PRAGUE, Czech Republic -- Two tall water glasses, two napkins and a liter of orange soda sat untouched on the coffee table. I sank into a soft couch with Mary Ann, my traveling partner, and Martin, Cubjak, our young Slovakian translator.

	John Hayes, Post-Gazette A statue of Andy Warhol stands in the plaza of the Andy Warhol Museum in Medzilaborce, Slovakia. Click photo for larger image. If you go: Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art, Medzilaborce, Slovakia 011-421-57-748-0072; www.region.sk/warhol Related article Celebrate traditions at Iowa's Czech and Slovak Museum

Across the table in stiff wooden chairs sat a stoic, gray haired Slovakian and his teenage son. We watched, perplexed and a little uncomfortable in a stranger's home as the natives talked about us in a language we didn't understand.

Although we were paying Cubjak to help us communicate, his limited English left a lot of spaces between the words. And the words were important. The men were discussing whether Mary Ann might be a long-lost member of the Slovakian's family.

Mary Ann and I had traveled together six time zones east of Pittsburgh, but for different reasons. She had spent months planning a trip she originally intended to take alone, reserving a rental car and a timeshare in a Czech resort. Her mission was to locate Medzilaborce, the small Slovakian village near the Ukrainian border where her long-deceased mother had been born, and to search for unknown relatives who might offer insight into her family's background.

We'd been dating for several months when she asked me to tag along. I was interested in visiting the other Andy Warhol museum, coincidentally located in the same small town. The crash course in getting to know each other accommodated my other secret agenda -- if we traveled together well and I could work up the courage, I planned to propose to Mary Ann.

Many people like to pepper their vacations with a little adventure. How much is a matter of personal taste. We chose a moderately freewheeling approach. For the first week of the trip, our timeshare 100 kilometers (60-plus miles) east of Prague would serve as a home base as we explored the Czech Republic by car. Week 2 was untethered with vague plans to drive the Slovakian countryside, rest in unreserved hotel rooms, explore Medzilaborce and its possible family ties and make it back to Prague in time for our flight home.

We couldn't have chosen a more interesting part of the planet.

For the last 1,200 years, the people of this landlocked, central European region have toiled under a long succession of tyrants. Dating back to the Frankish Empire of 822, the Czech and Slovak republics have been repeatedly forced together and ripped apart, resulting in languages and cultures that are similar but proudly distinct.

John Hayes, Post-Gazette Martin Cubjak, assistant to the curator, and curator Michal Bycko at the Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art in Medzilaborce, Slovakia. Click photo for larger image.

During the First World War, Czechs and Slovaks defected by droves from their Austrian and Hungarian masters to fight against the Germans. In 1918, the Treaty of Pittsburgh was signed in what is now Pittsburgh's Cultural District, decreeing a free and united Czechoslovakia.

Mary Ann's family had emigrated from Slovakia to the United States in the 1920s, about a decade before an appeasing England and France ceded the fledgling democracy to Germany. After World War II, Czechoslovakia succumbed to a communist putsch. The Czechs practiced a progressive form of communism, however, and in 1968 the country was invaded again by its ally, the Soviet Union.

In 1989 playwright Vaclav Havel emerged from the bloodless Velvet Revolution as president of a free nation, which four years later bowed to centuries of cultural separation by voluntarily splitting again into the westernized Czech Republic and the more agrarian Republic of Slovakia.

While both countries promote U.S. tourism, the Czech Republic is historically more cosmopolitan and hipper to Western ways. Slovakia seems to have given up on communism reluctantly and has been slower to accept capitalism and Western-style economic development. For example, while the currencies of both countries are called crowns, during our trip the Slovak money offered a slightly better exchange rate than the Czech money. But it was far easier to find places to change money in the Czech Republic.

Travel in both countries is a bargain. In the largest cities, the best hotel rooms can cost less than $80 US, and an upscale dinner runs about $2. Teetering between the politics of what has recently been termed Old and New Europe, both nations have joined the United States' coalition in Iraq, yet both will enter the European Union just this year.

