Bratislava

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We needed to leave Vienna relatively early in the morning (for us anyway) in order to get to Bratislava as we were only going to be there for the day. We were to spend the night in Budapest.

The train trip to Bratislava only lasted an hour. The border person that got on to check our passports gave them a quick once over and didnt even bother to stamp them as we crossed the border into Slovakia.

The Bratislava station is not very grand at all, in fact it is probably the most modest central station we have seen so far. Rather than having lockers it simply has a left luggage desk where you have to check your bags in with an attendant. We did this and found the tram which would take us to the centr of the old town area. The tram terminus (right outside the station) consists of a kind of circle where trams first pull up to let people off and then when they are ready to depart go further around the circle to the pick up point. It is all quite simple and comes about because the trams can only be driven from one end (and have doors on only one side). Ross had always thought that most trams are like in Melbourne where they can be driven from both ends, but based on our experience in Europe, it seems that Melbourne is the exception.

The old town area of Bratislava is quite a lot smaller than the old town areas in some of the other places we have been too. There are also substantially less tourists, although most people in the hospitality industry we spoke to seemed to speak good English.

Bratislava has a castle also which we visited, but no grand changing of the guard ceremony. Indeed the castle is quite small. One interesting thing you can see from the castle is the extensive high rise housing commision area on the other side of the Danube River. It looks quite similar to the housing commission blocks in inner Melbourne expect there are heaps more of them. Instead of tourists, the people we kept seeing in Bratislava were wedding couples. We think we saw 6 separate wedding couples getting their photos taken in the castle grounds and the old town area.

In the old town area we stumbled across what looked like the filming of a commercial which consisted of one person scaling one of the buildings, another person wearing scuba gear standing in a fountain and another person throwing a ping pong ball at them. It was all very strange.

Another oddity of Bratislava is that instead of the main cathedral being located in the middle of a large pedestrianised square like all the other cities, Bratislava decided to build a major freeway through the old town between the cathedral and the castle. It is literally just metres from the wall of the cathedral and you could step out onto it by crossing the guard fence! We found this quite amusing.

One stange thing about the ticketing for the trams in Bratislava is that the cheapest single fare ticket is valid for only 10 minutes and it must be valid for the entirity of your journey. Luckily it was enough to get us back to the station to catch our train onto Budapest.

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