Žilina

Well, we’ve been here five and a bit days now, and I thought I’d best contribute my own thoughts on our home for the next two months, Žilina in northwest Slovakia. By the way, you can see where ‘here’ is from the map below. I know it’s an area that Brits and Yanks don’t tend to be familiar with (and nor were we).

As I alluded to in my last post, the area is pretty hilly with the surrounding slopes (which top out at around 1400 m) thickly wooded with pine trees. I understand from several colleagues that Slovakia has some good skiing in the winter, though I don’t really have any idea as yet if this is nearby or not.

The town is reasonably small, with less than 90,000 people, but it’s the regional capital (Slovakia is divided into eight regions) and the 4th largest city. The centre is a compact hub of narrow cobbled streets, lined by old buildings (I’m struggling to find info about how old they are!) around a lovely, open central square:

 
And the skyline is dominated by the small cathedral:

 
Since we arrived, we’ve been mostly getting ourselves set up in our flat - which the company rents for such purposes – with trips to local supermarkets, as already mentioned by Karen, and generally working out how to get around the town.

Finding Tesco here was certainly an amusing discovery, and the other major supermarket belongs to the French, Carrefour chain, so we enjoyed having a little bit of familiarity from the start. Food shopping here is a funny experience, as many goods are labelled in Slovak, Czech (similar) and Polish, so it can be hard to work out which language even IS Slovak! On top of that there are goods from Germany on the shelves, and then many items have English names, but all the ingredients and method are in local languages. Given that knowledge of English here is seemingly less than in western Europe, I wonder how the poor people cope!

We’ve also been pleasantly surprised that free wireless net access is available in coffee shops, and even in the town’s two main squares, as we shall be entirely reliant on Skype and the internet to handle all our affairs in the US these next two months.

My first day at work will be tomorrow. However, I’ve already met my new boss face-to-face, and another day two colleagues took us to be registered with the local authorities, and then out to dinner. Food here is homely and filling, much like traditional English dishes, and there has been fairly little penetration of more exotic cuisines from outside, with the exception of Italian food, so we should have plenty of occasion to try new things!

So far the slushy snow has kept us from walking far out of town, but we did take a walk north to the nearby river Váh (click on the image to see a bigger version), and discovered a local castle.

 
Right, well I’ll call it quits for now. After all, you’ve all had quite a bit new to read this week! Hope everyone is enjoying the first few days of 2010, and we’re still on e-mail, so drop us a message!

Mark