KOSICE CITY, KOSICE VALLEY, & AROUND
Our seat is in a nice historical city of Kosice, the official European Capital of Culture 2013, and the hosting town of Ice Hockey World Championship 2011. Villages, gardens, fields, forests and meadows surround the city, and three beautiful national parks are within a 1- to 2-hour reach on rail or road (Slovak Paradise, Slovak Karst, Poloniny). All weather extremes can be enjoyed here during the four colorful year seasons of the mild continental climate zone. And what else you can find and enjoy in East Slovakia? Many mineral water springs, an intermittently erupting geyser (Herlany), thermal spa resort where you can bath in a natural crater under open skies (Ruzbachy), all-year ice caverns (Dobsina) and a rare aragonite formation (Ochtinska cave), abandoned but still accessible old opal gem mines (Dubnik), traditional goulash soup, bryndza sheep cheese pirogi, various endemic rural meals, the Tokaj Region vineyards with typical underground moldy cellars and the very special noble-rot thick nectar Tokaj wine, and plenty of other attractions... Lying in the middle of this all, Kosice is the biggest town in eastern Slovakia and the country's second major pole of industrial growth. Convenient railway connections and the adjacent Kosice International Airport (KSC) warrant comfortable travel to or from anywhere. Inhabited since the prehistorical era and settled upon the legendary strategic West-East & North-South ancient trade crossroads, Kosice was the very first city in old Europe granted an archaic "logo" / "trademark" predecessor - its own historical coat of arms. Our multicultural metropolitan hub with 800 years of written urban history is currently a home of the Europe's oldest / the world's 6th oldest annual marathon run (Kosice Peace Marathon), Slovak Constitutional Court, a branch of Slovak National Bank, the large U. S. Steel industrial complex innovated with American investments, and many other establishments, points of interest, and cultural landmarks. Academic life in Kosice started in 1657 with the archaic Universitas Cassoviensis, and Kosice now hosts three universities, several colleges, and some dislocated faculties. Additional scholarly and professional career opportunities emerge especially in the area of instrument engineering, software development and information technologies, e.g., with SIEMENS, T-Systems, or the Kosice IT Valley project.
NOTEWORTHY THINGS
The greater geographical area of former Czechoslovakia (Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, and Slovakia) is where a man lives in flesh who can move a train just with his muscles, or who endures walking the entire 42 km (26 mi) Marathon route tied to a car. Here, several iconic terms and things were originally conceived, such as: "robot" machines in 1921; the most famous version of a mysterious medieval narrative about a clay-made "Golem" - a giant anthropomorphic servant creature; or historical ancestors of the modern-day "dollar" currency; and other interesting curiosities. Slovakia is also the home of future AeroMobilTM real flying cars, engineered here to fulfill century-long human dreams of individual wing travel.