In an attempt to get some more of these out there, I’m going to go back
slightly to Bratislava. It was only a
short stopover of two nights, barely one day, so I should easily be able to
bang this one out in the five hour train trip to Munich – something I’m not
certain is necessarily true of either Prague or Vienna.
Still, my time in Bratislava was fun and interesting. And I can guarantee that the guys who made Eurotrip had never even been to
Bratislava.
DAY HALF
My arrival in Bratislava was slightly later than I had originally
planned as I remained in Vienna long enough to see Lily off to her flight (more
of that in the Vienna blog, coming some time to a computer screen near
you!) This wasn’t really a problem since
Bratislava is only an hour or so away from Vienna, and the trip was quickly
over.
Bratislava has one of the smaller and more communist-feeling train
stations I have been in the whole time I’ve been in Central Europe – it’s
pretty much a giant concrete block with a space in the middle.
My hostel was not too far from the station, and I expected to pretty
much have to follow a single street all the way there. This worked out for me for a short
while. My instructions (that I had made
based on Google Maps, as I always do) described a dead end that I would have to
turn left at. Well, the road ended in a
staircase that led up to another road. I
assumed that this was the dead end, and that the left turn was actually a short
way past the dead end, and I just hadn’t paid enough attention.
Well… it turned out that the staircase was a continuation of the
road. Yeah… in Europe streets don’t
necessarily have to carry cars in order to be considered a street.
I went off left and soon reached an area that looked nothing like what I
had been expecting based on Google. It
was a massive, multi-lane and multi-road intersection. I was supposed to have come out on a little
street – the street my hostel was supposedly on.
Confused, I walked a little way along the intersection. Aaaaaand… there in front of me was the street
I had been looking for. So in
Bratislava, even when you’re lost you’re not really.
The hostel was quite nice and included a spacious lounge area and single
(!) beds. Unfortunately it was not
terribly full, though I have reason to believe that there were more people
staying there than I necessarily saw.
When I arrived I met a British fellow.
Though perhaps ‘met’ isn’t the right way of putting it since he was
asleep when I entered the room. I set
myself up in the room, started sorting through my bags and checking emails etc
when the slumbering form awoke.
He’d just come from Budapest, which he’d been able to fly to cheaply
from the UK. He had just quit his job, a
job related to British Parliament, though one he couldn’t give me much information
about. Apparently he hadn’t been allowed
to have a life – no smartphone, no friends, no contact with relatives, no
facebook account – and the job had showed him a side of British politics he
hadn’t been able to handle seeing. So he
quit and ran away. To Bratislava (well,
eventually).
However, he had been stuck in Bratislava for longer than he’d
anticipated. He’d fallen ill, having
caught something in Budapest (apparently a crazy bug went around after I left)
and had basically been asleep in the hostel for the last three or so days. He was planning to go to Vienna the next day
in order to see the Champions League match between Real Madrid and Manchester
United (his team, since he was from Manchester) and wanted to recover before
then.
I told him I’d just come from Vienna and that it was expensive.
“You know, you can get a beer here for a euro. In Vienna, you’re lucky if it’s cheaper than
three.”
Nowadays I judge how expensive a place is based on the price of a pint
of beer.
He considered this information for a moment.
“Well, I’m going to want a bit of beer for the game,” he said. “Do you think they’ll be playing the match
somewhere here?”
“Of course they will,” I replied.
“Think of all the expats living here.
They probably have a heap of Brit-style pubs playing the game tomorrow
night.”
And then I found him a sports bar that would be playing the match the
next night online.
“See?”
Faced with this new proposition, my British friend decided to remain in
Bratislava one more night. He went down
to organize this.
Now, I had been umming and ahing over what I was going to do for
dinner. I’d only be in Bratislava two
nights, and food, based on what I had seen on the boards of restaurants walking
to the hostel, was pretty cheap. I had a
quick browse for a place where I could have some kind of traditional Slovak
cuisine. I found a place called the 1st
Slovak Pub. And here came the
problem – so far I had only met Mr Sick British Man, and he wasn’t in a state
where he was ready to go out for dinner (he’d been surviving on 2-minute
noodles for the last few days). The only
other option was to eat by myself.
