Slovakia weekend

Trip Start Jul 29, 2010

Trip End Jun 30, 2011

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Flag of Slovakia Kosice, Kosice, Slovakia
Sunday, September 12, 2010

This weekend Tina and I drove to Kosice, which is the second largest city in Slovakia. It's about the same size as Debrecen, which is about 250,000 people. The drive is about 2 hours or so through mostly Hungarian countryside and then a little bit up into the mountains in Slovakia. I thought it was beautiful. You pass through mostly small towns and villages and farm land that eventually is surrounded by green rolling hills. Most of the farms are corn or sunflower farms, and I can only imagine how beautiful everything is in the Spring. The sunflowers are mostly dead right now, but the fields are still really pretty. I will have to drive through next year sometime when everything is in full bloom.

Kosice is a really cute town with narrow streets and a main pedestrian area in the city center. The St. Elisabeth church is the main site to see, and it's really pretty. It's a huge gothic cathedral right in the center of town, and wedding after wedding took place there yesterday afternoon. The city center also has a huge fountain that sprays to songs that are blasted into the square. Many of the songs are American, which I thought was kind of funny.

There was a street fair going on in the middle of the square in the afternoon and into the evening. They were cooking Slovakian food, selling crafts and had live music on a big stage. When we got there, there was a Slovakian country music band playing. For a minute, I thought they might have been playing in English, but when I listened more closely, I could tell it was probably Slovak. Slovak is apparently a mixture of Czech and Polish. Anyway, all of the band members were wearing cowboy hats and they sounded like a band you would have heard in a country bar in Texas. It was kind of nice to hear.

We basically strolled around for most of the afternoon, ate a few times, had a couple of glasses of wine and just relaxed. We stayed at a cute penzion that was right around the corner from the main square. The location was perfect, the room was cheap and the place was nice.

Kosice is definitely a nice place to visit for a day or so. We think we saw everything there was to see in a day. I would have liked to do some hiking in the mountains around the city, but it was a bit cold and rainy there yesterday. We had breakfast there this morning and then headed home. We got home in the early afternoon, which was really nice because we had the afternoon to be lazy. We ended up walking around a flea market in Debrecen, doing some grocery shopping and then just lazing around at the aparrment. It was a warm, sunny day in Debrecen, so I sat outside on my balcony for a couple of hours and finished a book. I like lazy Sundays.

Kosice hotels

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