Outlandish

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...

Before moving to Slovakia I had never heard of the Tatras. Maybe they had been mentioned in primary school but I had forgotten all about them long ago. Turns out they are a pretty huge mountain range forming the border between Poland and Slovakia. They are also known as High Tatras since in central Slovakia there is another range of mountains called Low Tatras. A colleague of mine has a cottage there, at which we spent the previous weekend.  We woke up in the morning in to a thick fog. But since we were anyway going to climb above the fog it didn't bother us much. The first plan was to leave for the hike at 7 o'clock. We didn't quite manage it. Eventually it was already 9 when we got out of the house. And the only way was UP! We drove a little bit up the serpentine road to a chalet from which the path upwards started. And the view from the parking lot for a city girl who was born and raised in a country with no trace of mountains was breath-taking: ...