Almost paradise

So, what to do in Slovakia, besides pass through on the way from Hungary to Poland? Bratislava doesn't get fabulous reviews, and we're always on the lookout for great hiking areas, even more so since our Slovenia hiking plans got rained out. So the Spiš region called to us; it tempted us with the Tatra mountains but we settled on Slovensky Raj, or Slovak Paradise -- how can you go wrong with a name like that?

Slovensky Raj is known for gorges and waterfalls, and the gorges with waterfalls rrunning through them -- we spent 2 days of quite adventurous hiking – the kind you find very little of in the fearful, litigious USA. The trails were very well constructed and well-signed, but they didn't bother carving out easy routes, they simply made it possible to get through the terrain: lots of ladders (horizontal and vertical), metal steps affixed to the sides of cliffs with water rushing below, steep slippery rocks with chains to help you pull yourself up or let yourself down, lots of rock-hopping back and forth across creeks...so much fun! With a gorgeous cliff overlook, a place serving great lentil soup in the middle of the trail network, and trailheads easily reachable by bus, it adds up to a highly recommended hiking wonderland.







Of course, Brian doesn't actually consider 6 hours of hiking to be enough of a workout for a day, so he was happy to have another communist-era fitness center about 200 feet from our hotel. I myself consider 6 hours of hiking to mean I deserve a nap. Isn't it nice that we both get what we want?




While Brian concentrated on eating goulash in Eastern Europe, I concentrated on meat with fruit sauces, which I love. The best was a strawberry-and-green-peppercorn sauce on roasted duck, served with mashed potatoes (die-die-must try), at Menza, a fabulous retro-chic restaurant on Liszt Square in Budapest. I also ate my way through cranberry sauce on chicken, pork with prune, and chicken with sour cherry.

I had read about cold fruit soup in Hungary, and am still kicking myself for waiting until our last night there to try it -- a red currant soup, pink dreaminess in a bowl. Another feature of Hungary was the Bull's Blood wine out in the Eger region – deep red, lush, and delicious.

Brian briefly mentioned the Budapest baths with the chess players in his last post, and for some reason I told him he should leave it to me to expound (since I'd forgotten to write about the baths in Turkey, I figured I'd catch up on that at the same time). So: the Hungarian baths are like a very wet playground; many different fun areas to be explored, thermal baths in varying heats and varying levels of minerals causing various shades of yellow-green (nicer than it sounds). We did a little lap swimming exercise for a self-righteous start to the day, then headed for the outdoor pool waterfall jets for a shoulder massage. This pool also had a surprise foot-tickling mechanism, whee! Next was the current pool – super strong jets sweeping us around in a circle, delighting kids and adults alike. Then we headed inside to the thermal/mineral baths, making ourselves tingle by alternating super-hot with super-cold. We then found the sauna, which was even hotter, tremendously hotter -- and the cold pool by it was even colder (I'm not sure whether we added to or subtracted from our lifespans with that part of the experience). All in all, the complex was tremendously impressive – we found even more rooms with more features (such as an aroma sauna) as we tried to find our way out -- it was hard to tear ourselves away, but other activities were calling.

My Turkish bath experience (hamam) was quite different, more spa and less play. I did the bath after a long day of hiking, and felt grubby to start with. I tried to communicate that I wanted to start with a shower, but between the language barrier and the prescribed order of the hamam elements, it didn't work. They slathered a mud mask on my face and put me in the sauna so that the day's dirt could seep deeply into my pores – or maybe the dirt on my legs just meant that the mud mask wasn't only on my face. I moved on to the loofah scrub-down (yowza) and soap massage on a hot marble slab, then cold shower, jacuzzi, and relaxation lounge. Biggest surprise: the jacuzzi was cool rather than hot – it felt great in the steamy room!

Also, back in the Balkans post, I somehow forgot one of the Sarajevo highlights -- the National Museum with the Haggadah from "People of the Book." Has anyone read this one? It's a wonderful novel by Geraldine Brooks, who wrote "Year of Wonders" and won the Pulitzer recently for "March." The book is a fictionalized history of an actual Jewish relic called the Sarajevo Haggadah, which we tried to see. It is in a hermetically sealed case (good, I totally support that) in a separate room behind locked doors (are you kidding me?). You could only sort of see it from a sideways kind of very bad view. They only open the room for special events or visiting dignitaries or something. Bah. They did have a touch-screen console about it which you could actually page through, though, very cool.






This last picture is for Venitha, and everyone else enamored with the hat and its travels. ;-)













Also...is there irony in the fact that Brian calls himself “slackerboy” here, yet the large gaps in blog posts are when it's my turn to write? You can be assured that his Poland post will be up soon!