A week in Košice

Just recently at work I thought that I had been unlucky in that I hadn’t had a business trip for a while.  Quite coincidentally, a few days later I was asked to a meeting where I was introduced to some business partners from Košice in Slovakia and was told that I had to go there to help sort out some problems.  “Košice?” I thought.  “Never heard of it.”  But anyone reading this blog knows that I am travel mad.  Who am I to turn down a trip to an exotic destination, even an unknown one?

The Currywurst tram at Stuttgart Airport - only in Germany!

An aircraft museum on the roof of Terminal 3!

I’ve never been to Eastern Europe before, apart from a week in the eastern sector of Berlin, which sort of counts I suppose, but not quite.  So I was slightly apprehensive – after all, it was only little more than 20 years ago that you couldn’t go there even if you wanted to (at least not without some great effort) and it was all locked away behind the iron curtain.  That has always given Eastern Europe an air of mystery for me – and probably for many of us – and it makes it the “unknown country” to an extent.  It is a slightly odd coincidence that it was Slovakia as the destination for my first foray into Eastern Europe, because when I was a child (about 9 or 10 years old) I used to think that the name Czechoslovakia was the most exotic sounding of names and I wanted to go there.  This was in about 1980 when the iron curtain was still up, so how a 10 year old living in Australia in 1980 even heard of the name Czechoslovakia, much less wanted to go there, is anyone’s guess.  But then I’m an oddball grown up so I suppose I was an oddball child!

So, the Slovakia half of Czechoslovakia for a week it is then.  I’ll have to do the Czech half later – especially given that one of the people I’ve been working with here in Košice this week said that Prague is “like being in a fairy tale.”  High praise indeed!  But first I’ll visit Bratislava, capital of Slovakia, which I intend to do some time in the new two or three months (yes I’ve been impressed enough with Slovakia to be already planning further trips here).
As an Australian it is easy to view Europe as small when compared to the vast waste of the Outback, but it is bigger than it looks.  These “short hops” to nearby countries take a surprising amount of time – out of bed at 4:30 am, out of the house at 5:30, on the train to Stuttgart at 6, on the Stuttgart S-Bahn by 7:30, finally on the plane at 10:30, stopover for a quick coffee in Vienna at midday (yes now I’m dropping names) and finally check in at the Hilton Košice just after 3.  That’s a long trip for a short hop across Europe – I could get half way to Australia in that time!

View from the Košice Hilton

My place of work for a week

On arrival I had a bit of a wander around the centre of town, which bills itself as “the best preserved old town in Eastern Europe.”  I’m not sure if that is true as I’ve not seen enough of Eastern Europe yet, but I would probably believe it!  It reminded me of the Royal Mile in Edinburgh in that the entire Hlavná ulica (Main Street) is almost perfectly preserved.  There are only about two modern buildings in the main street of town – one of which is a bloody Tesco!  The entire main street is almost perfectly preserved, as is the warren of narrow lanes around it.  I’m curious as to why.  Obviously the city escaped bombing during the war, but such a perfectly preserved street is still unusual.  Was it luck?  A lack of money under the Communists (doubtful, given the huge amount of 1960s Soviet apartments that ring the old town)?  Or was it cultural pride?  I suspect the latter.  Slovakia is a small country of only 5 million inhabitants, but I have noticed a definite cultural pride here, and certainly what I could only describe as a cultural richness.  For example, in the bookshops everything is in Slovak, which is unusual for such a small population.  Even in Finland, which has about the same population, I noticed that not everything is translated into Finnish in the bookshops, presumably because the market is not big enough.  But then the Slavic languages are related and mutually intelligible (especially Slovak and Czech) so maybe many of these books are in Czech – I’m not yet able to tell the difference!

Public transport Košice style

So that brings me to the Slovak language.  It’s impenetrable.  I asked someone how to say “thank you” – it’s “ďakujem.”  Five days later and I’m still struggling with it.  And that’s only my first word.  Six months after moving to Germany and having to slowly learn the language from scratch and I’m back to square one!  At least German is related to English and is without doubt the easiest language I’ve attempted to learn (the others being French, Norwegian and Finnish, so I’m no language beginner!) whereas Slovak is in the same family as Russian, which takes it into a whole different world, linguistically speaking (pardon the pun).  On the subject of German, it is not uncommon here, although Košice is so far east that it’s bordering Ukraine.  Last night a drunk Slovak man came up to me on the street and started asking me a question.  “English” I said, gesturing to myself.  “Deutsch?” he replied?  “Ja, ein bisschen” I said (yes, a little).  At which point he asked me in slurred words where the bus stop was for the number twenty three bus.  Unfortunately I couldn’t help him, but at least I understood him!

