Hockeytown USA

Slovakia is hosting the World Hockey Championships, which is like the World Cup for hockey. The final rounds as well as some of the higher profile earlier games will be in Bratislava, while Kosice (pronounced Ko-sheet-zeh), in Eastern Slovakia, has the remaining ones. The US was set to play Austria in a first round matchup. We made a roadtrip out of it along with our friends, Jory and Caitlin, and had a great weekend.

We took the train early Saturday for the five hour trip to Kosice. We passed the time sleeping, eating snacks, reading, chatting, looking out the window at some beautiful scenery, and playing scrabble. What started out as a five hour trip ended up taking about seven. There was a problem on the track ahead, so the train stopped eerily in what seemed like the middle of nowhere. The entire train was emptied and we waited with drunk Austrian hockey fans, several nuns, and a couple hundred other annoyed people to board buses to get to the next train station where we would board another train to complete the trip.

We arrived at the Kosice train station with about 25 minutes until the start of the game. We had a taxi drop us off at the hostel at which we would be staying for the evening. It was at this point that it started pouring down rain. Because of the hockey, it was very hard to find a hotel room, which is why we ended up sharing a room with 4 beds at the hostel. This was to be my first hostel experience. I'd always been curious about it and even though I've become softer and more sheltered over the years, I figured because of my time at summer camp, I could handle it. We dropped off our stuff and ran the last couple of blocks over to the arena.
We finally made it in, bought some beers, and some food, only to find out from the usher that we could not leave the concourse and go to our seats as long as we had food and beverage in hand. None of us had ever heard of such a thing at any sporting event, but since there was no way to smuggle in 500 ml beers, we consumed our refreshments while watching on the video screen from the concourse. I'm not sure what the logic is to this rule. I guess it's to keep the arena clean, but what it seems to promote is shotgunning beers which leads to lots of drunk fans. We made it to our seats finally, after we, of course, shotgunned our beers. Our section was crowded, but the rest of the arena was half full. I can understand the US not being a big draw, but I thought Austria would have plenty of support.

The rest of the game was anti-climactic as the US easily cruised to a 5-1 victory. It was fun to be there to support our country, and made me much more proud of my country than for the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Not that I think negatively of his death, but it makes me extremely uncomfortable to see and read about throngs of people storming the streets and celebrating. It makes me worry, that's all, for lots of reasons.
We spent the rest of the evening walking around the very nice city center which has been re-developed in recent years. There was lots of excitement for the hockey, but not so much activity out at the bars. We ate street food for dinner and continued the drinking we started at the hockey game. The problem for me was that I'd just returned from Asia on Wednesday night after two and a half weeks, so every half liter beer I drank, I probably became 10 times more tired. After a couple of hours, I was struggling to keep my eyes open. As much as I wanted to stay out, I couldn't, and while I tried to tell Caitlin, Jory, and Jenn, they could stay out without me, they all came back to the hostel.

In the early morning, I passed a man walking down the hall wearing leopard print underwear on my way to the bathroom. The rest of the morning was much less eventful. We walked around the main street, had some breakfast, some ice cream, and headed back to Bratislava.

The train back was thankfully much less eventful than the ride to get there.

It was a short, but fun trip. It was great to be there to support our country.

For more pictures, click here.