The Golden Hall, Bojnice Castle

ahojte from slovakia. today megan and i set out on our own by bus to a nearby town to see the bojnice castle. this blog entry is dedicated to dave barney, who upon entering this particular room of the castle looked up at the ceiling and said, 'talk about bling-bling!!!' i laughed really hard. so back to going to castle...i was really scared. i mean, that is the thing that scares me most...no, you wiseguys, not castles...public transportation. that, and new restaurants. and we had to conquer both today. we made it to bojnice ok because katka personally put us on the bus and told the driver to tell us when we had arrived. but from there we had to take a city bus up to the castle. i confidently got on a bus that stopped in front of a sign that read bojnice and within minutes we were the only ones on the bus and the driver stood up and just looked at us. my biggest fear. it happened to me in london when i was alone too, but there i had ended up in wimbeldon;) so we walked back to the bus station and i had to, gulp, ask a lady for help. she was sweet and more than happy to do so so we made it to the castle and zoo, neither of which we entered. i'm so glad megan and i are so alike. we walked around and took pictures and that was enough for us. then it was eating time. we searched and settled on a little place advertising slovak food. this is what scares me about new restaurants, ones that i've never been to before...i never know, do you just sit down and wait to be brought a menu or do you order at the counter? but we took a risk and just sat at an outside table and no one stared at us so i figured we were good. sure enough a waitress brought us a menu. we had decided to get a beer together, mainly to be funny, but when i tried to order a topvar, slovakia's most famous beer, she just said some word i didn't understand. luckily i'm a QUICK one and i figured out that it was another beer. so after a few embarassing moments with the waitress we got our delicious lunch and paid and all. well of course we, then, had to go take a picture of me posing on a toy horse that scott made famous when we were there 3 years ago. but as a result we missed our bus by a matter of seconds. thinking we could just catch the next one we realized it wasn't for over an hour and had to get back to the bus depot to go back to banska bystrica. so what do you do???what do you do? you call speedy taxi, of course. i did get a cell phone, a mobile, if you will (i won't;) so i dialed the number nervously and asked in slovak if he spoke english "a little" was the reply but luckily we were standing by a hotel so i asked in slovak if he knew where the such and such hotel was and he said he'd be there in 3 minutes, which was good because our bus back to bb was in about 12. he was a sweet driver and we spoke german together. so we made it back without incident, other than looking a little foolish paying for the bus because slovaks do not talk to each other, so amidst the pindrop silence we could not contain our laughter at the stoic driver and the comment la roja had made previous to our stepping on. i had wanted to get an icecream bar called a magnum bar, which is, ahem, bar none, the best ice cream bar in the world. but it was such a close call getting back to the bus, and she asked if i wanted to get my magnum bar and i was like, no i don't. because i didn't want to risk missing another bus etc. it was really funny. i miss you all and love you all.