Bratislava

First of all, again, we don’t have any classes on Fridays.  So instead of sleeping the day away, a few of us decided to take a day trip.  Today’s destination was

BRATISLAVA.

This is the capital of Slovakia, which is northeast of Austria.  It took us an hour to get there by train.

Amy, Monika, Stephani, Jordan, Mara, and I met at the OBB train ticket office at 8:00am and bought a roundtrip ticket to Bratislava for €15.  This ticket also would get us onto any public transportation in the city, which is cool.  We boarded at 9:21 and arrived in Bratislava an hour later.  On the way, we read Rick Steeve’s tour ideas for this city.  His books are awesome!  I’ve heard the podcasts are helpful too.  So I read that chapter out loud…we learned about some history (Maria Theresea would come to this castle sometimes to practice horse riding….she otherwise lived at the Schönbrunn palace), got some ideas for food and hot chocolate, studied a map, and just got some ideas of what to do once we got there. We arrived an hour later and stepped out of the train station into the POURING RAIN.  Oh brother.   We really had no idea where to go…but we figured out the map, and headed in a possibly correct direction (it was).  They don’t speak Germany in this country, let alone English.  It was a crazy feeling.

(MO)

(MO)

We walked down this street for a while (after we had found a sign confirming that we were where we thought we were on the map) until we saw the presidential gardens!  The president lives in this house.  It was beautiful, and it even stopped raining right when we got there!!  There was a cute little park and we played on the teeter-totter…until we got in trouble and yelled at in some language we did not understand.  We got off haha.

(MO)

President's house

We walked a few more blocks down into the “Old Town”.  We passed a billion souvenir shops…they sure know how to get us.  We didn’t get anything at the first shop we went into, even though we found things we wanted, cause we thought maybe we would find something better or cheaper as we went through all the shops.  We explored for a while, looking into various shops and at booths set up in one of the squares.  The weather got so nice!!

the gate entrance into the Old Town

(MO)

We went into this awesome Folk Art Gallery…it was like a crafts store really.  They had these eggs that were carved or painted!!!  Oh my goodness they were all so beautiful so I had to take pictures of all of them.  I did buy one!  The one I bought isn’t in any of these pictures though...it is in a little box in my room now and I HOPE it isn’t broken.  Everything was so beautiful in this store!

i really liked that one piece natvity at the far left 

We got hungry and followed Rick Steeve’s instructions and got a BAGEL.  The place we went to didn’t have the flavor he said to get, but we got bagel sandwiches for lunch.  Mine had cream cheese, cottage cheese, red peppers, and spinnace…WOW it was so good.  It was only €2.40 too which was surprising.

We walked up a few more streets until we found this café!  The book told us to get hot chocolate here and not to miss it and so of course that is what we did!  The menu was extensive.  I ordered a peppermint hot chocolate, and Amy, Jordan, and Mara got the Italian.  When mine came out, I tasted it and it definitely wasn’t peppermint….so I asked the lady, “is this peppermint?” And all she said was “liquor.” 

“I ordered peppermint…?”

“Liquor.”

“What is this…?”

“Chocolate.”

“Does the Peppermint have alcohol…?”

“Yes.”

So for some reason she assumed I didn’t want alcohol…?  I’m pretty sure the drinking age here is 18 and not really enforced, so why would she give me a plain chocolate drink?  She could have told me what was going on?  Well maybe she couldn’t actually.  It was really confusing though.  ANYWAYS, it was DELICIOUS.  It was rich and thick and creamy but not too rich and warm but not too hot and it came with a shot of water because our mouths were coated in chocolate after.  THANK YOU RICK STEEVES.

(MO)

(MO)

We wandered around some more…we found a great shop with amazing scarves…we go crazy.  It is not good.  Oh well!!  We walked up into a church and looked in, just as it started to POUR rain again.  Stephanie paid a Euro to go in and see the crypt underneath.  She said it was super creepy.

