Bratislava

In order to get to Bratislava, I had to cross the whole of Austria from Salzburg. The countryside is very beautiful, green, and full of cows. My Eurail pass did not go to Slovakia, so I had to do a quick train station switcheroo in Vienna in order to get to Bratislava. Luckily, the distance between Vienna and Bratislava is ~30 miles (making them the closest national capitals on the planet). I had not thought to stop in Vienna because the last time I was there all I saw was Freud’s house and a Hapsburg palace, neither of which were terribly exhilarating sights (though it was pretty cool to see Freud’s stogy collection and his coke bowl).

My reason for wanting to stay in Bratislava instead of Vienna was also because Slovakia has yet to join the Eurozone (they are set to join at the beginning of 2009). As such, I was under the impression that I would get a good exchange on my dollar which was depreciating in value every day since I left the States. However, the assumption was as incorrect as it had been in the Czech Republic. While I did get more volume for my dollar, everything cost about as much as it did in the US, so while it was comparatively better than the Eurozone, it afforded me little. The only thing I found cheap and in abundance was the beer, which is very understandable in any of the former Communist Eastern Bloc countries.

Upon entering the train station I was at a loss as it was after 6 PM and everything looked closed. I thought this problematic as I had no Slovak currency in which to use to get to my hostel. Also, the language was very hard for me to understand, being Slavic in origin. Luckily, after floundering for a bit, I caught a man going into what looked like a tourist information room. I caught him and asked if he exchanged money, and he said he did. After exchanging some Euro for Slovak koruny I asked him what the best way to get to my hostel would be, and he said by bus. He also told me that he would be taking the same bus home himself, and that if I followed him, he would show me the way.

On the bus ride into town, I questioned the man about Bratislava: stuff to see, things to do, bars to drink at, all the necessary questions. He told me that there really was not much to see in Bratislava, but assured me there were plenty of bars around. I asked him if he was excited about Slovakia switching over to the Euro, and he told me he stood to lose a chunk of his savings in the exchange, so I chose not to pursue that line of thought further. A few minutes before he exited the bus, he cautioned me about the women in Bratislava. “Watch out for the girls. They act nice, but they just want your money.” I said, “So they’re no different than other women anywhere else?” to which he replied, “You are a smart young man. Not me though, I learned the hard way.” and he lifted his left hand to show me a wedding ring. As horrible as that sounds, it made me laugh a lot inside.

I eventually did arrive to my hostel, which was nothing special. The place, at the time of my arrival, seemed to have an abundance of drunk and obnoxious youngsters from the island of Great Britain, so I avoided them like the group of uptight and pretentious lepers that they are.
There really were no great sights to see in Bratislava. Most of the buildings are still drab and smack of the old Communist regime. It is a wonder for me why artists do not attack the city’s walls with buckets of colorful paint, but perhaps that will be a task for the younger generation that has been brought up in the comforts of free thought and expression. I did happen to run into a pair of odd statues that happened to stick out while walking down what was, I assumed, the “bustling” part of town. One was a statue of a man sticking out of a manhole. I have no idea why this thing was made, but just so people would take notice, either for tourist reasons or to simply not trip over the thing, they had a special traffic sign dedicated to it. The second one was a happy gent with a top hat that I had some fun posing with. Here are both manhole guy and top hat man:



Here I am in front of the Danube:


Three days in Bratislava turned out to drag ad infinitum. The drabness of the place could hardly be compensated for, even after consecutive nights of beer binges. The next stop was Budapest, and in order to get there I had to cross back into Austria and hop back on Eurail trains. Along the way, I saw a military train convoy with several tanks loaded onto flatbeds traveling along a parallel track. This perplexed me as I had not heard of Slovakia having any military worth mentioning, and I especially wondered where this convoy was heading. Had I seen such a tank convoy in Germany, it would have been easy to assume that they were probably heading for Poland.