To put this into perspective, I hadn’t really been into a restaurant by
myself previously. I’d often told myself
I would do it, then chickened out at the last minute and gone to a takeaway
joint, or perhaps a self-service place where it wasn’t unusual to be seated by
oneself. I was fairly certain, from
descriptions I had read, the the 1st Slovak Pub was the kind of
place you went with a couple of people.
Still, I didn’t have much time and wanted to make sure I got to try the
real deal.
I went out and walked toward the centre.
Bratislava seemed quite straightforward geographically – there was a
main shopping street, where trams and such passed along, an old town just south
of that and the ugly centre to the east.
On my Google Maps check, 1st Slovak Pub had appeared to be on
a small side street near to the tram line.
I had to cross that shopping street and wander through various alleys
and streets in order to get there.
I left the hostel realizing I hadn’t actually written down any
instructions, so I sort of walked in the direction I thought it was based on my
glance at the map. After a good twenty
minutes of plodding randomly down little side streets, seeing the streets
slowly fill with university students (it was pretty busy for early on a Monday
night) I gave up and decided to just go for whatever garbage I could find that
wasn’t either McDonalds or KFC. I
reached the shopping street, started heading down it, and walked right past the
1st Slovak Pub. I
nonchalantly kept going, partly because I didn’t want people to see me suddenly
do a double-take and turn around and partly because I still wasn’t certain I
wasn’t just going to chicken out and eat something easy.
Halfway down the street I stopped to cross the road. This was all part of my plan to turn back to
the 1st Slovak Pub: first, cross the street, curving as you do so in
order to reach the other side pretty much perpendicular to the sidewalk. Since the people on the other side of the
sidewalk don’t know which direction you were walking (unless they are the kind
of creepy dude who watches people on the other side of the road) you can easily
turn around with no-one any the wiser. Then,
casually cross back over the street – people are less likely to notice you
cross the street twice than to notice you turn around completely mid-stride.
By now I was approaching the pub and trying to decide whether I would,
indeed, be entering or whether it would be better off to just walk on by
and- Oops, too late, I’ve gone inside.
The pub was set up a little like a museum. Each room was supposed to represent a
different era of Slovak history or something.
I can’t tell you much about that, unfortunately, since by the time I
realized there were different themed rooms I’d already sat down at the first
mildly inconspicuous table I could find.
Then I realized I’d managed to sit down right in direct view of the bar,
where all the serving staff would be able to see and mock me.
A waitress came and gave me a menu.
I perused it – though I chose very quickly (there was a section called
‘Grandma’s Specialties’ that consisted of the kind of traditional food I was
looking for) I made sure to read every last thing so that it would look like I
was busy and enjoying myself and not some sad, lonely, pathetic loser.
I’d just reached the drinks page when the waitress returned and asked if
I’d chosen. I got a plate of pierogi and
a beer. The beer came very quickly,
which I was relieved by since it meant I had something to do besides twiddle my
thumbs. I also started fiddling with my
camera to make it clear I was totally occupied and didn’t need company.
The pierogi came out – little crispy dumplings with sour cream and
bacon. I tried to work out how much the
bill would come to. It was somewhere in
the vicinity of six euro. This was just
awkward, I decided, since I only had a ten euro note and tipping is customary
in Slovakia. Generally you’re supposed
to say how much you wish to pay when you hand over the money, and the staff
then gives you change based on that, keeping the tip directly. I’d figured that the ‘correct’ tip was
something like fifty cents, but it felt really weird having to say a specific
amount. I decided to have dessert and
try to get it as close to ten as possible in order to be able to just give her
the money and say “keep the change” or something.
They really only had one choice for dessert: strudel. And it was surprise strudel, the kind where
you don’t know what kind it will be until it arrives in front of you. I got banana and chocolate in the end, and it
actually tasted pretty good.
I was now close enough to ten euro that it didn’t really worry me
(though I must say, I left a MASSIVE tip – but let’s be honest, a main, dessert
and drink for ten euro isn’t too bad) so I asked for the bill and paid and
left.
One of the differences I find between eating alone and eating with
others is the exit. With others you tend
to hang about a bit, taking your time, talking and slowly heading for the
door. By yourself you grab your jacket
and zoom out as quickly as you can.
Bratislava was easy to find my way around, so it didn’t take long to get
back to the hostel. Some more people had
checked in since I’d gone out – a group of four South Americans (I’m constantly
lumping South Americans together, it’s terrible – if I remembered what country
they were from I would use that).