(MO)

We walked to this Holocaust memorial.  On it are handprints, faces, bullets, fire…all below the Star of David.  It represents the 90,000 Slovaks killed by Nazis in WWII in concentration camps.  The text says “Remember” in Hebrew at the bottom.

We walked onto this bridge that goes over the river.  There  is a restaurant in the dome at the top in the middle.  We walked halfway, then back.

(MO)

view of the castle we went in later

(MO)

(MO)

We went over to this castle!  It was wonderful.  I wrote about it earlier, about Maria Theresea.  The castle was actually burned down back in the 1600’s when it was built, so it was restored in the 1800’s and is still being restored….so it looks like a new building which is kinda a bummer.  But the grounds were still old!  The old walls were amazing.  I loved it.  And it was free to hang out up here!  The leaves are so pretty, and the rain is SO pretty!!!  I couldn’t be happier.  

(MO)

(MO)

We went back over to the Old Town and tried to go back to that first shop and it was closed!  We read the hours wrong I guess.  We also walked past the Palace…it wasn’t as exciting as we thought it would be.   The streets here are so cute and narrow and of course cobblestoned.  Such a great place to hang out all day!!

(MO)

the palace

Rick Steeves had been great so far, so we decided to go to one of the restaurants he recommends for authentic Slavic food…”The Slavic Pub”.  It was a few blocks out of the Old Town, and we barely found it…it is up some stairs above other shops.  It was HUGE up there!  We read in the menu it seats 500 people!  There were 8 different dining rooms I think.  We ordered what he recommended to order which ….I’ll have to look up to type because I can’t remember.  It was basically noodles with sheep cheese with bacon bits on top.  Mara and I split a serving of it as an appetizer, and it was DELICIOUS.  I also had a schnitzel chicken cordon bleau which was delicious.  We ordered at 7…and our food didn’t come till after 8!  And the train we wanted to take left at 8:45, so we thought we were fine until our food took forever to come!!  As soon as it came, we told our waiter to bring our check, and he didn’t understand us…but we finally got the message across.  He brought our checks right when we were finishing up eating SO FAST, and we all had exact change ready for him, and we were literally handing him money while standing up and grabbing our bags and leaving.   We LITERALLY RAN out of that place.  I wanted a picture so bad!!  My camera died though and so I had to use my iPhone for the whole restaurant experience….but whatever.  Documentation!!  It was freaking dark in there anyways.  So I tried really hard to get a picture of the sign when we were running out but Monika yelled at me to run!  So they are blurry haha!!!  

(MO)

(MO)

(MO)

hahahhaha

map of where we went...bad picture....hahahahaha

We RAN for a few blocks back up to the Presidents house place.  We were waiting at a red light at a crosswalk, and this lady heard us stressing about the train station, and we were prepared to run all the way up there… (the next train came at 10:42).  She spoke English!!!!  And she told us there was a bus stop just 20 meters in front of us that would take us right to the train station!  The only problem was it didn’t come for a few minutes… at 8:36.  She said it was a 4 minute ride.   So we waited for that, because we didn’t know how far we could run up the hill.  We got on the right one, thankfully, and waited two stops, meanwhile checking our clocks the whole way.  It was 8:41 when we pulled up to the train station!!!  We RAN IN SO FAST and frantically looked for the big screen that shows which platform our train was going to be on to Wien.  Amy yelled out, “Platform ONE!!!”  And I looked and 1 was straight ahead of us!  I could see the train in there still!! “It’s right there go!!!”  And we ran through all these doors to the train and made it on with maybe 20 seconds to spare…the train started moving before we even found our seats.  OH MY GOSH.  It was amazing.  That woman was honestly a blessing from heaven.  We really didn’t want to take the 10:42 bus….we were all so happy!!  The whole time while we were running though I kept saying “our EGGGS!!!!!”   So I really hope they’re okay.

My feet hurt!  I had some tea to relax. It is late…Tomorrow we have another full schedule.  I love it here.  Today made me realize that these few months really are going to change my life.

WE HAVE ALREADY BEEN HERE A MONTH, TODAY!!!!