Slovakia: kosice

I love late spring. The weather is usually pretty good, there is green on the trees, and flowers are blooming. I also love this time of year because there are more holidays, and more holidays mean more time to travel. Long weekends are the best. I feel a lot more justified in leaving Ukraine when I have a long weekend.

I chose Kosice, Slovakia as a destination because I found cheap flights, and was able to meet up with a friend. According to Wikipedia, it is the second largest city in Slovakia. I'd never heard of it before booking the flights, but since I know very little about Slovakia in general that didn't surprise me.

My flight to Kosice, Slovakia left at 0400, which meant that my taxi was at 0200. (At that hour there is no traffic, and I knew I didn't need to be at the airport two hours early.) This meant I started packing around 0100. I know that's totally last minute, but it's how I usually do things. These times meant I didn't go to sleep, as there was no point. The flight was only an hour and a half, so I didn't sleep much there either. Basically, by the time I arrived in Kosice, I was completely knackered, and was still going to be up all day.

The airport in Kosice is small. Very small. It is the kind of airport that doesn't have a whole lot of flights, so it is dead most of the time. The arrivals hallway was dark after I exited baggage claim.

The sun wasn't up, and inside was dark. I had no idea what to do. Thankfully, this airport had free wifi.

I figured out there was a public bus into the city center, and thought it would be coming along around 0500. I figured wrong. It actually came at 0620. Thankfully it wasn't that cold, and the stop had a bench to sit on and was somewhat covered. Apparently I was the only one who didn't know the first bus comes at 0620, because about five minutes ahead of time, at least 15 people seemed to appear out of nowhere to catch the bus. They weren't travelers like me, so maybe they just lived out in the area and this was how they got to work?

The ride into the city was only about 15 minutes, I love fast rides like this. The bus dropped me off at the train/bus station, which was where I met up with Bo. He'd been on trains for a while, and had only arrived a bit earlier. It turned out that if I had taken a bus from the airport at 0500 I would've been waiting for him at the train station.

Bo and I walked into the old city center, which is pretty small. The whole city felt small, even though it had more than 100,000 people. We crossed the city center, which is basically a big church in the middle of an even bigger, stretched out diamond shaped platz. Very picturesque.

At that point, the sun was up, but it was still very early, and no one else was around. I took advantage and took photos, of course. The church wasn't yet open to visitors, we knew we would come back soon enough. We walked all the way to one end of the oval, just to see what was there, and because we needed to kill some time.

We found a statue for the peace marathon, which appears to have been run here regularly for a number of years. I don't know if it still takes place. There was a long wall, on which was inscribed the name of every winner of the race, along with the year, and where that runner was from. I really liked the variety of winning countries.

Our next sight was a random street sculpture. Well, not really a sculpture. Call it a modern art installation, It was a collection of keys, over 80,000 of them. They'd been grouped together in letter shapes, spelling out revoluce. The sculpture was made in 2010, by a czech artist, and made with donated keys. Very cool.

This street was split with a long parkway in the middle. Trees lined the parkway on either side, and there were benches along the way. Lovely. This is definitely a city for relaxing, there is no need to hurry around. There aren't that many specific sights to see. If we'd had one day longer we might've spent a couple hours sitting on one of these benches, reading.

We went to our booked accomodaton, which was not yet ready for us. Not surprising, considering checkout wasn't until nearly noon. We arranged with the landlord to meet back there in a couple hours.

We kept walking, and found a small church. Well, not big not small. I wasn't sure what kind of church it was, but as soon as I saw the iconostasis I put on a headscarf, just in case. What confused me was that there were pews as well, and I'm not used to seeing those in an Orthodox Church. It turned out to be a Greek Catholic church, so in my mind it was a mix of Christian and Orthodox in terms of decoration, if that makes sense. One of these days I'll sit down and read/learn the smaller differences between the various Orthodox churches around the world.

We followed a side street until we found a local farmers market. Fresh produce and flowers. Very cute. We both wanted some of the produce, but didn't want to carry it around. Not far from the market we found a small cafe that seemed a perfect place to spend an hour chatting, killing time until we could check in. It was a local cafe, the kind of place people go to have a quick coffee and perhaps a pastry of some kind. No booths, just tall tables and chairs. It was nice to relax.

We went back to our accomodation at the arranged time, and were able to check in. Sortof. The previous guests had left, so it wasn't totally clean, but we were able to drop off our bags, which was really all we wanted.

Back in the old town square, we found a stella called the Immaculata. According to my travel app it is a memorial to the victims of the plague. Sometimes I forget that the disease swept through much of Europe and killed so many people.

Since this was a holiday weekend, we could see some sort of stage being set up on the platz, just behind the plague memorial. Also in this area of the platz was a fountain with all the astrological signs. I found mine, and had Bo take a photo of me sitting there.

By this point the church was open to the public. We could see setup happening for a wedding, and guests were milling about outside.

