Southern Slovakia

On Saturday Lucia and Pali (IAESTE Kosice Leaders) rented a couple of cars for us to do a day trip around Southern Slovakia to see some castles and caves. Maria's mother and two of her mother's friends had come to Kosice on Friday night and joined us on this trip as well. In one rented car was Lucia, Maria, Maria's mother and two friends. In the other rented car was Pali, Magda, Ivana and Ivana's friend Markus who was also visiting for the weekend from Vienna. Vladimir also drove his car and Martin, Ersi, Dubravka, and I rode with him.


The first stop of the day was a cave, Jasovská Jaskyňa. We got there just a little too late to go in with the first group of the day so we took a little walk up to the little church on the hill of this town. It seems that every little town or village in Slovakia has a little church like this one. After some nice pictures we headed back down to the cave entrance. This cave had beautiful stalagtites and stalagmites with various colors and designs. There was a tour guide but he basically led us around and turned on the lights and automated voice recording in English. I think he could have been a little more personal. I think we even skipped one of the rooms that we were supposed to see.

The second stop was a castle. I will have to look up what the name of it is. This castle is apparently the most beautiful on the outside so we didn't pay to go inside or have tour. We were also a bit behind on our schedule for the day so we wanted to move along to the other sites. We did have a fun encounter with some goats at this castle though and we got some great pictures of the surrounding area.

The next stop was a mansion that used to be a castle, the Kaštieĺ Betliar. This was a very beautiful building. Outside there was a fountain and lots of things going on for children such as crafts and singing and people dressed up in costumes. The tour of the castle was in Slovak so Lucia and Vladimir translated for us into English. Maria's mother and her mother's friends didn't speak much English so Maria translated into Spanish also. The Andrassys were the previous owners of the mansion so there were a lot of things on display that belonged to them. The mansion was beautifully decorated. After the tour we walked around the grounds a little bit and had some of the lunch that we brought along.

The last stop was the ice cave. I didn't realize until we got to the stop but I had been there before with my boss and his boss on our trip to the cell phone towers. There was a little bit of a hike up a trail in the woods to get to the ice cave. Some of the others weren't expecting this and were a bit tired when we got to the top. The ice cave was worth the walk though. It was a little bit expensive for only a half an hour tour, 6 Euros, but they probably need the money to keep the place nice. The cave is about zero degrees Celsius inside so all of the people from the southern parts of europe were really cold. The ice flows and shapes were really beautiful.

After the cave we simply headed back to the dorms to have dinner.