Kamila Bratislava

... I touched the button just as it started moving. Great. But luckily, or so I thought at the time, there was another train going to the same places on the next track leaving in a few minutes. So I climbed on that on and found out that it was a regional train and stopped everywhere. I think we would be moving for about 2 or 3 minutes and then stop. What could have been a 25-30 minute ride on the first train ended up being an hour and 20 minutes. Oh well, I arrived ...

... town last week too, so that night I met up w/ them and Chris to hang out for a while. They were crazy-busy tourists and left us w/ a long list of places we need to see before we leave. Saturday, the 3 of us (Erin and Kieffer) went to the Shonbrunn Palace. We had a little picnic and people watched in the gardens for the first part of the afternoon, then hiked to ...

I took my first 'city-break,' as they say in London, to Bratislava, capital of Slovakia.

Bratislava has a huge, amazing, old town. Architecturally, that is. It's a grand maze of old buildings and car-less stone paved streets. For all its prettiness, though, the town has a 'just moved in' feel. Sort of like a movie set. It's a little too clean to be believable. The rest of the city is rather soviet...huge block buildings, a ...

... So the very act that is supposed to preserve these buildings just causes them to fall further apart since people avoid the hassles of dealing with the man. Come to think of it, I've been to other United Nations World Heritage Sites and they all seem to be the same as Porto. Nice job there UN!! Now back to Bratislava and the cold rain. Not wanting to risk getting stuck here tonight (not that it would be a bad thing), I headed to the train station early this ...

... a buffet. After breakfast, we walked towards the bus station and took the bus to Vienna, Austria (please check out my separate blog on this). After coming back from Vienna, Austria which was around 11:30pm we went straight to bed. The following morning, we had breakfast and left to check out the city of Bratislava. We had plenty of time to kill since our flight wasn't until 9:55pm that evening. We walked around taking pictures along the way in the old ...

... actually even relocated to their soccer field so that we could sleep in. the second day riding in slovakia we finally met up with the trail by the danube. nice farm fields and small villages and interesting town crests. the trail itself was a little boring because there isn't much to see. the trail runs on the service road of the danube's flood protection wall, surrounded by trees and no view of the river. we decided to ride the small ...

... only because it consisted of a large, decaying Soviet era building and was manned by 4 guys with pretty big guns. We were the only ones there...biking along the highway to the border point. It was no problem to get across though. We got our passports stamped to leave Hungary then walked literally 2 steps to have them looked at by the Slovakian guards....seemed pretty needless but that's the way borders work. Bratislava did look a bit run down from the ...

... and helped me get to the station. (There were a lot of posters up saying something about Islam..I didn't quite understand the point of it). Anyway, train to Slovakia- nothing too interested. Got to Bratislava, wandered into the city centre- very nice Presidental Palace..I then saw the Slovak #1 Pub, a pub I had read about on a website. Naturally, with it being 11am and all, I went ...

Last night I slept for 9 1/2 hours on the train, then spent a couple hours in Budapest this morning after dealing with some of the rudest train employees known to man. Then another 5 hours to Bratislava. After that I was completely disgusting, haven't shaved, showerd, brusthed teeth, changed clothes, etc in at least two days. We arrived at our hostel this afternoon, but there's not much to say about it. What I can say about it is ...

... Saving Private Ryan. Our room was ok though, even though we had to share 3 showers and one toilet with everyone else on our floor. We went to the nearby TESCO's to get some supplies- some chocolate, bread, cheese, nutella and some juice. Slovaks don't generally use the Euro, they use Slovak crowns. 24 crowns equals one Aussie dollar. A 6-pack of Corona beer cost about 100 crowns- yes, that's right, 4 Aussie dollars. Unbelievable. We decided to spend our visit ...