We arrived to this little town in
Slovakia, located in the middle of the Tatra mountains. Arno had
booked it in the morning before Auschwitz. It was dark and late, no
need to say that we were both super tired and mentally exhausted
after such an experience as a concentration camp can be. Inside there
was this little lady with high heels waiting for us to come. She
didn't speak any English so we handled everything with German. She
showed us our room and after carrying the bags in and doing some
picture editing, facebooking and writing we finally got some sleep
too.
In the morning we again had to check
out so for that we needed to lift some money, no credit card
payments. This nice (non-English-speaking man behind the reception
told us where to go (judging by the length of the line it must have been the only ATM in the town) and after everything was done we felt how hungry
we actually were since last night neither of us really had felt for
eating. And so we started looking for a place to eat breakfast. Yet
it was hard to find one on a Saturday morning in this tiny town where
we were I guess the only tourists. We asked around but no one spoke
English or knew a place and soon we had walked around the whole colorful village and decided to ask this girl in the tourist
information center. She said she doesn't really eat out so she
doesn't know about the restaurants. Well no tourist info found here
but, I thought I'd still ask about the mountain trails and where
would be a good place to hike. But of course she didn't hike either
so she didn't know. Yet she was kind and tried to find us a map of
the mountains – apparently the one she gave us wasn't the one she
had meant but it got us somewhere.
But we couldn't go hiking the mountains
before breakfast – or any kind of food. So die the lack of
breakfast places we just decided to go for an early lunch. To a
Chinese restaurant. So original right?! But it ended up being one of
the best ever Chinese restaurant we have eaten in. And that's a lot
from us since we have both been in China. With few euros per piece we
ordered frog legs, fried noodles and pecking duck. So good! And so
wallet friendly! Then through the grocery and towards the mountains.
We arrived to the base and parked. It
was cold, had been all morning and now we needed to put on some more
clothes since up on the mountains it would be +1 degrees of Celsius..
We too some food and water to the bag, bought these expensive lift
tickets to the highest mountain around and headed to the lift.
Watching the mountains and sitting in a gondola got us both on the
mood for snow sports. I'm a true lover of snowboarding and Arno likes
downhill skiing. To bad we didn't have our boards and skis with us.
And also the mountains were suffering some real lack of snow.
Well there was some. That we discovered
all the way up after changing lifts and getting up to over 1700m from
the sea level. Oh brother it felt cold. Luckily Arno had borrowed me
his hoodie since I was stupid enough not to pack a jacket when
leaving Finland. Also at first I thought it was a waist of time and
money because the weather was a little rainy and foggy up there. But
we got some cool footage and I just loooooved to stand on a mountain.
Plus even tho we didn't take the lift to the top (since it would have
been like 27€ for 50 minutes due the lack of oxygen) we climbed up
to at least 1900 meters. We had nice time and as always some fun. So
as I said we found snow. And as we are two children who just pretend
to be adults, we started playing with it as soon as we had climbed up
to it. Then after a couple of hours we had to climb down. We had
scheduled our trip so that we should get as close to Budapest as
possible since the next night we would fly back home.
 |
| I think I will hang this picture on my wall. And then any day that I feel depressed or bad about myself I will just look at it, remember how good victory looks like and enjoy Arno's face! |
 |
| Okay nevermind... |
So we started driving towards Budapest and stopped to fill both us and the tank after such a mountainy day. We had again very wallet friendly food (yet my gluten free pasta wasn't tasty enough to make me a pasta lover) and I also invested 4 € for hair colors since in Finland with the length of my hair the packs would be somewhere close to 20-30 €. (Once I went to get my hair colored while living in America and it costed me $165 + tips. And as my hair has only grown longer the prices would be something even more astronomical if I'd do it now.) After our little pit stop we made it back to our car that in this point of the tirp was quite a dump.. I mean we had been basically living in it for the past 10 days – driving a lot and just dumping everything on the back, changing clothes, gathering groceries, snacks, receipts, luggage, camera stuff, shoes and all this.. So we dumped everything dumpable (oh that poor guy who needs to empty the trash cans on the paring lot, we filled it up) and got it quite clean. Then we started driving towards this hotel we had just booked in the dinner table.
Through the night and rain we drove and
made it to Hungary and all the way down to Budapest. Our hotel was
the cheapest we really could find close to the airport. After
travelling for almost two weeks we were quite broke and counting all
the pennies we had – so that's how our room looked like too! We had
three single beds. With mattresses so thin I could feel my every
bone.. So we ended up piling all the three on top of each other and
sleeping tight on one bed. And I was also lucky to have Arno to lay
on top of so no complains. He tho hadn't sleep quite as well. Also we
needed to wake up quite early to return the car before 9 am. So really
neither of us got really that much sleep since we hit the bed like
after midnight.
And there we went, the last day.
Checked out and headed to the car rental office. Returned the car and
one lady behind the cashier offered to drive us to the airport wich
was nice since we were gonna leave the luggage there anyway! Such a
kind woman who had done a same kind of trip with is boyfriend as a
teenager – just like 40 years earlier!
At the airport we found the luggage
drop of and got told that it would make 10 euros per bag. And we had
four. So we just packed (stuffed) the smaller ones inside the bigger
ones. And then I had to make a nice call to my dear mother back in
Finland to ask her to put 25 euros on my account since our very last
pennies went for the bus ticket that we needed in order to get back
to the city for the day. Thanks mom, saved us!
So our flight was gonna leave at 10 pm
and it wasn't even 10 am so of course we went to the city, just to
roam around. And we had like whole 5 euros (1600 HUF) for the both of
us to eat with so we felt like kings! So we walked around not really
knowing what to do. The weather was quite nice, we randomly bumped
into this writer festival with a lot of local writers, ate mango on
the riverbank, wrote a postcard to Arno's grandma (such a sweet lady)
and stopped for coffee and chocolate croissants - that weren't as
tasty as the first day. Then we decided to head to an island we
didn't have time to go the first day. It was actually next to our
boat hotel we had stayed after arriving, if you remember! And so
cute! Reminded me of the central park in New York (so many great
memories)! There was this fountain that played Let it go from
Frozen and sprayed water in
rhythm. Nice people, good feeling overall, flowers, sun, a heron
running from a self-destructive toddler and such a chill atmosphere!
So there we walked around for hours just talking and being together.
We just never run out of thinks to jabber about, nonsense fun stuff
all day long, and the less we sleep, the more funny our jokes get –
right?!
 |
| Every park that wants to really earn some glory needs to have one of these giant bubble blowing guys that makes all the kids go insane! |
I was
a little worried we couldn't kill that much time but I worried for no
reason! Soon we had to turn back to find a restaurant – Burger King
counts as a restaurant, right? We ate, kissed goodbyes to Budapest
and took the train and bus to the airport. There we lined up to check
in and figured out our flight was like 50 minutes late. Witch in our
case meant that we would miss the last train from Helsinki-Vantaa
airport to my place. So as I googled the trains would stop running
after 1 am and since we were not gonna be able to make it with the
flight coming in late our only option was to take a bus that would
leave like 2 am and get us 4 kilometers away from my house. And walking 4 km
with luggage at 3 o'clock in the middle of the night isn't really my thing. Especially if I need to
wake up for work at 6 am.. So this little angel called Joni – one of
Arno's best friends – promised to pick us up! Thank you thank you
thank you Joni!
So
yeahh the trip was over. We landed late but safe, got picked up and
drove to my place and there was this little surprise waiting for me.
Something that in a flash turned my life around. But more about that
in the next post!
Huggies!
Linnea
No comments:
Post a Comment