A cottage in the forest

I spent this past weekend (starting Thursday night) at the cottage of a coworker in northwest Slovakia with her, her boyfriend, another coworker and her boyfriend, Monika, and two friends of the girls that showed up on Saturday night. It was everything I could have asked a weekend in the woods to be. Hot tea with freshly squeezed lemon almost all the time, a fire in the fireplace, walks through the forest...but I'm getting ahead of myself.

When Katka F., Monika, and I arrived in Horná Mariková, a small village in northwest Slovakia, it was raining far too hard for us to begin the 30-40 minute walk up into the woods to the cottage belonging to Katka's family. I wasn't too ready to start a long walk anyway, as I was still drowsy from sleeping on the bus ride from the local small town where we disembarked from the regional train. If it sounds like a long trip, it's because it was--it took nearly 4 hours to go about 115 miles.

Here was our reward for the journey. It's hard to see, but there is a faint outer ring as well.

Here is a typical-looking Slovak cottage along the path to the cottage where I stayed. The crisp, clean look is typical only for those cottages in which people still live. There are plenty of abandoned cottages that almost look like run-down barns.

This is the part of the pathway we took to reach the cottage. On Friday, Monika and I discussed the subtle difference in connotation between the "woods" and the "forest" with Katka. We said that when she said we'd be going through the forest this weekend, we had a vision of something different--maybe like walking through chest-high grass and getting ticks while tripping over ourselves. That ended up being Saturday.

Reaching the cottage, we were rewarded with another great view. This is facing straight out the front door.

And then turning to the right. The cottage was relatively small compared to what I expected--it had a kitchen, a dining room, a rather big living room with a fire, and 2 upstairs bedrooms. I suppose when I heard it could sleep 8 people or more I thought it had more rooms. It definitely slept 8--I realized how appealing a sleeping bag by the fire could be when I saw a couple of our crew make arrangements to stay there.

Saying that this weekend was relaxing would be an understatement. For the most part, everyone slept 8-10 hours a night (in almost complete dark and complete silence) and enjoyed tasty (if a little unhealthy), leisurely meals whenever it suited everyone. In a word, it was cozy.

Even so, I had several chances to do some manual labor, which was really fulfilling. I chopped a lot of wood for the fireplace (visible in the basket) in the barn out behind the cottage...and there is nothing like getting a chance to bring out your inner lumberjack in some fresh, cold mountain air when 99% of the time you do your work in front of a computer screen. I only wish I had more opportunities to chop firewood.

On Thursday night, Katka F.'s boyfriend arrived after hitchhiking his way to Horná Mariková. It was pretty late when everyone ate and got settled, so we only managed to play one game of Scrabble before going to bed. It was epic, though--each team had one Slovak and one American and was authorized to make a word either in Slovak or in English. I was so proud to have put two of the three-letter Slovak words on the board myself.

On Friday, we woke up, had some breakfast, and set out to see some nearby cottages before buying food for the next couple of days from the village below. We scared one woman really badly by walking up to her cottage without her noticing us. I can imagine why--every other cottage in their clump of cottages was vacant, so she wasn't expecting anyone. She was busy squeezing cherries and removing their pits in order to make cherry marmalade. Her husband joined us with this basket of freshly picked cherries and offered us some.

On Saturday, the guys set out after breakfast to help the next-door neighbor with a problem he'd been having with his well water. Rainwater had collected in a puddle next to his well and was unfavorably altering the mineral content in his otherwise pure mountain stream water--he knew this because his daughter was a hygenist and did yearly checks on her dad's water. He had asked Katka F.'s boyfriend, Miloš on Friday night if he would help dig a ditch to drain the puddle.

I think Miloš and I would have accepted the task even if the neighbor had not offered us apple moonshine that Friday night, which he made in a shed by his house. I'm not really into sitting around at a table and throwing back moonshine, but Miloš assured me that there is nothing wrong with it--in fact, it is a cultural requirement in the mountains of Slovakia to do exactly that. The neighbor spoke two words of English in the entire time I was around him: "good medicine," right before he took a shot. It was then that I executed my first (and likely last) successful joke in the Slovak language, in which I pointed at his shed and said, "that is the pharmacy!" He understood me and seemed to enjoy it.

Friday night was when Katka M. and her boyfriend Poťo arrived by car. Poťo helped dig the ditch on Saturday morning--he also beat me in chess and served as navigator for our jaunt through the forest, using the GPS system on his phone (useful if you're looking for the courage to wade through otherwise unnavigable tall grass).

Like I said before, the food was delicious but so unhealthy. The Slovak name for this casserole translates to "landfill." The dish consists of potatoes, sour cream, sausage, cabbage, cheese, and likely other things I forgot. We had heaping portions of it on Saturday afternoon for lunch, just after our big work project. For other meals, we had fried bread covered with ham and fried eggs, shishkebabs of peppers, wild forest mushrooms, and sausages, among other combinations of the same fried foods. I will need to eat nothing but vegetables for a month to make up for this weekend.

Here is a good example of the "old cottage" style. On Saturday during the exploration of the forest, a group of us came across a closely packed group of such cottages in a clearing in the forest. We called several times to see if anyone was home and finally almost decided that no one was, but an elderly man came out to greet us and he talked to the others in Slovak for a while. It turns out that he had been born in the cottage just a few feet away from the one outside of which we were standing. He lived there alone, but he still had family in the nearby local town where we had gotten off the train--he stays in the forest because he gets "bored in the city." He offered us cherries, too--his cherries were from a tree that he planted himself in the forest when he was 15. All of this was relayed to me later, of course, but standing there and observing his conversation with the others was engaging in its own right.

We left on Sunday afternoon after Katka and Miloš did a huge amount of cleaning in and around the cottage. I enjoyed my jaunt "back to nature," but it was still good to leave. It's only easy to relax for the sake of relaxing for so long. There's stuff to do back at the League, including preparations for the Pohoda festival this upcoming weekend. I leave on Wednesday morning to help build the organization's tent at the designated site, and then Thursday, Friday, and Saturday will each be 12-hour marathons of music and activities.