How a Japanese met Slovakia, part 1

(Original notes of Nat)

I´m not going to write anything emotional and too personal here. Such things will go into my personal essay apart from this story. And I´m not going to go into details on each person I met because I won´t finish this in time but I´ll also write about them in my personal essay. The purpose of this is to purely tell what I thought about "Slovakia" after I spent three weeks there. And the hypothetical audience is neither you nor me. So here goes.

What the fxxx?! Where the fxxx is that?! If not "what" the fxxx is that?! What in god´s name did you go there for?! What on earth were you doing there?! Or you mean Czechoslovakia, right? These are some of the things that people would say to me if I tell them that I visited Slovakia and had a heck of a good time. And I would neither be surprised by these words nor blame people for saying these things because I wasn´ft too far away from these words in one point, to be honest. And I would have said something similar if someone had told me that they visited Slovakia. The reason is simple. People don´t know what a great time Slovakia can offer to them. I´m sure I was one of them but I´ve discovered what a hidden beauty Slovakia was and still is, thanks to my special someone with whom I travelled throughout the country where I gained experiences that no one else can ever think of gaining like I did with her.
To be honest, I was not thinking much about Slovakia before I visited there. My only reason was to meet her. The rest was extra. But I´d had no idea that this extra would turn out to be extraordinary by the end.
After travelling more than 20 hours by airplanes from Sydney, Australia, I finally arrived at Prague, the gateway to my ultimate destination of my vacation. There I met her friend who was nice enough to agree with her and come and pick up a total strange Japanese man from Australia. This friend helped me change currencies and buy a ticket to Prague city center. I had no idea at this point that this was just a tip of huge iceberg of what will happen in the next three weeks.
The first thing I realized was that it was summer there. OMG, it was scorching hot! I almost fainted. I flew via Abu Dhabi and felt freaking hot there, too, but Abu Dhabi is always hot. And I forgot to think about the season in Prague. Sydney was still in the winter. I couldn´t think of a hot summer of Prague or Slovakia because I had a strong impression of a cold climate in these countries. I didn´t think these countries have such a hot summer. This must show how ignorant I was about these counties, huh?
We arrived at a subway station and caught a subway next. I´m not sure if it was this station or the station we got off, but I surely remember that some escalators in the Prague subway are massively long and terrifyingly steep. It looked to me like they stand at almost 90 degrees. I don´t recall any subway systems of Tokyo, Osaka, NY, Paris, and Australia (train) that long.
This friend also helped find my hotel and buy a ticket to Bardejov.  In order to buy a ticket to Bardejov, she brought me to a bus depot not a train station which I was expecting. I was only thinking of catching a train from Prague to Bardejov so I was quite confused but didn´t question her because she knew better. After all, she was a local. But I was wondering, though, if she thought I wanted to go by bus, not by train. Anyway we went up to one of the booths. Well, what I was wondering was right. She was asking a bus ticket for me. So then I asked her if there weren´t any trains. And she asked the guy behind the glass, but he said there weren´t. So I asked how long it takes to get to Bardejov and what time it leaves, she told me it´d take 11 hours and it´d leave 8:20. I said, "11 hours!" I thought I was day dreaming but she repeated that it´d take about 11 hours to Bardejov. In Japan it takes as short as like 3 hours to travel for a similar distance. While still in shock, I thought it wouldn´t be too bad because I thought I´d arrive in Bardejov and meet her on the same day if the bus leaves Prague in the morning. But she meant 8:20 PM! That didn´t sound good at all. So I asked if I could leave that day but the guy behind the glass told her that night´s bus was book solid. Yes, BOOKED SOLID! So only choice was going by bus tomorrow evening and arriving the day after tomorrow. I was like "what am I going to do for the next 27 hours in Prague by myself?" I didn´t plan anything to do in Prague because I wasn´t supposed to spend 27 hours in Prague alone.