Pieštany

The family and I went to visit family and friends in Pieštany, a nearby town in Slovakia which is known for its spas. (By "the family," I mean Dad, Anna, and Louis with his family: his wife, Karen, and his kids, Christina and Steven.) People have been going to Pieštany for a thousand years, seeking the healing powers of the spas there.

The family we visited was Ernest, Anna's brother, and his wife, Eva. Ernest is an engineer who works with the wind turbines that have recently appeared in Slovakia. He and Eva live in one of those ugly high rise apartments with an elevator inside that's not much bigger than a phone booth. The inside of Ernest's apartment looked a lot better than the outside. On one wall, they have prints of drawings by Alphonse Mucha, the famous Czech painter from the Art Nouveau period. For lunch, we had soup, haluški and kolác. Haluški is a dish with potato noodles in cheese. Kolác is a poppy seed pastry. It was a good meal. Ernest showed me a video of the wedding of his daughter, Lenka. She married a British Royal Marine.

The friends we visited were Peter and his wife. Peter used to work as a nuclear physicist, but now he works as a consultant, and he seems to be doing very well. His house is a mansion with its own workout room, laundry, spa, and wine cellar in the basement. The paintings on the wall vary from fine art to modern art. A curving staircase leads upstairs. The upper floor is an apartment for his daughter. She wasn't there, but we met her cat. After the tour of the mansion, we went to an elegant restaurant at a local penzion for dinner. The muzak they were playing was strange. It was Slovak bands playing rock hits from the 60's and 70's, including some Beatles songs. They didn't sound like the Beatles. After dinner, we walked around town and saw the sights, which were mainly the local parks, hotels, and a nearby church. The sun was still up in the evening. It was muggy and hot, so we got some ice cream.

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