Throughout our two weeks, we visited several organized tourist destinations, but spent much of the journey joyously improvising -- "reading" road maps written in Czech and Slovak, veering off of main roads, boorishly Anglicizing the names of towns, at least while speaking to each other, and absorbing far less of the culture than tourists whose grasp of the language exceeds "Dobry den," which is Czech for "hello."

	John Hayes, Post-Gazette Human bones decorate the Kostnice Ossuary in Kutna Hora-Sedlec. Click photo for larger image.

Communication was easy in cosmopolitan Prague, where most people speak at least a little English. The smaller the town we visited, however, the more we wished we had learned more of the language.

Guidebooks report that most American and European visitors to the Czech Republic rarely venture beyond Prague. We were glad we did. Our timeshare near Jaromer was the perfect launching point for day trips throughout the historic Czech regions of Bohemia and Moravia.

In the north, we walked the ramparts of the ancient Kost Castle, hiked a trail that wove through majestic natural sandstone towers at Teplice, and watched fly fishermen taunt brown trout from a high mountain stream near the German frontier.

Southeast of Prague, we toured the ghoulish chapel ossuary at Kutna Hora-Sedlec, where the bleached bones of tens of thousands of plague victims from the Middle Ages are bizarrely arranged in hanging chandeliers, crosses, coats of arms and macabre, abstract statues.

In the South Moravian region of the eastern Czech Republic, we toured picturesque caves under the Punevni and Macocha Abyss, spelunking so deep beneath the mountain that part of the tour was conducted on small boats poled across the top of the underground water table.

Prague is a glorious mix of past and present. It was purely by chance that we arrived on the 35th anniversary of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. In a small cafe, Alan Levy, founding editor of the English-language Prague Post, hosted a memorial that surprisingly attracted few natives. The room bustled with students and tourists as Levy and a handful of middle-aged Prague residents recalled where they were and what they were doing when the tanks rolled in.

Throughout most of Eastern Europe, ice cubes are a hard-to-find luxury. On hot afternoons, I learned to love the only non-bottled cold drink available: ice coffee -- a cup of espresso with a dollop of vanilla ice cream. I was sipping one under a huge umbrella in Prague's grand Old Town Square, waiting for the choreographed machinations of the landmark Astronomical Clock, when I found the courage to pop the question. Although it felt like tense hours before she answered, Mary Ann swears she savored the moment for only a few seconds before saying yes.

My new fiancee and I strolled slowly through the narrow cobblestone streets before returning to the curb side where we had parked our rental car. Neither of us knew the Czech word for "panic" when we discovered that the car wasn't there. Had it been stolen? Towed? How cool were the cops in this town, anyway?

Not knowing how much trouble we might be in, we caught a cab ride to a police station. None of the officers there spoke English, but they phoned another station and found someone who sort of understood parts of what I was shouting loudly and slowly into the receiver.

Eventually, we figured out what had been written on those street signs far up the street at the end of the block. The voice on the phone, shouting back loudly and slowly in broken English, explained that the car had been towed to the local pound, and that the parking fine would cost about $70. A Czech-English dictionary would have been cheaper.

After a week of exploring the Czech Republic, we headed south and east into Slovakia. Following an easterly route along the southern edge of the northern mountain range, we were entranced by spectacular views. We drove for two days over hundreds of kilometers of sunflower and cabbage fields, past crumbling castles and through charming villages with names we couldn't pronounce.

While the two languages sounded similar, the lifestyles of the Czechs and Slovakians are distinctly different. Farms abound throughout the Slovak Republic, but most of the farmers also work full time in light industry or have service jobs in nearby villages. To supplement their incomes, families and small collectives work the land on their own time.

Nearing our destination, we found several untended graveyards with stones bearing the names of Mary Ann's relatives, Susko and Mihalik. The answers she was seeking were close.

Medzilaborce is little more than a crossroad with a few shops and about 6,500 residents near the country's extreme eastern edge. The faded red star of a Soviet tank, still parked on a foundation in a village square, catches the attention of the few tourists who travel this far east. Small, dull, boxy homes built during communist times show how little has changed in the past half century. There's one glaring exception: an upscale museum dedicated to an American pop-culture icon.

