Oh Slovakia.

Poprad Slovakia…. What to say, I suppose if it needed one of those tourism advert tag lines mine would say. "Poprad Slovakia! Don’t ever come here." As you can probably tell, if Poprad is a place you hold dear in your heart, filled with good memories, I probably wouldn’t bother reading the rest of this. It’s not going to be good.

I should also start this by saying that Poprad wasn’t exactly our plan. We were staying in a little village just outside of Poprad called Nova Lesna where our plan was to enjoy the sunshine and get some hiking and sightseeing in! yeah that didn’t happen. We arrived at Poprad bus station with the rain hammering down, this was pretty much the theme of our trip to Poprad. Cold weather and constant rain. We stopped inside the train station briefly to attempt to get some information on which way to the train station, and of course as is pretty common in Europe, all the information booths were closed. At 3pm. On a weekday. And this is just a personal bit of whinging from me which isn’t Poprad specific, but being forced to pay any amount of money to use a bathroom in Europe should be illegal. I refuse to accept there is any reason they should be paid entry, because they’re generally always disgusting. What are we paying for!

We arrived at the train station which turned out to be only about 10 minutes away, and my god they haven’t updated this place in a while. The roof of the station quite literally had holes in it, this made for an interesting walk to the platform as you tried to avoid getting soaked on your way. As we got up to the train platform we got a breathtaking view of Poprad! It took your breath away… because it was one of the most depressing places we’d ever seen. Pastel covered tower blocks, and a building that genuinely looked abandoned with a big “hostel” sign hanging from it, thank god we weren’t staying there. And yes, I’m aware that the whole communist tower block thing is common in Europe, maybe it was the weather that made everything in Poprad look so much worse than what we had seen so far.

Anyway! We boarded our train to head to our little village of Nova Lesna, and we were at the station within about 10 minutes. As it was the whole trip, it was raining when we arrived. But luckily for us, two Germans decided to pick us up, I don’t think we’d ever been more relieved. Just goes to show that no matter where you are, and even if you are a miserable bastard who complains about an entire city (me) someone will still have the decency to feel sorry for you and give you a lift. They explained that their daughter was currently backpacking and I guess that was enough for them to drop us of at our accommodation. The one good thing I will say about this trip, was that our accommodation in Nova Lesna was pretty impressive. The only problem was, that it was forecast to rain for our entire time there, so we ended up spending our whole trip in our room. On our first night we quickly realized we were too late to even buy groceries, the store had closed before we arrived. There were also no bars and no restaurants in the village, which we forgave because it was small place. So we spent the evening in our room drinking tea and watching subtitled TV. The next day we decided to brave the rain and attempt to explore Poprad, we had an enormous list of things to do! Not really, google things to do in Poprad and you’ll see what I mean. So we headed back to the leaky train station armed with our umbrella and headed into the Poprad city centre. We walked for about ten minutes before we ducked into the major shopping centre in Poprad and stayed there for an hour or two until we went back to our room in Nova Lesna.

I feel like I’ve whinged enough, but just a quick note of the fact that when we left Nova Lesna we were set to board the 12pm train to Budapest. The only problem was on our arrival we were informed that the train was cancelled, it was going to be a two hour wait. It was also snowing. I wont bore you with our wait, but we were cold. Oh so cold. And then we were off, away from Poprad and out of Slovakia. For all I know Poprad could be an amazing place that we just didn’t explore well enough, but you’re never going to convince me of that. And we’re never going back.

#slovakia #backpacking #winter #poprad #travel