Vino Festival

This past weekend, a fellow lecturer from Mikuláš and I went to Bratislava for the weekend. Four of the twenty American lecturers had birthdays between last week and this week. Carla's was the 17th, Carsten and Laura’s were both the 21st and Sean’s is the 29th. Carol, Jenny and I were invited to Bratislava to celebrate and go to a wine festival with the crew. Jenny decided to stay in Mikuláš for the weekend but Carol and I went on our way.

Friday after school we packed and went to the train station hoping to get on an IC (InterCity) train, but it was full. We were able to get tickets for a regional express train that left at 14:14 (2:14pm). An IC train stops only at major stops; Mikuláš is fortunately one of those. A regional express train makes more stops so takes a little over 4 hours instead of 3 hours to Bratislava. Our timing ended up being perfect though. When we got to the apartments in Bratislava and made it up stairs the group was just about to pray before they started the Fiesta, it was Mexican night.

Saturday morning some of the girls and I went shopping at the local mall. I wanted a fall jacket and Becky was in need of some hiking boots. We looked around for a little while and were successful. In the early afternoon, around 2, we meet up with the boys to head to the wine festival. There ended up being about 12 people in the group.

We walked to a tram stop and took it into Rača which is kind of a suburb of Bratislava. We arrived at the festival around 2:30 and ended up staying until about 8:30. There were a lot of booths set up. The wine that is sold at this particular festival is called burciak. It looks somewhat like juice and also tastes like juice but with an added fizz, which is the alcohol. The way the wine is made is different than normal wine though. Burciak needs to be drunk in 3-4 days otherwise it goes bad.

The wine festival was a lot of fun. We all tried wine from various booths and had some food as well. I also tried Metovina which is a warm honey wine. It was very good, but does not taste as good once it gets cold. This was a good drink for the day because it was cool and rainy.

After the group left the festival we headed back to Bratislava and hung out at one of the apartments before going to find some more food. We thought it would be a good idea to have something since none of us had eaten since around 3 and it was now close to 9. We went to Pizza Pan (Pan means man or Mr. in Slovak) which I was told used to be Pizza Hut. The food was good; we ended up ordering in pairs because none of us could eat a whole pizza ourselves at that time. Overall the weekend was a lot of fun. It was nice to see people from orientation again and to help people celebrate birthdays.

Some of the crew (L to R, back row) Jon, me, Carsten, Larry, Maika, Becky and Jana.



The girls (Lto R) Becky, Maika and Rachel




Leaving Rača on the tram: me, Carsten, Larry, Jon and Becky