Inside the church the photographer was taking shots of the whole thing. I loved the stained glass, and most of the decoration.

We opted to climb up the bell tower, paying 1.5 euro to do so. The staircase is very narrow, with a tight spiral. You get very cosy with anyone going the opposite way up or down the stairs. While going up there were a few places to step out of the staircase, into the bell area. Some of those bells are huge!

At the top we stepped onto a viewing platform that gave us lovely views over the entire city.

Back down on the platz, we spent a few minutes watching a big fountain set to music. There were a couple kids playing in the edge of the fountain too. The water was cold!

At the end of the platz we found a Tesco, and bought a few items, drinks in particular.

After Tesco we decided it was time for dinner. It wasn't really dinnertime, but we were hungry, so why not? We chose a place on the platz, with traditional Slovak food. Touristy, big portions, decent food.

As we turned around and walked toward the other end of the platz Bo noticed a lot of people dressed in traditional clothing, heading in the same direction we were. After we passed the church we saw why. There was a stage set up, and benches for the audience. Some of the benches were already filled, mostly with groups of friends or families.

This was when we remembered that it was a holiday weekend. Kosice was celebrating May Day. We watched four or five songs worth of traditional dancing, with different groups in different outfits doing each dance.

We went back to our flat, and figured out we could connect a keyboard to the big screen tv in the living room. We used internet to stream a movie I'd seen before. Apparently I was tired, as I fell asleep five minutes in! Ooops.

The next morning we slept in because we could. It was probably close to noon by the time we got out of the flat.

Our first sight of the day was what we called the Sister City Tree. Apparently Kosice has sister city relationships with cities around the world, as there were many branches listing distances to various cities around the world.

Across the intersection was a WW2 memorial, not terribly big. On another side of this intersection was another WW2 memorial, this one dedicated to Russian soldiers. (I think. I'm guessing this because of all the Russian names I saw.) There were a lot of pink and purple flowers, everything looked very pretty.

Eventually we wound our way back to the city center platz, stopping to take more photos of the church. There was a small landscaped area on one side of the church, very pretty. Very charming.

At this point we decided to try to find the tourist information office, stopping for ice cream and water along the way. I get distracted easily :)

The first place that called itself tourist information definitely wasn't the official place. This was a place that sold souvenirs, but also wanted you to sign up for their tours. We didn't.

We managed to find the official tourist information office, which wasn't marked nearly as well as it should have been. The lady gave us a nice map of both the city, and the entire region. She also gave us a couple ideas for day trips, and how to get to each place. I bought a few postcards there :)

Our next couple stops were for 'modern art.' One was an alley decorated with umbrellas, very cute and colourful. Another was a giant painted wooden shoes. We'd seen at least one other of these shoes in different places around the city, each was painted differently.

Next to the shoe was an archway entrance with a door leading to stairs. I saw a few people go in, and wondered where the stairs led. It turned out to be the old city hall. I was really surprised to find something so nice, it wasn't all the noticeable from the entrance.

The old city hall is well set up for a visit. There are signs describing what each room was used for, in Slovak and English. Some of the rooms were quite fancy. I exercised patience to get a couple photos without people in them. Entrance was free to the old city hall, yahoo!!

We managed to find the old Orthodox Synagogue, which unfortunately didn't look very good. The padlock on the door was rusted, and the steps in front were crumbling away. I took photos of the inscriptions and asked a friend to translate for me, very very sad. It turns out that there was a good size Jewish population in the area before WW2, but they were mostly deported, and very few returned. Judging from the condition of the synagogue, there was no active Jewish community anymore.

We walked back through the small park to the train/bus station to figure out timing for the next day. We figured out trains left regularly, so we weren't worried.

We had dinner at a local restaurant a bit away from the city center. Again, traditional Slovak food. The menu was huge!

This time we streamed one of my favourite movies, Hoosiers. I stayed away, repeating all the good lines, of course.

The next day we had breakfast in the flat, but that didn't stop us from stopping at a place that said it had pie on the menu. That turned out to be only somewhat accurate. I was not particularly impressed with the pie, but the tea was good. The choices available were cheesecake, carrot cake, coconut pie, and one other. Meh. When I hear the word pie, I want fruit pie, or meat pie.

Oh well.

Read the next post for what we did in both Presov and Bardejov.

When we came back from Presov we had sushi for dinner. Not great, not awful, but good nonetheless. I grew up in Indiana, so I don't have high expectations for sushi.

When we came back from Bardejov the next day we ended up going to the sushi place for food again, only this time we got it to go.

I caught a bus to the airport (which only comes every couple of hours!!) which was not open. Well, that's not quite true. The front hall was unlocked, but lights were off, and no one was there. I was really surprised at this, since it was less than two hours until my flight.

Fortunately, desk workers came in time for me to check in, go through security and passport control, and board my plane.

The end of another great trip. I need to see more of Slovakia. (I need to see more of everywhere!)