Banska Stiavnica

Greetings Blog readers!

So going backward of things I should tell you all about. From December 27 to December 29, my comrades and I were in Banska Stiavnica. My comrades include Larry, Kendra, Kendra's friend Karin, Sonja, and Rado. Banska Stiavnica is a small mining town in central Slovakia. We had a fantastic time (Okay, I exaggerate. It was a pretty good time).

Our journey began on Thursday, December 27 at 6:20 a.m. Let's just say it wasn't my idea to leave that early. On the right, you can see how I spent my train ride. We took two trains. One train ride was three hours, then we took a one cart train for about an hour.

When we arrived, we went straight to our hostel to put our stuff down. It was quite a walk from the train station to the hostel, about a 45 minute walk. After we got acquainted with the hostel, we went to lunch. I had some fantastic Kapustnica and something else that I can't remember, so it must not have been that amazing.

After lunch, we went to the Old Castle. The castle was pretty cool. It had some old statues inside of it and then replicas next to them, which were interesting to compare.

The next day we went to the New Castle, which was a little more interesting, probably because it had descriptions of the history of the period in which it was built. I learned that the castles were built as fortresses and lookouts for them to tell when the Turks were coming. The Turks occupied Slovak at that time and made it all the way to Vienna.

We also traveled to the old mine. This adventure was probably the highlight of the trip, or rather, the highlight was wearing that ridiculous outfit on the right and carrying a huge flashlight. It was a 30 minute walk to the mine, so we were all freezing when we arrived; however, fortunately for us, the mine was far underground. We went from -5 celsius to 15 celsius. The temperature was great. We were in a group of twenty and a few had to leave because they felt claustrophobic. I didn't seem to mind. I think the warmth was what made me stay. Anyway, at this mine, they used to mine a bunch of different materials: gold and iron mostly.

The low point of the trip was Friday night/Saturday morning when Sonja realized that her camera was missing. As it turns out, another person staying in the hostel had 2000 crowns (80 bucks) stolen from her. We figured out that there was a door unlocked that we didn't realize was unlocked. We never used the door and figured that it was locked. Apparently it wasn't.

Anyway, we arrived back in BA Saturday evening after a good few days.