Anyway, they’d just come from Krakow, and I heard the usual spiel about
how awesome it is (which turned out to be right) and went to bed. The Brit could speak Spanish as he’d spent a
year in South America, so they talked a while.
I just went to sleep.
DAY ONE
My only complete day in Bratislava, so I certainly didn’t want to waste
it. The South Americans left almost
immediately, even before I got up (I didn’t get up that late). The Brit was feeling better and said he felt
like he needed to get out and see the city a bit before leaving – and he also,
I suspect, wanted to get some fresh air so he’d be feeling right for going out
to watch the football. I had a couple of
things to do that morning, so we agreed to meet up in the afternoon and go on
the free walking tour at 2:30pm.
First, though, I had to go and get my ticket for Swan Lake in Prague. There
was a ticket issuing office somewhere in Bratislava, and it was my task to find
it.
On the way toward the ticketing office, I was approached by a woman
about my age in a bit of a panic. She
was speaking Slovak at a rapid pace, and I was all like… “Um, what?” She calmed down a bit and said, “It’s ok, I
speak English.”
Her story was a bit tough to follow, but the gist of it was that she was
a kindergarten teacher and had to get to her class, but she had locked herself
out of either her apartment, having forgotten something important, or the
school or something. Anyway, the point
was she needed a boost to a window she had left open so that she could get in
and get to her kindergarten class.
I agreed to give her a hand. The
window was really rather high up, so I told her I would go on one knee and she
should stand on my hand. I would then
lift her up.
She took her shoes off and we had a shot. The first attempt failed rather abysmally –
as soon as I tried to stand up she fell backwards off my knee. I told her to lean against the wall and we
managed to get her up to the window. I
pushed her feet the final few centimetres up over the windowsill. She was swearing and saying “God God God God
Jesus” constantly, but once she was up she took a breath and thanked me.
I passed her shoes up and went on my way. It was only then that I realized that there
was a possibility she’d simply been trying to break into someone’s house and I
had just aided her in her crime. To be
honest, though, I don’t think that’s the case – it would have been pretty hard
to fake her panic. Still.
The walk took me, for really the first time, into Bratislava’s Old
Town. It was a very nice old town,
filled with narrow streets, nice buildings and general quaintness.
As it wasn’t terribly large or complex, it didn’t take me all that long
to find the ticket office. It was
actually a tourism information centre with one booth in the corner designated
for Ticketportal, the organization I was dealing with. I went to that corner and showed the lady my
number.
She looked at it confused. I
explained it was for a show in Prague.
That didn’t seem to clear anything up for her. Then I realized it was because her English wasn’t
adept enough for the complexity of both what I needed to tell her and what she
needed to tell me.
A lady came up to the desk and offered to help with the
translation. As it turned out, the
numbers were different for Slovakian shows and Czech shows, so the lady wasn’t
sure how to access my ticket. When she
heard it was for Prague, she went to the Czech site and got it working, so it
wasn’t really an issue at all. I slipped
the ticket into my pocket wanting to make sure I remembered exactly where I put
it so that I would not miss out.
I still had an awful lot of time to kill before the walking tour, so I
decided to go for a walk to the river.
As it turned out, the river wasn’t all that far away, so I decided to
walk along the river. The riverside gradually
got uglier and uglier (I didn’t even go that far) so, sick of that I headed in
toward the castle. Funnily enough, the
castle was basically right next to my hostel but I ended up approaching it from
the other side of the hill.
Anyway, I walked up the hill for a while, basically up some fairly
dilapidated stairs, until I reached a residential zone on the top of the
hill. I had an inkling that there was
some kind of statue somewhere on this hill that would provide wonderful views
of the city from above, so I walked in the opposite direction of the castle,
continuing up and up and up.
The road eventually stopped going up, which I took to mean I had reached
the top of the hill, which I further deduced meant I had no idea where this
statue and lookout were supposed to be.
This being the case, I headed back down the hill in order to get a squiz
at the castle.
The castle was pretty lame all things considered – basically a great big
white block with windows. It did have a
kind of medieval wall that went along the hill, but that wasn’t particularly
impressive. A walk around it took me to
a weird statue and a bit of a view of the city.
