The Slovakian youth group, great food, and a castle!

So it's now 10:30 on Saturday morning. I realize I didn't fill you all in on Friday's happenings last night, so I'm going to throw Friday and Saturday morning into one blog post.

Yesterday's highlights included going to a Slovakian grocery store, Phil speaking at Ed's youth group, and Grant sleeping until 12:30. I'll fill you in on these events in order of importance/excitement factor.

Grant slept in until 12:30..........there's not much more to it than that. I guess I could tell you that we decided he had slept long enough and took Jalen and Shaylee in to jump on him, but unfortunately (for our enjoyment) he was already awake.

We went to a Slovakian grocery store. This was definitely a neat experience. While the store closely resembled a Meijer or an Aldi, it was interesting to see all the labels in Slovak and the prices listed in Euros. All right, your probably thinking, "that wasn't very interesting either, get to the good stuff". Don't worry, our next event was pretty awesome!

At around 5:00 in the afternoon, Grant, Phil and I went to the youth group meeting with Ed at their local church. Phil (with the help of a translator) was the featured speaker for the evening. He gave a very well done and insightful lesson on Godly relationships. I think it was well received by all but one student (I'll get to that later).

When we first got there, Ed had to meet with the other leaders and Phil had to go over his talk with the translator. This left Grant and I to fend for ourselves among the 30 or so high school aged students. Since I only know about 3 words of Slovak (and I'm lucky if I remember two of them) I decided to see if I could engage any of the students in a simple English conversation. I noticed a young girl was sitting by herself and wasn't presently engaged in a conversation so I tried my luck with her. I asked her if she spoke any English. She stared at me blankly and made a hand-motion that indicated very little. Not to be dismayed, I held out my hand and said, "My name is Ben". She understood that, and shook my hand and gave me her name. As this exchange was taking place, the students in the 4 or 5 separate conversations around us must have heard English being spoken, because they dropped what they were doing and swarmed around me and my Slovakian conversation companion. Here I was, now attempting to converse with about 10-12 young Slovakian girls who spoke very little English. I tried a couple of simple questions speaking very slowly (what's your name, how old are you, what year in school are you in, what's your favorite color?) and we went down the line with each of them giving me their answer (if they understood). Thankfully, by this time Ed had noticed my predicament and came over to bail me out.

I then went over and joined Grant in a conversation with a young man named Jan, who spoke very good English. He turned out to be a great friend for us throughout the night and continually was willing to help us with translation and just overall knowing what was going on.

When the night officially began, we started off by playing a classic youth group game out in the field. Everyone had a piece of paper taped to their back and the object of the game was to run around and pull the paper off of everyone else's backs while protecting the paper on your own back. It was a lot of fun and left us hot and sweaty as we headed back indoors for worship and Phil's talk.

The worship part of the evening was very interesting, as many of the songs were familiar U.S. praise songs (so I was able to recognize the tune) but the meter and flow was very different with the words being in Slovak. I attempted to sing along in Slovak (the words were on a screen up front) but I'm sure my pronunciation was really weird because I kept getting strange backwards glances from the people sitting in front of me.

Next up came Phil's talk. He'd speak for a sentence or two and then pause as one of the students translated what he just said into Slovak. He was rolling along like this for about 15-20 minutes when all of a sudden, one of the male students sitting in the back of the room decided he had had enough. He got up, opened a window and noisily jumped out from the first floor opening. Confusion ensued for several seconds before I turned to Jan and asked if this kind of thing normally happens. He got a big smile on his face and said loud enough for everyone in the room to hear him, "Welcome to Slovakia".

When we returned to Ed and Wendi's at around 8:00, Wendi had amazing homemade pizza prepared for us! We had a wonderfully relaxing evening with Ed and Wendi complete with Pizza, ice cream, and a new card game called 65!

This morning (being Saturday morning) I had a very enthusiastic and effective wake-up call. I awoke to all 5 of the Rumbold kids jumping on my bed!:) Apparently 8:45 was sleeping in a little too late for a Saturday morning. They were all ready to get the day started!

And boy am I glad they got me up! We had a fantastic breakfast of traditional Slovak pancakes (the name escapes we right now) filled with whipped cream and cocoa. It's now after breakfast and........................hold on we must interrupt this blog post to bring you an important announcement:

It has just been decided that we are leaving imminently for Spissky Hrad, the largest castle in Slovakia! I'll get right back to this post when we return....................

Alright, I'm back! It's now 9:00 pm and we have just finished an amazing day exploring a castle and eating at a very traditional Slovak restaurant!

We arrived at the castle at about 12:45 and hiked up a steep incline to get to the mountaintop entrance. The remainder of the afternoon was spent touring around one of the most breathtaking places I have ever witnessed! Some highlights included the dungeon, complete with medieval torture devices, a huge tower overlooking the entire valley and countryside, and a castle museum which featured everything from a authentic castle kitchen to a catholic church built into the side of a stone wall.

After a full day of walking all around the castle, we had stoked up some pretty ravenous appetites. We found the solution to this problem in a authentic Slovak restaurant which Ed and Wendi suggested. The food was fantastic and the outdoor restaurant atmosphere was so classically European. I was definitely pleased with every aspect of our Saturday adventure. I really feel like I can't adequately express in words the full range of experiences we.......experienced today! I invite you all to check out the pictures I've taken thus far on my facebook page.

We'll we're winding down for the evening now. Ed and Wendi are upstairs putting the kids to bed (my prediction is they will sleep VERY well tonight). Grant is taking a nap 3 feet to my left and Phil is outside the doorway doing an insane number of push-ups and ab exercises (he fittingly calls this workout insanity. I did it with him the other day and I almost died.)

Since this blog post is already getting up there in length, I'm going to call it a day and wind down for the night myself. We're going to church at 9:00 in the morning tomorrow.

Until next time, this is Ben signing off from Bardejov.