Despite the protests of some 1,700 local residents who signed a petition to keep it out, The Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art was opened in 1991 with the help of the artist's older brother, John Warhola. Financed by the Slovakian government, the building was originally intended to be a community hall. Warhola and pop art scholar Michal Bycko persuaded them to go Warhol, in part with unproven claims that in his heart, Warhol was a socialist.

Famously quoted as claiming, "I am from nowhere," Warhol never visited Medzilaborce, but his mother was raised in the nearby Mikova Valley before her family immigrated to Pittsburgh.

"The connection," Bycko explained, with the help of Martin, our interpreter, "is in the Byzantine church icons that you'll find throughout the region. Warhol's mother certainly grew up with the church art all around her, and she shared her interest in art with her children. In Warhol's early art, you'll see the panels similar to the religious icons in the churches near Medzilaborce. There is certainly an influence there."

Granted, the artistic connection is a bit of a stretch. But with artwork and personal items donated by the Warhola family, and rotating exhibits on loan from the Warhol Foundation in New York, the facility is, after all, the second-largest museum dedicated to the life and works of Andy Warhol. The largest, of course, is The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

Cubjak , an assistant to the curator, proudly showed off prints of famous Warhol works in a walking tour. Rich Americans -- he joked that all Americans are rich -- pay $15. (Natives pay less than $1.) Some of the items are merely prints of famous works, but many are little-known original sketches and watercolors and items donated by the Warhola family. Included in some 120 exhibited works are Warhol's "Red Lenin," "Absolut Vodka," "Cow," and "Hammer and Sickle," works chosen, said Cubjak, to accommodate local interests and understanding of pop art. Some personal effects, including Warhol's snakeskin jacket and sunglasses, are more interesting than others. One crumbled scrap of paper is exhibited under the title "Calligraphy fragment found in pocket of Andy's leather jacket."

If the museum were located in a more convenient European location, it might be of some interest for art academics and pop culture enthusiasts. A few kilometers from the Ukraine frontier, however, it's a 21st century anomaly in a part of the world that hasn't otherwise left the communist 1950s. That said, it is a must-see for any Pittsburgher or art lover traveling in the province of East Slovakia.

After the tour of the museum, Bycko flipped through a local phone book and found a family bearing Mary Ann's mother's maiden name. He arranged for us to meet and Cubjak went with us to interpret.

As we drove past a family of Roma, pejoratively called "gypsies," Cubjak unintentionally revealed a darker side of Czech and Slovak culture, a dangerous vestige of a history of pogroms and ethnic cleansing.

"Look at them," he said, pointing. "They are dirty, dirty and stupid."

Throughout the former Czechoslovakia, Cubjak explained, the Roma are still treated as an inferior race. Because of the parents' wandering lifestyle, most of their children don't stay in school. As adults, many Roma are untrained for all but the most menial and low-paying work.

"Do you ever talk with them?" we asked.

"It's difficult, very difficult," he said. "No one wants them to be around."

An awkward silence filled the car as we continued past the train station where Mary Ann's family had probably begun their long journey to America. At a small home just outside Medzilaborce, we were greeted at the fence gate by the stoic Kopka, his son, and his deaf and elderly mother.

Through Cubjak, we asked a lot of questions: When had his family left Slovakia? What were the names of the family members? By what route did they travel to America? Where did they settle?

The answers were less than satisfying. Conversing with the man on a single issue for several minutes, Cubjak would turn to us with cryptic answers: "Maybe. Sure. Could be." After two weeks of travel and 20 minutes at the man's house, we were about to leave with no answers when he briefly left the room and returned with two recently postmarked letters. To our surprise, the return address was Pittsburgh.

With many starts and stops, Cubjak told us that the Kopka family of Medzilaborce had been in occasional contact with family members who had emigrated from Slovakia in the 1920s and settled in Pittsburgh and Ohio, just as Mary Ann's family had done. It wasn't clear confirmation of a genetic link to Mary Ann, but it was more than we had expected.

Ultimately, her genealogical research expedition ended with a deeper appreciation of where her family had come from and what their lives might have been like.

Although our understanding of the region would have been more complete if we had spoken and read the language, spending two exciting, adventure-filled weeks with no one to talk with but each other resulted in the best vacation either of us had ever taken.

Mary Ann left with new information about the history of her mother's family, and I left with a fiancee.