It wasn’t quite the statue or view I had been searching for, but it was
close enough and I got my panoramic over the city and checked out the decidedly
weird statue. It was some kind of woman
with crazy weird hair and big feet, splayed out on a rock or something. Not sure what it meant.
Anyway, off I headed back to meet up with my British mate for the
walking tour.
What facts did I manage to pick up this time around? Well, some of you may be interested in the
bizarre custom Slovakian people have on a particular festival day in
spring. The idea is that the girls of
the village or city dress up in their nicest dress. They wait around at home for a bit before someone
knocks at the door.
“Who is it?” she asks.
A boy answers her. She opens the
door and the boy throws a bucket of water over her, then proceeds to take her
over his knee and smack her on the bottom.
As a thank-you, she gives him alcohol and money. Apparently it used to be painted eggs, but
the men all decided they wanted alcohol and money… So you can see who gets the raw end of the
deal here, I suspect.
We had a female guide, so we got to hear all about it from personal
experience. She said that if you live in
a small village you just have to hope that you live at the end of the street
where the boys are finishing since by the time they get there they’ll be too
drunk to continue.
What else? Well, Bratislava
Castle is not a residency – it is a military fort. It has stood up to the Ottomans, the
Mongolians and Napoleon, but apparently it was destroyed when an Italian
architect hired to redesign it held a party and accidentally lit it on
fire. So it couldn’t survive and Italian
party.
Our guide kept having seedy people say weird things to her (in Slovak –
she translated for us later). One old
lady said she looked like she needed to go to the toilet. Later, a man hocking touristy junk on one of
the bridges suggested she should do something rather dirty with him. We were like… “Is this normal?” Apparently it was the first time this sort of
thing had happened to her.
There are a lot of statues around Bratislava, most of them rather
humorous. We only got the story behind
one, a statue of Napoleon leaning on a bench with his hat pulled over his
eyes. Apparently it was revenge by the
people of Bratislava on Napoleon for attacking their city. Rather passive-aggressive.
The other interesting point is that, apparently, the Velvet Revolution
(that is, the revolt that overthrew the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia)
began in the university in Bratislava and is only erroneously attributed to
having its origins in Prague. Saying
that, in Prague they say exactly the opposite, so take all this with a pinch of
salt. I suspect that by the time of the
Velvet Revolution things were taking place all over Central Europe and it was
just a natural endpoint for a number of regimes in the region.
The previous evening I had failed to have two very key staples of Slovak
cuisine: garlic soup and halusky. I had
planned to go back to the 1st Slovak Pub to try them, but a place
called the Flagship Restaurant was recommended by the guide, so I chose to head
there instead.
In fact it was run by the same organization, with a similar traditional
pub feel and museum set-up. To get to
the Flagship Restaurant you had to walk down a short tunnel leading to a wooden
door that took you onto a mock-up street.
Then you entered a bar, which I almost mistook for the restaurant but in
fact you had to walk up a massive staircase in the back of the bar up to an old
converted cinema. The menu was slightly
larger than the one at the other place, but its content was basically the
same. I knew what I was going to have,
so ordered (and a beer of course).
The garlic soup was delicious. It
came served in a gigantic bread roll that you could then eat afterwards. It was creamy and had actual chunks of garlic
in it – you could taste the freshness.
Halusky are a kind of potato dumpling that isn’t dissimilar to
gnocchi. Really it’s just a smaller
version, and it’s served with sheep’s cheese and bacon. The bacon is really just a garnish made up of
a few small fatty cubes, but it must be good quality because it adds a lot of
flavor.
Basically I was stuffed after all that – I had eaten an entire breadroll
(a huge one at that), all the soup contained within and a plate of starchy
dough balls. And a beer.
I stumbled off home, unsure what time I was supposed to catch up with
the Brit so that we could go watch the game.
I needn’t have worried – the game started at around 9pm, so I had plenty
of time. While I was hanging around
waiting, who should come a-walking into my dorm but Corey and his girlfriend,
the two Americans I had seen in both Rome and Zagreb. They were meeting up with a friend of Corey’s
who happened to go to Griffith University and who had for some reason come up
listed as a mutual friend when I added Corey to Facebook. It turned out I didn’t actually know her and
Facebook was just being weird.
