The Eastern Block

We just recently got back from a weekend in Slovakia. You might be asking, why Slovakia? Generally I would be asking myself the same question, given all of the places we haven’t been to, but there were special circumstances on this trip.

To make a long story short, my best friend, Brent, works for a manufacturing company. An Italian company who happened to have a plant in Slovakia bought out the old company and they decided to send a few people over to fill some gaps in their Slovakian work force. Brent was one of the lucky few to be chosen (in the end he was the only one that went over for more than a week). In theory, Brent was to help improve the efficiency and productivity in the Slovakian plant, but ended up just doing the same job he was doing back home, which seemed a little nonsensical considering the distance he had traveled and the cost involved (I’ll let Brent fill in the inner workings if he so chooses on this one), but it is a really good deal for him, so hard to complain.

As it turns out, he was only there for 10 weeks (the limit of his stay without major paperwork) and leaves for home September 7th. Originally I thought he was going to there until the end of September, so our trip ended up being a bit last minute (a note on last minute travel: significantly more expensive…). In any case, we got our tickets and our time off and we were on our way.

The trip started off a little rocky. Have I mentioned I hate the 24-hour clock? Well, I messed up the time slightly in my translation and, where I thought we were leaving at 9:50pm in the evening, we were really leaving at 7:50pm. Fortunately, as I was leaving work to leisurely walk home, have some dinner, and then grab the bus to the airport, I realized the error of my ways. So instead, I called Mariah, walked home a top speed, grabbed luggage (fortunately we had already packed, but we did manage to forget a good few things) and half run to the airport bus (no dinner was eaten). We got on the bus at around 6:20pm, which seemed like a reasonable amount of time, and then…traffic… There was a forty-minute cut off for checking into the flight, which meant we had to get there by 7:10pm. I spent most of the buss ride begging, in a general manner, whichever governing divine powers that would listen, to allow us to make our flight. A constant repetition of “Please let us make our flight” rattled through my head as we stopped and then lurched on through the after work traffic.

We arrived at the airport at 7:08pm and literally ran to the check in desk. We were fine, I begged just enough. We made it!

Our flight was delayed fifty minutes and then another hour. I begged too hard…

We arrived in Bratislava at about 1:00am in the morning (it’s just over a two hour flight with a one hour time difference – we were supposed to arrive just after 11:00pm). Brent had a car available to him, so he picked us up. Bratislava is the main city in Slovakia, but Brent was staying just to the east in a large town called Trnava. We arrived at the hotel (the company put Brent up in a hotel for his whole trip, so we just stayed at the same place) at about 2:00am. The hotel was really nice with a comfy bed…ZZZzzzzzzzzzzzz…

Not for long though. Brent is a pretty big World War II history buff (I am as well, though on a much smaller scale) and he really wanted to see the Auschwitz death camps while he was over here, so we had decided to drive to Poland Saturday morning to see it. The drive was a long one (about 5 hours) so we wanted to leave early so we would have plenty of time to see it and then get back that evening. (Yes, 10 hours of driving in one day…Brent did the driving and took it like a champ.)

So, on only a few hours sleep we rolled out of bed, jumped in the car, and headed for the border. One of Brent’s work mates, Matej (pronounced Matay), came along, which was key to our travels. Not only was he a great guy, but he also acted as our pathfinder when we quickly found ourselves off the main track and lost.

Who closes a freeway for the weekend? In multiple different spots no less… I know, it happens, but it didn’t exactly help us out both going and coming back. With Matej’s skillful asking of directions to the random guy on the side of the road in the random town that the closed freeway dumped us in, we made it into Poland. Poland was a slightly different story in relation to language. It is just different enough not to be the same, but just similar enough for two people to understand each other in passing along directions…fortunately… Matej is also fearless in this regard, so we really had no troubles the whole way there, aside from a little wrong turn here and there.

Auschwitz is broken into three different camps, built at different times given increase in capacity. We saw two of them. Normally you go on vacation to do something up beat and happy, to forget the troubles of your everyday life. This was not happy…but it was really, really interesting! I’m not going to go into a great deal on the camps (hopefully we all know the basic history here); suffice it to say it was a humbling experience and one not easily forgotten. The first Auschwitz camp was just filled with museums. Each brick building, once used as sleeping quarters for Jewish prisoners and other prisoners of war (typically Russian) alike, had a small museum in it with a different focus.

One of the many, which I found most gripping, was dedicated to evidence of the atrocities and held rooms filled with remnants of the people who died here. Huge rooms just filled with shoes, or piles of eye, suitcases, and pots. One room was filled with tons and tons of human hair. It seems the Nazis, after the killing, would take the hair from their victims to be used in making cloth for internment clothing, or just sold. Hitler…ever the entrepreneur… This was decidedly the most horrifying thing I have ever witnessed.

And now that I have shared it with you we can move on to happier topics…

Well…not just yet. About three miles from Auschwitz sits Auschwitz II: Birkenau. We walked from one to the other, likely a walk that many prisoners had taken in the past. The sequel was significantly bigger than its predecessor, likely more efficient, and more cheaply constructed. Huge fields were filled with bunkhouses and we were only able to cover a small piece of the camp since time was growing short. The Germans tried to cover their tracks as they retreated at the end of the war and destroyed most of the camp, specifically the Crematoriums (the facilities used for gassing and burning prisoners). All that was left of these was rubble, so we didn’t get to see much of how these worked aside from pictures.

All said it was depressing, but in a good way…

Our trip back was long, but fairly uneventful. I’m pretty sure we got lost at one point, but it was dark, so we couldn’t really tell, and we eventually made it to where we were heading. The freeway was still closed in a few different places so we got sent on more than one detour. Fortunately the detours were marked with signs this time, so we only felt half lost. We made it back to the hotel at around 12:30am and fell into bed, this time for a significantly longer stretch. In fact we didn’t really roll out of bed until about 1:00pm. Making up for lost time…

That day, Sunday, we pretty much just sat around with Brent and had a chat. We ate here and there, played a little Badminton (the hotel we were staying at was also a sports center for tennis and it seems Badminton is a relatively popular pastime in Slovakia), but otherwise we just sat around and shot the s***. That evening we ventured into downtown Trnava to meet some more of Brent’s coworkers. Only some of them spoke English, so there was a lot of segregation in the conversations and a lot of repetition in one language or the other, but it was definitely a good time.

Monday Brent took off work and we headed into Bratislava for the day. It is a pretty interesting place with some really great artistic features. They have even become icons for the city. Specifically the one pictured here of a man poking out from under a manhole cover was really great. The old part of their city center that we saw was really interesting and supposedly there is a great nightlife there, though we weren’t in the city for that part. It seemed more stark than other cities I had seen, more plain, but still very cool.

That evening we had some more time for BSing, got to say goodbye to Matej, and then headed off to bed. Again after only a few hours sleep we had to roll out of bed Tuesday morning to get to the airport at 5:00am. Brent had to go to work afterwards and we had to take our flight home…and then go to work… This part I would not choose to do again. Recuperation time after a trip is imperative, even if it’s only a weekend. I don’t know how business guys do it traveling constantly and heading straight into meetings. I suppose you get used to it. In any case, I don’t want to and will be taking the extra day off, assuming I haven’t used them all up.

All of the trip pictures have been added to my Picasa site, so you can check them out at your leisure.

BACK TO WORK!