Land O'Cheap Beer and Opportunity
Trip Start
Apr 27, 2006
1
3
110
Trip End
Apr 01, 2008
Bratislava,
Slovakia
Saturday, May 6, 2006
The city itself is a salad of new and old, with a toss of Soviet leftovers thrown in for flavor. If anyone has seen "Eurotrip" (American Pie-esque but based on a road trip through Europe), Bratislava is portrayed as having row after row of apartments built in the prison style of architecture so favored by the former Eastern bloc, littered with trash, populated with ugly people with bad teeth driving Ladas, but a nickel will buy you a phenomenal meal and get you laid at a club serving Absinthe. This is only partially an exaggeration.
There is an old town typical of "old towns" throughout Europe. Old buildings on narrow streets, interspersed with palaces, churches, plazas with cafes and restaurants in cellars, set on a river (the brown, not blue, Danube, downstream from Vienna), overlooked by a castle on the hill. Outside the old town, new construction competes with blocks of 60's style bureaucratic edifices, and across the river, miles of cheap, boxy highrise apartment buildings once populated by the party peons dominate the horizon.
A castle!
However, the only one I went by - on my way from the airport - was neat and the parking lot was filled with small, but relatively decent cars, unlike the scene from "Eurotrip" or what I saw in Moscow and St. Petersburg.On the other hand, the city is cheap, not a nickel cheap, but the average pint of beer is around $1. A good meal can be had for $5, and a top-notch, fine-dining experience for not much more than $10. I had bryndzove halusky (accents over letters omitted) - potato dumplings covered with sheep's cheese and bacon, sort of a heartier mac and cheese - for $3, and venison medallions with a Hungarian fish soup appetizer and 4 deciliters of pretty nice Slovak wine for $20. The local spirit of choice - borovicka - a light ginny thing that reminds me of Becherovka crossed with Slivovitz is also about $1 in a pub.
Too, my apartment was a grand total of $41 a night. For that, I got a place equivalent in size to a studio/junior one bedroom in San Francisco, complete with kitchen, bedroom/sitting room, and standard Eastern European bathroom (shower on a rope, no shower curtain, everything gets wet and slopes to the drain). It was on a busy street, but the double paned windows, and this rather amazing shutter system on rollers, completely blocked out all sound and light. And this is important when you don't get in until 4:00 a.m. - because I found this huge subterranean pub open only from 10:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. - which I probably would have passed by 50 times because the front door is so unassuming and you can't hear the noise from outside - and the place with the automated roulette game where I won 2000 Krone (Whoo Hoo! I'm a high roller betting 100 Krony notes, also known as $3.33)
Which leads to the people I met.
A Palace
My friend in Amsterdam gave me an introduction to a local chick who works for Sky Europe - a budget airline here (I flew on it from Amsterdam for 39 Euros before taxes). On Wednesday and Friday, I met her and her friend for drinks. The friend was pretty damn hot ... if she kept her mouth closed. It wasn't the conversation - they both spoke pretty good English and were edumacated - but the teeth were out of a 1950's propaganda piece about the horrors of Communism. Twisted, blackened, and protruding. Of course, I took pictures - with her mouth closed - the better to remember her by.But I digress. At one point, we were walking down the street, and the Sky Europe chick exclaims at some shoes in a window, but she then comments that they were almost her salary. They were about $400. So I asked "per week?" No, per month. She makes roughly $6,500 a year! I bought their drinks for the rest of the night. At $0.75 per deciliter of wine, I think I can handle it.
The most amusing night, though, was Thursday. It was one of those nights that I love when I travel. It was one of those nights captured so well in "Lost in Translation" when Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansen get caught up in a series of random bars and parties and karaoke, with random people, having barely comprehensible conversations in pidgin English over loud, crappy music, yet it is still a blast.
I had been to see the local castle and had some beer overlooking the confluence of the Morava and the Danube. When I got back to town, I went to a wine bar to sample some Slovakian wine (not bad, actually).
Cool Castle view
There were only three people in the place - the owner, the bartender and a friend of theirs in commercial real estate. I know this because they invited me to sit with them, they poured me a bunch of different Slovak wines, we has some kielbasa, and discussed whether Bratislava was ready for an Argentinan steakhouse. I then went across the alley to another bar where I met a security consultant to the U.S. embassy from North Carolina. 26 years in the service - special forces - and now he supplements his pension "consulting" in Bratislava. Interesting guy. He had also read Sam Harris' "End of Faith" and, although we disagreed amicably about some things, we agreed that the biggest threat to my continued happy-go-lucky life is Islamic fundamentalism, but that neither of us have an answer for how to stop the few determined zealots in a world that provides ever-increasing ability to export one's irrational delusions.Oh, and I got to hear him tell me about how he has killed men. Fun stuff. Maybe that's what made me drink the Green Death (Absinthe) at the next bar. Maybe not. Who knows? I certainly didn't after two shots of 140 proof liquid brain tranquilizer. And then ... pizza followed by, oh, 10 hours or so of sleep.
Good stuff, sleep. I get the feeling I am making up for a fifteen year sleep deficit. Or I am clinically depressed. But, god, it is great subconsciously knowing that I don't have to get up. No work. No commitments to meet anyone or do something. No nothing, except for that I have to make that damnable check-out time once every four days. Roll over, go back to sleep. Yeah, I can feel your pity from here. Too bad. I'm outta here. (Well, not really, I'm still in the bar car of the train from Bratislava to Kosice.)
Finally, I note that the town was completely different on Friday night. The prior three nights were pretty mellow. People were out and drinking at the Old Town bars, but in a mellow way. Sitting, talking, pretty boring. Friday, though, the town was overrun by loud British men who can fly there for 19 Euros (or something) on Ryanair or Easyjet, and do so in copious quantities because the beer is so cheap. The Slovaks despise them, but take their money. I even picked up a brochure put out by a couple of Irish guys about buying apartments in Bratislava. Depending upon location, it looks like you can get a pretty nice, 900 s.f. apartment in or near the center of town for $100-150,000. Call it one fifth of the cost of an S.F. place. I think it is a phenomenal opportunity. The Slovak Rebublic will go full-on EU (with the Euro) in 2009, and it could be the next Prague. Seriously, I am thinking about it, but waiting until I see the rest of Southeastern Europe.
Next Stop: Kosice, Slovak Republic.
