Slovakia in a nutshell

This blog hasn't got off to a good start, I know. My apologies to everyone who's disgruntled about the lack of regular updates! In my defense, however, it's been a frantic few weeks (and it seems that I'm the only one who will update it!). I'll do my best to keep it more up to date from now on.

So, Slovakia. We spent a great few weeks in Bratislava (and a little bit outside Bratislava too), with a few significant occurrences. Firstly, I met Martin's parents (a very big deal!) and fortunately the crazy Slovak/English/French conversations were sufficient to facilitate communication. With a Mexican exchange student in the house (instead of Martin's brother), there was a little bit of Spanish thrown in too. All very interesting for someone who speaks English well, French a little bit and only enough Slovak to say 'good' and 'thank you'! I now have a very small, and not terribly useful, Slovak vocabulary which I intend to form into something more practical in the coming months.

During our time in Slovakia, we went to two weddings, a few shopping centres with stupidly large supermarkets, spent a day in Vienna, rode bikes along the Danube, visited ruined (and not so ruined) castles, learned to drive on the right hand side of the road, met family and friends and went on a trip to the famous reconstructed mill (more below) and the Tatra mountains. All in all a pretty nice trip!

Our venture out of Bratislava was too brief, but enough to realise that I can't wait to go back. The mill was beautiful - it's an old wooden sawmill in the north of Slovakia that over recent years (mostly since the end of communism) has been painstakingly restored by a bunch of volunteers (including Martin and to a more serious degree, his friend Pedro). You'll have to check out the photos in our albums (see http://picasaweb.google.com/mirandazoe). We also went walking in the Tatras - my first experience of real mountains - and it was gorgeous! So impressive, and we had the most glorious autumn weather.

To cap off the start to our european adventure, we also decided during our weeks in Slovakia that we're going to get married in Bratislava in September next year. Woo hoo!