Acc-Nifos Color Hotel Bratislava

... have been left behind.<br><br>While slow, the train eventually arrives in Zilian, several hours late. My intent was to spend the afternoon in the castle town of Trencin but the day is gone so I head onward to Bratislava. I am lucky and have an Inter City train leaving in 15 minutes. While somewhat more expensive it is very nice including having power outlet so I can recharge my almost dead PC battery. <br><br>I am ...

... looking bridge. And that coming from someone who lives in a country where a bridge is known as the coathanger. It looks like a normal bridge, but it has a tower going up it at one end &amp;, on top of the tower, what can only be described as a space ship. Don&#8217;t you wonder what kind of person thought that was a good idea? But still, it was definitely unique. I had to trek through the old town to get to the hostel. Well, I was expecting a trek, seeing how I was going through ...

... There was a number 29 bus there, but by the time we had looked at the ticket machine and figured out how much money we needed to buy tickets, it had left. It was an hourly bus, but the map at the bus stop said that the number 28 bus also served the main street of Devín. We had figured out that we needed two tickets at 18 SK each, and that the machines only took coins and that we only had 25 SK in coins. But in our earlier wanderings around the town we had seen ...

... the following day. My couchsurfing experience in Bratislava could only be described as interesting. I stayed with a Finnish girl who is studying costume design at a university in Bratislava for the year. Calling her an ego-centric drama queen would be a massive understatement. She can't seem to have a conversation, instead preferring to talk only about herself. Nonstop. In way too much detail. During the ...

... Soviet tower blocks on the other. Spent the rest of the day exploring the Old Town, seeing how many weird and wonderful statues we could spot, including Napoleon and a spy (seperately). Then we went to a mahoosive Tesco for dinner materials. Dinner included an incident of hilarity when I chucked some tomato over the balcony and angry Slovakian shouts arose, so we left it a while before we left for another cheap and slow night out for some good baeer and nice bars.

... got our fill of the sun and photos of all the sites, we headed back to the hostel for a bit of a rest before packing for tomorrow. Once it had cooled off a bit, we set back into town for supper. Had an awesome meal of pork stuffed with peppers, cheese, eggs and ham. A couple of beers there before walking back to the hostel so that we could be in bed by midnight and on time for our morning trains.

The last time I travelled through region, Czech Republic and Slovakia were still one country, Czechoslovakia. Bratislava (population 450K), the capital city of Slovakia, is another city that has its own old town, cobbled street, old town square and castle. It is on Danube River. Even though I was in town for less than 48 hours, I ...

... as I was for them to show me. It turned out to be a fantastic night, going around, talking to them, hitting up bars I would've never found on my own and interacting, for the most part, with nothing but locals. The next day I had to myself to play tourist until my train to Budapest in the middle of the afternoon. And it was that day where I could sort of see why people don't have much of an opinion of Bratislava. I walked to the castle, wandered the grounds and ...

... the clerk at the Tesco store in Bratislava looked at me funny when I bought my TP, giving me a look that I translated as "I haven't sold a package of that overpriced stuff in months, but I will take your coddled American money because apparently you want to wipe your Imperialist, Bush-loving, ass with dollar bills." Actually, they like Americans here, they just don't have any respect for the consequences to my ass of their delicious, cheap (less than $1.00 for some pints) beer.

... valley village - or more like came and went as once the bus left, nothing much else happed - other than a dog crawling in front of us rubbing its belly on the ground comedy style, that's about as exciting as it gets. Breakfast feast complete we dived into the first pass of the day. 700 to 1100 meters up a perfectly smooth surface, followed by a descent through woods so damp and lush the water in the atmosphere collected into ...