Anyway, she had left her scarf in Budapest (in Morrison’s, if you
remember that place – if you don’t it’s the place we went on Monday night) and
the other two had picked it up and brought it with them to Bratislava.
They’d had a good time in Budapest and had stayed in the same hostel I
had (I recommended it to them).
Apparently the hostel had just started a fortnightly party in the baths
when they arrived and it was amazing, so I’m now hoping to get back there some
time since that’ll be a perfect opportunity to ACTUALLY GO TO THE BATHS WITHOUT
HAVING TO ACTIVELY FIND OTHER PEOPLE.
There were two other guys, one Australia and the other Kiwi, who were
there as well. They’d decided to come with
us, being fairly big football fans.
The Americans said they’d follow a little after us, as they still needed
to eat.
On the way to the bar, the Kiwi told us about their previous night. Apparently they were in a dorm with two girls
from Ireland (I never met them, and you’re soon to understand why). They were supposed to have left that morning,
in fact, but had apparently spent the entire day in bed. The reason for this was that they had gone
out with the Aussie and Kiwi the night before and gotten smashed. One of them had allegedly spent the entire
night following the Kiwi from bed to bed in an attempt to sleep with him. I can’t remember exactly how that story
ended, but it was definitely not with them sleeping together (which I’m glad
at, since otherwise I would have been chatting casually with not only an
ass-hat but a rapist ass-hat).
When we arrived the sports bar was packed. There was not a single space that wasn’t
either taken or reserved. There were
even places at the bar that had been reserved!
That was crazy stuff. We looked
around in a halfhearted fashion – the others had already got beers before we
even found a place to sit – and looked at each other.
“Well… I guess we just go see if we can find another place playing the
game after we finish our beers.”
I didn’t want to give up that easily, so I went off into the back
searching for a table. I found what I
thought was a bar where one could at least rest one’s glass and rushed back to
the others to bring them there. Turned
out the bar was actually a blockade to stop customers getting to the fridge and
it was a thoroughfare for the wait staff.
Oops.
We went upstairs and found a prime vantage point looking down onto the
biggest screen. We had to stand, but
that was a small price to pay for what was, in all honesty, probably the best
position in the house. So I went to get
a beer.
How did the game go? Well… Man U
lost. It was looking pretty good for a
while, but then a player got unfairly red carded (it was a yellow, but
definitely no red) and they were suddenly one man down. And against a team like Real Madrid, being
one man down at the beginning of the second half spells doom.
We had a very irritating man behind us (a Real Madrid supporter) who
would just call all the Man U players dirty constantly, and whenever they made
a tackle he would complain about it. He
was the kind of guy who would refuse to recognize the fact that having a player
sent off unfairly played a major role in ensuring their loss.
Our poor old Brit needed a drink after watching his team get defeated in
such a way, so the others went out to continue the night. I went to bed because I had an early bus to
catch.
DAY TWO…ISH
I was out of the hostel by 8am, powerwalking to catch my 9am bus. The bus stop was a bit outside of the area of
the city I had been in previously, so with trusty map in hand I went on my
merry way.
It was all going well until I got to a street that I was certain was the
street with the bus stop on it. I went
almost all the way down this street without seeing hide nor hair of the bus
stop, and it unfortunately didn’t help that the street had no sign to let me
know what its name was.
Eventually I got worried I had missed the bus station and turned back to
have a proper look. In doing so, I caught
sight of a street sign. It was not the
street I was looking for. Whipping out
my map I realized I needed to keep going just a little bit further…
(We just crossed into Germany, so I had my ticket checked by my very
first German train conductor. She was so
lovely, and very surprised when she saw the number of trains I have caught so
far.)
I only had ten minutes before the bus was scheduled to leave.
Fortunately, as it turned out, I was only five minutes away at that
point.
Onto the bus I hopped, ready for a six hour drive that would get me to
Krakow. The entertainment for the ride
was Transporter and Transporter 3. I don’t know what language it was in – either
Polish, Slovak or Estonian. I watched it
anyway. There’s something strangely
surreal about watching a totally mindless movie in another language – somehow
you don’t have to concentrate. What’s
really sad, though, is that they were probably better movies because I couldn’t
understand the dialogue.
Well, you know what happened in Krakow already, so I guess you could end
up anywhere when this story is
TO BE CONTINUED
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