That is probably the most successful conversation in German that I have had so far, and I was quite proud of myself.  Speaking to non native speakers of a language you are learning is far easier than speaking to a native speaker.  When I was in Oulu last year a drunken Russian woman came up to me in the street and started talking to me in Finnish (I’m starting to see a pattern here) and that too was the only decent Finnish conversation I had.  I understood every word she said (in Finnish with a strong Russian accent) and yet I could never understand a word of a native Finn!

With my Russian workmate in a Soviet nostalgia bar!

Well I am rambling a bit and that will do for my first post.  Not much has happened since I arrived on Monday as I am, after all, here on business and so I have been working.  This afternoon I finished work early and took some photos of the old town, which I will upload later, and tomorrow I will go to Spišský hrad (Spis Castle), 800 years old and one of the largest castles in Europe.  Stay tuned for a blog post when I finally get around to writing it in two weeks time (hopefully not)!

Güntzburg Altstadt

It’s funny how visiting one place always seems to lead to visiting another.  You make a list of places you want to visit and when you make an effort to make the list smaller with a visit to a place on the list, you discover another place and the list gets larger (or at least stays the same length).

So it was a couple of months ago when I went to Munich with some work colleagues to lounge under (real) palm trees in a (fake) tropical swimming pool.  As we were barrelling down the Autobahn as Germans do, we passed one of those brown signs that seem to be the international standard for pointing out things of interest to travellers and tourists.  This particular sign said something like “Historic Güntzburg Altstadt, 5 km ahead” and so I duly pulled out my mobile phone and marked it on my GPS map for later reference.  One place ticked off of my list, another place added…

Güntzburg's pretty High Street

So this morning when I awoke and saw that the sun was shining (after several days of absolutely appalling wind and snow) I knew that I had better rush off for my “Sunday exploring” while it lasted, and Güntzburg seemed a good choice.  When living in Germany as an avid explorer and amateur historian, it is always good to keep an eye out for towns ending in “burg.”  Burg is the Germanic word for castle or fort and in fact it’s where we get our borough and burgh (as in Edinburgh) in English.  It derives from the Germanic word for berg, which means “hill” as in prehistoric times hilltops were used as basic fortifications.  So any place ending with “burg” is a potentially historically interesting place, provided it hasn’t been pulverized by WWII bombing.  Unfortunately this was the fate of most –burg towns, but luckily there are enough of them that some survived intact, and Güntzburg is one of them.

The local bank

It’s only a 15 minute train ride from Ulm, so I have to wonder why I didn’t go there before now.
Güntzburg was originally founded by the Romans in about 70 BC on the River Donau (Danube) as the Donau was a part of the Limes – a line or fortifications that protected the northern part of the Roman Empire in Germania.  Many towns in this area owe their existence to the Romans (although Ulm, where I live, isn’t one of them, having been founded much later).  It’s quite impressive as you approach it by train as it sits on top of a small hill that is quite visibly higher than the surrounding countryside, as this provided a strategic advantage for its citizens – remember the etymological lesson about the words berg and burg above?

Lots of little alleys

It’s also quite interesting to note that Güntzburg has a very nice and modern railway station, which is clean, utterly free of graffiti, well built and nicely incorporates its original historical station buildings.  You may wonder why I am mentioning this but anyone reading this who has travelled extensively by train in Germany will know that the Germans win a number of awards for building the world’s must depressing, ugly, graffiti covered and soul destroying stations of anywhere in the world.  I have no idea why.  Even in the nicest of towns when you get off the train you feel as though you have just disembarked in the Bronx.  But not Güntzburg!  Top marks to the Bürgers (citizens) of Güntzburg for their top railway station!

The local artists have been at work

So I wandered up the hill to the altstadt (old town), which is mostly intact, although the town walls are long gone.  You can still pretty much see where they were based on the contours of the hill on which the town sits.  It’s a typical German altstadt, with lots of back alleys and small streets that are closed to traffic – and some equally small ones that aren’t, something that I always consider ridiculous!  The usual suspects were there – the rathaus (town hall), multiple kirchen (churches), painted buildings and odd half timbered mediaeval building.  There’s not much to say about it that wouldn’t be the same as any other similarly sized altstadt (oh that’s a convenient excuse for the fact I’ve become bored with writing this entry!) so I’ll let the attached pictures speak for themselves.  I will say however that I shall definitely have to come back in the summer time when it is warmer!

One can only wander around an altstadt for so long on a chilly Sunday afternoon when all of the shops are closed, so after a nice meal in an old gasthof (inn/pub) I caught the train back to Ulm, where I found that the Donau had burst its banks due to the melting of the huge amounts of snow that had fallen over the past couple of days!

The flooded Donau!