Touring the Liptov Area with Grandma O.

Early Wednesday morning in the staff workroom, we were discussing Tim's work visa, and all of a sudden arrangements were being made for Pastor Ferenčik to drive Tim and Janka back to Žilina right away.  It all worked smoothly, I got a lot of organizing done at my desk while they were gone, and they were back well before lunchtime with Tim's new work visa in hand.  So that's one thing we won't have to worry about next fall!  YAY!  

I walked back to the flat to pick up Grandma mid-morning, then we drove back to the school, since our path to school has gotten really muddy after all the rain.  We gave her a tour of the school, she met some of our staff, and she got an introduction to our Slovak school environment.  

Having the traditional first course of soup for our school lunch in the basic school canteen.  Notice that Mom is now wearing a scarf, like a true Slovak woman!!     ;-)   

After school, we drove to Sväty Kríš, which is very near Liptovsky Mikuláš.  This historic wooden articular Lutheran church is the biggest in Slovakia, and it was moved to this location when the dam was built forming Liptovská Mara (huge lake here), flooding 13 villages.   I've added a link to interesting information on this unique type of church!

Slovak Wooden Articular Church 

This shows how huge the church is.  There were over 6,000 people in the congregation for the dedication service in 1774.  It was fascinating to hear the history of this church!!  

Mom O. got to see an enormous stork's next, with the stork in it, on top of this building!

For dinner Wednesday evening, we were invited over to Marian (Tim's student) and Susan's house.  The meal was delicious, and we had a great time chatting!  We came home around 9:00, so there was time to skype with Beth and with my parents too before bedtime!!           :-)  

Thursday morning, we went to school, and Betty got to meet some of our students.  Since there aren't any real classes this week, some students are on a study abroad trip to England, and grades & class books are all officially closed, the students don't really HAVE to be at school, even though they are "supposed to" be there.  So, as you can imagine, there were not a lot of kids around!  But it was still fun for her to talk to some of our students and hear how fabulous their English is.  

This morning Peter, one of my wonderful V.AP class students (graduated senior), stopped by  with their class photo board which has been displayed in a store window uptown.  It will now be hung on a wall in our school for posterity!  

 We went out to lunch today (Thursday) with Janka, before heading to to the skanzen in Pribylina.  It's an outdoor museum east of here displaying typical architecture of the Liptov region.  Again, the weather was cold and cloudy, but at least there was no rain this afternoon!  

The first building was a fire house, and it had two vintage fire engines inside. 

This house was a non-landowner peasant's house - very small and simple.  

Houses of craftsmen or tradesmen were slightly bigger.  

Normal houses had basically one large room which was used for cooking, eating, and sleeping.  Many of these houses were still in use well into the 20th century.  

These hand-decorated fabrics were gorgeous!  

Pribylina museum wooden houses with light colored stucco fronts.

You could tell the slightly higher-class houses by their more decorative furniture and bigger living spaces.  

There were sheep grazing all over the place, and these were running away from the little girls in pink!   :-)  

The wood shingle rooftops were on all the buildings.  

The oldest parts of this church date back to the 1100's, and it has been added onto for centuries.  

The pews inside the church were very ornately carved and painted.  

This is a famous Gothic wood- panel altar in the church. 

Baptismal font made of carved stone.  

Here is the altar, and some very old frescoes saved when the church was restored. 

 A wooden one-room school house, Slovak style!  The left half was the teacher's living quarters.  At some times during our careers, with coaching sports and rehearsing music groups, we have both thought life would be easier if we just slept on a cot at school - HA!

Inside the school - student desks, a teacher desk, and a pump organ!!  Music - yay!!  

There was information posted on each building in Slovak, English, and German, so we learned that many teachers took up bee-keeping as a hobby.  These hives were behind the school house, and they remind us of all the delicious honey people have shared with us here.  Yum!!  

We couldn't communicate with the ticket-seller, but I was pretty sure from the signs that there should be a guided tour and kept trying to ask for that.  Most of the buildings were open, like this one, so we could just wander in, and the written descriptions were great. 

We ran across a lady giving a tour to a small group of people, so I asked her about  getting inside the locked buildings, which were of course the biggest ones.  She was really nice about it and let us inside everywhere, even though the tours were only supposed to start on the hour.  So nice of her!!  This is the great hall of a large mansion where members of the nobility lived.  

The great hall was the original mansion, but eventually many additions were built, and it was turned into one big room.  

In the mansion were MUCH nicer bedrooms than where the lower class villagers lived! 

The period furniture was really beautiful, and we were amazed at how enormous the cabinets were in many of the rooms! 

View out the window upstairs in the mansion.  

Children's room / nursery with cribs, cradles, and toys --- darling!!  

 We really enjoyed seeing all the buildings at the outdoor museum, and we were grateful that it never rained while we were there!  

On the way back through Liptovsky Hrádok, we stopped by the castle there, so I finally got a picture of this shrine atop a giant boulder in this lake, which we have passed by in the bus many times before!  

Liptovsky Hrádok castle - which has an attached hotel now!  

We are so grateful that we have had the use of Pat'ka's car all week while Tim's mom is here.  (Pat'ka is in charge of the England trip with our students all week, so it was perfect timing!)  It made it soooo much easier to get to all the places we wanted to take her.  We always take trains and buses, but there is usually a lot of walking involved, so having the car has been perfect!!  

We headed home for a quiet hour or so - some napped, some worked on the blog - LOL!!  And then we went to the Slovenská Restaurant here in town for Grandma's traditional Slovak meal of bryndsové halušky and bryndsové pirohy.  (All the students today wanted to know if she had tried the national dishes, both made with potato dough and sheep cheese.)    It was really yummy to us, though different-tasting for Betty!  

All three of us have our suitcases packed for our travels which will begin after church tomorrow.  (The last school service happens at 8:10, and then the students will go back to school to be given their final grade reports.)   It is a great blessing that Pastor Ferenčik has arranged for us to use the church car for our the next week, since he won't need it all week.  So we will head to Bratislava, then on to Austria and Germany.  It will be a whirlwind tour!