{"id":1664,"date":"2015-06-25T08:38:51","date_gmt":"2015-06-25T15:38:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/easethemain.com\/?p=1664"},"modified":"2015-09-04T03:42:59","modified_gmt":"2015-09-04T10:42:59","slug":"na-zdravie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/easethemain.com\/?p=1664","title":{"rendered":"Na Zdravie!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"DSC_0036\"<\/a>\"DSC_0103\"<\/a>\"DSC_0126\"<\/a>\"DSC_0372\"<\/a>\"DSC_0211\"<\/a> \"DSC_0247\"<\/a> \"DSC_0256\"<\/a> \"DSC_0313\"<\/a> \"DSC_0353\"<\/a> \"DSC_0365\"<\/a> \"IMG_1826\"<\/a><\/p>\n

After a one-day rest back in Bari, we got up at the crack of dawn and made our way to the Bari airport to fly to Prague. Darold\u2019s roommate from the time he lived in Australia was living in Prague and we planned to visit him as well as rent\"\"<\/a> a car and drive to Slovakia to visit Darold\u2019s relatives in the small town of Plavnica, near the Polish border.<\/p>\n

We met up with Ermanno Pelucchi our first night in Prague.\u00a0 Ermanno is from Italy and was living in Australia playing soccer professionally when Darold met him.\u00a0 Darold hadn\u2019t seen Ermanno (Darold calls him Pepe) in over 15 years.\u00a0 We toured around Prague with him including having great Czech pilsner at a brewery in a monastery, visiting the Prague Castle, exploring his neighborhood and going out at night to hear some great jazz music and enjoy the beautiful city.\u00a0\u00a0 Basically we did a lot of eating and drinking, conducive for catching up after not seeing a friend for so many years.<\/p>\n

After two days, we picked up our Czech-made Skoda rental car\"\"<\/a> and drove 10 hours to Stara Lubovna, a town near Plavnica.\u00a0 There are three different families in Slovakia that we are related to, and we hadn\u2019t seen them in 20 years. They are related through Darold\u2019s great grandfather on his mother\u2019s side.\u00a0 His great grandfather is buried in the cemetery in Plavnica.\u00a0 He (Peter) had immigrated to the United States but didn\u2019t really like it.\u00a0 He went back to Plavnica with wife and two youngest children.\u00a0 Sadly, he became ill with pneumonia and died.\u00a0 One of the older children came back to Plavnica to pick up their mother and two younger siblings.\u00a0 Peter\u2019s wife had a sister, and the family in Plavnica are descendants of that sister.\u00a0 Darold\u2019s great aunt (one of the two young children who went with Peter back to Plavnica) had stayed in touch with the family and provided us with a letter of introduction to them when we made our first visit 20 years ago.<\/p>\n

When we first met the family 20 years ago we didn\u2019t have Google Translate so it was a lot easier to communicate this time around.\u00a0 Even better, more of Darold\u2019s relatives spoke English (since our Slovakian is almost nonexistent), plus the boyfriend of Darold\u2019s cousin Danke (Jan) was fluent in English (and much faster than Google Translate). One thing that hasn\u2019t changed\"\"<\/a> in 20 years is how much plum liquor they served us.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think we will ever forget the word for \u201cCheers!\u201d in Slovakian (Na Zdravie!).\u00a0 The last time we visited Darold\u2019s cousins, they had small children. Now they are\"\"<\/a> all grown and many of them married, some with children themselves.\u00a0 One cousin in particular, Lucia, had kept in touch with us via Facebook because she had studied English at university. She was six years old when we visited in 1994 and remembers it clearly because we were the first people she had ever met who spoke a different language.<\/p>\n

This trip we visited a new whiskey distillery near Plavnica (Nestville), visited the castle in Stara Lubovna, took a river trip on the border of Poland and Slovakia, visited the cemetery to see the family graves and toured the new church they built in Plavnica.\u00a0 We also ate a lot. Pirogi (potato dumplings) are Darold\u2019s personal favorite since they are vegetarian.\u00a0 However, Dante and I ate all of the other local specialties with meat including meat wrapped in cabbage, pork cutlets, cured pork and all varieties of soups. One day we went over to Jan\u2019s parents\u2019 house and saw his father\u2019s hunting trophy room.\u00a0 When I showed him a picture of her with a boar I had killed he was quite impressed and began serving us plum liquor at an even faster rate.\u00a0 One thing you should know is that the Slovakians don\u2019t sip their plum liquor; it all goes down in one shot.\u00a0 They laughed at us when we tried to nurse our first drink.\u00a0 We had forgotten that it all goes down the hatch at once! Lucia, who is getting married in October, said that when planning how much liquor to buy for a wedding you plan on a liter (a quarter gallon) of plum liquor per person\"\"<\/a>.\u00a0 Weddings usually last all night long with most people not going home until about 6am.\u00a0 \u201cOnly the grandparents go home early \u2013 around 1am,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

We had a fantastic visit with the family and they got a huge kick out of Dante who was beginning to learn some Slovakian, and who ate all of the foods offered to him with gusto.\u00a0 The town had changed a little since we had seen it last.\u00a0 There was a Kia car dealership (foreign car manufacturing is one of the industries in Slovakia), a new church, a new supermarket and many of the houses had new paint.\u00a0 However, the town (which is essentially a long road with houses on either side \u2013 without a single stop light) had retained its charm. The mutual affection that we all had for each other was palpable and we tried to encourage them to visit us in California.\u00a0 \u201cSlovakia is a poor country,\u201d said Darold\u2019s cousin Stevo (through Jan\u2019s translation.)\u00a0 When it came time to say goodbye, everyone was in tears.<\/p>\n

Returning to Prague, we took Dante to the Museum of Communism in Prague, and it was a great introduction for Dante on the subject.\u00a0 It put into perspective the conversations we had with Darold\u2019s family in Slovakia about the difference between living under Communism and the difference now.\u00a0 We don\u2019t know when we will see the Slovakian family again, but we now have a few bottles of plum liquor and Slovakian whiskey to remind us of them and our visit.<\/p>\n

For more pictures go to our\u00a0Flickr<\/a>\u00a0site!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After a one-day rest back in Bari, we got up at the crack of dawn and made our way to the Bari airport to fly to Prague. Darold\u2019s roommate from the time he lived in Australia was living in Prague and we planned to visit him as well as rent a car and drive to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sailing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/easethemain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/easethemain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/easethemain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/easethemain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/easethemain.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1664"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/easethemain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1664\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1786,"href":"http:\/\/easethemain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1664\/revisions\/1786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/easethemain.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/easethemain.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/easethemain.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}