), made with cold breaded pork cutlets between 2 slices of rye bread, 2 apples, 2 oranges, 1 nectarine, 1 bottle of water, and two large sugar wafer cookies: one made with chocolate wafers with nutella layered between, and the other some type of lovely chocolate concoction. Sure glad we didn't miss out on that deal.
Once again, I awoke early, after tossing and turning all night. I would blame it on the cheap bottle of wine that Amy and I tried last night, but it's probably much more than that. In any event, we thought that we needed to be ready for the bus at 8:00. The realty was that breakfast was at 8:00 and we were leaving at 9:30, which really became nearly 10:00 thanks to some slow moving students.
But, that gave me some early morning time to try to absorb some of the Slovak language. I'm not sure if the difficulty I'm having is due to having an old brain, or just to sheer exhaustion with all of the commotion that has been going on.
Today we headed out to Smolenice Castle for our excursion. We were supposed to hike in the Small Carpathian mountains, but the plans were changed due to possible storms in the area. Let me just mention that we never saw even one raindrop until after we arrived back in Modra.
But, we enjoyed our day nonetheless. I think the women in charge felt bad about eliminating the hike, so they somehow managed to find a way for us to tour the castle. We had been told yesterday that it was closed and that we could only just walk around it. One of the women on today's trip spoke English and she was excited to translate for Amy and us. She was just one big bubbly source of entertainment, and Amy and I really appreciated her efforts as translator.
The view from the top was stunning, and above you can see the highest mountain in the Small Carpathian mountains.
This castle now serves as a source of relaxation for the Slovak Dept. of Sciences Academy . It sure is easy to see why it would be relaxing.
After our castle excursion, we loaded back up on the bus and headed to Driny cave.
Above you see the woods that we walked through to get to the entrance. It was quite a hike uphill to the entrance. This is apparently the only cave in this area of Slovakia where one can walk through. Not that I would put that on the top of my list of things to do, but it was interesting, nonetheless, and we had our great interpreter to help us enjoy the experience.
Here's a photo looking down from the entrance.
After we returned to the room, we headed into Modra to attend 6:00 mass at St. Stephen the King Church.
Of course I only understood a few words, but we certainly enjoyed the renewal of vows by a couple who was celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary.
Afterwards, we headed to a quaint restaurant where we had enjoyed a lovely meal earlier in the week. Here the waiter patiently listened to our botched Slovak language ordering, only to answer us in English. The meal here was great, and despite having to walk through wind and rain to and from Modra, we enjoyed ourselves very much.
We certainly had an enjoyable day, and we look forward to tomorrow when we attempt to head into Trnava to explore that beautiful city that is supposed to be known as "Little Rome". We hope to meet up with our cousin, Lubos Mrena, so here's hoping for another great adventure!
I'll keep you posted.
Dovidenia!
No comments:
Post a Comment