Time to catch up

I have neglected this blog lately, but not the cooking! So I'm back with a few new recipes, some totally improvised which turned out to be truly delicious.

We came back from Slovakia on Sunday afternoon. We spent 5 days there and had a lovely time.

We arrived just over an hour before departure at the airport (our train to the airport was late) and there was a big queue at the check-in desk. We had hand luggage only and could have checked-in at home, if only they did not charge £5 more per person for the privilege to do so. It surely should be the other way round: if people check-in at home, they don't need to employ many desk people, they save cost and we should therefore pay less. Or did I miss something here? As we checked in the boards were showing "Final Call" for our flight, AAAGGGHHH!

No time to lose, we ran all the way, jumped all the queues right to the front (even if they were going to wait for us, we did not want to delay the flight, and decided that jumping the queue was the best option). We assumed that everyone on our flight would do the same. There were many of us who would be late at the gate.
And then, crawling at the front of the security check, after apologising for ignoring the queuing system, someone shouted: "hey, you've just jumped the queue by at least 5 people!" (we jumped the queue by at least 300 people...) We said our plane was taking off in 10 minutes. To which the guy replied that so did his. We said that in which case he should obviously jump the queue too! He did not look happy.

We caught our plane. It was delayed by 30 minutes.

Arriving at Bratislava Airport, it took us some time to find out how to buy a bus ticket into town. There was a sign pointing towards a machine, but there was a price against a specified time (10min, 30min, 1 hour, 1 day, 3 days) so I assumed this was for the car park. NO! It was for the bus. In Slovakia, they seem to love measuring and weighing things. You pay public transport according to how long it takes to get from A to B. And in restaurants the weight of each dish on offer is written on the menu, before the price. So we finally got onto an empty bus, took a seat, and after a while, the bus was quite crowded and there was not much room to move around, with all seats taken and many people standing so we could not move. The bus had been going for 10-15 minutes when we heard in English: "Hey, Mr. Amnesty, are you not going to leave your seat to a woman carry a baby?" This was Mr. Grumpy from the airport! In a perfect sarcastic tone, he indicated that his wife/partner (who seemed very embarrassed by his intervention) needed a rest. Now, I am all for leaving my seat to older people/pregnant women, etc... BUT here were the circumstances:
1. the woman was quite large and had an enormous back-pack type thing in which there was a child big enough to walk, taking so much room it would have been impossible to reach the closest seat.
2. even if the bus had not been so crowded and she could have reached a seat, she could not have possibly sat on it because of the enormous backpack thing.
3. the guy who tried to make us feel guilty of not letting our seat to his partner was not even carrying the tiniest purse while she had this shell on her back!!! and he was clearly stong enough to support it.

So we did not feel too guilty and left him to his grumpiness. They left the bus a few stations before us. He called Trave "Mr. Amnesty" because of the Amnesty International T-Shirt he was wearing.

This was for our travel to Bratislava. We walked into the centre in the evening and had dinner there. The following day, we took a train to Piestany where we stayed a couple of days. We had a very interesting wine serving experience, and enjoyed cycling through the Slovakian countryside, particularly maize fields. We returned to Bratislava early on the fourth day to visit the capital city, as we had to fly back the following day.

I will try to post photos from this beautiful country soon!