Outlandish

The drive to Zuberec on Friday evening last week was quite bad: it was already dark and it was raining so hard that you could barely see the red back lights of the car in front. But one thing I did notice on the way: a huge castle lit up on top of a steep hill. Turns out it was the Orava Castle (Oravsky Hrad). I love castles (because I still want to be a princess...) so I wanted to at least stop on the way home on Sunday long enough to get a picture of it.  We did stop. But the moment we got up to the castle door it was literally closed in our faces. Closing time. Suomen Leijona !?!?!? The legend of the castle says that the noblemen owning the land made a pact with a devil because they wanted a castle that couldn't be built by any man. If the devil succeeded in building the castle in one day the noblemen were fine, but if not they would go to Hell. Obviously the devil didn't succeed (on purpose I expect) and the noblemen went to Hell. In proven fac...

Sunday morning, slow and lazy as it should be. The Sun was out as it always is on Sunday mornings and there were people already in the kitchen eating breakfast. Exactly what I like Sundays to be like. I like going for trips with a big group, the bigger the better, and somehow I love mornings then. Drowsy people sitting around table, one staring at the table cloth with blank eyes, couple people talking about which is the best sandwich cheese, one sipping coffee from a mug that's bigger than her head and someone going around asking who wants more of this or that. Life <3 Of course after breakfast comes the time to start cleaning up and packing. In Finland, when at the summer house, Sunday mornings were very efficient and fast for some reason. No matter if the weather was awesome we were in the car driving to the ferry before it was 12 o'clock. Since moving to Slovakia and traveling with my colleagues I've learned that Sundays can also be full of things to do before go...

I like history in the way that it's full of good stories. Some of them true, some not, doesn't matter as long as it's a juicy story. Slovakia is full of ancient castles and each castle has their legends and stories, one of the juiciest stories being the one of Countess Bathory who lived in the Cachtický castle an hour's drive from Bratislava. Countess Elisabeth Bathorý was left a widower when her husband died in 1604. She developed a nasty habit of luring and kidnapping young women from the near-by villages.  There are many versions of what she did to the girls but one of them is about how she had built a room into the castle with a grid floor. The girls, who had to be young and virgins, were tortured an killed in the room so that their blood would trickle down to the floor below into a bath. She then bathed in the blood believing that it would maintain her youth and "good" looks. For ten years she was able to keep this up until she was sued. By o...