Braving the cold in Bratislava

I broke my rule for this trip. I took a flight I didn’t, strictly speaking, need to take. Then, as I was breaking rules anyway, broke another and took a couple of nights in cheap hotels.

Don’t be mad at me. I can explain everything!

We rejoin the action, as it were, in Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria. I could not find any buses to Ukraine that weren’t ridiculously long or that didn’t require a transfer to a bus that was twice weekly or something laughably infrequent. So, I said the hell with it, and looked on SkyScanner for the cheapest flight anywhere (and let me say here it’s a bit of a sign of desperation when you have to select “Everywhere”) and the cheapest ended up being Bratislava, which as luck would have it is somewhere I’d wanted to go anyway.

The only slight niggle was that to get there I’d have to fly from Sofia, which if you’re keeping track would make it three times in Sofia in the space of a few weeks. Regular readers will know I like Sofia, but this was getting ridiculous. Still, it was cheap and hopefully would get me back on course.

Something my Australian friend from Athens said kept playing on my mind too. She had mentioned that when she travels every six weeks or so she stays in a hotel for a night, to have her own space for a bit. It had been about six or seven weeks since I’d had my own room, and as my flight was at inconvenient times I booked cheap hotels either side of the flight.

Hostel life can be good, you can meet a lot of great people and hear some interesting stories along with tips about other places, but after a while it is fantastic to have your own space and I decided to try out her approach.

Before I could have any space though first I had to navigate Sofia’s metro, which I found so confusing. I’ve navigated these systems all over Europe without half as much trouble as I had here (though still I complained bitterly at the time). Ultimately the problem came about because apparently I was supposed to take a line to the Serdika (or Serdika II, I still don’t know) station and change line, but when arriving I simply couldn’t figure out where to go. It was intensely frustrating. I even hit on the idea of leaving Serdika and trying another station, but in some cruel twist of space I ended up at the platform I’d just left, albeit having spent money on another ticket. I could have wept.

There are only two lines, and they’re labelled blue and red, but I think they’re not very consistent with which line they label blue and which red. Eventually I decided I was just going to stay on a train and see where it took me. I reasoned that the metro itself wasn’t all that big and anywhere had to be better than going round and round the same station. As luck would have it it delivered me to the airport, admittedly via the rest of the city.

(If we could just take a break here — if you’re reading this and you happen to know the way from Sofia’s bus station to the airport via the metro would you do me a favour and send me a message or reply to this telling me? It bothers me that to this day I don’t know how to do it!)

It turns out my Aussie friend was right. Some time to myself was nice — I took a long, leisurely shower, unpacked and repacked my bag, and had a pleasant sleep without waking in the middle of the night to go smother a snorer.

Refreshed, I headed for the airport. The terminal at the airport is not the greatest in the world. Very little seemed to be open, aside from a small shop selling chocolate and magazines and the like. I passed the time by attempting to quietly set the worlds’ record for number of Pringles consumed.

The flight itself was actually pretty good, not too busy so the queues were manageable. It was over in a couple of hours or so, and as I passed back in to Central European time I even got an hour back (time I sorely needed to consume more Pringles).

(Apropos of nothing, Google tells me that “Will Fleming ate a can of cheddar cheese Pringles in six minutes, 56.84 seconds” which if anything seems a little slow to me).

In a complete contrast to the nightmare that was Sofia’s metro, the Slovakia public transport system was a breeze. I hopped on and off buses and trams like a pro and made it to my hostel, which was actually very well located.

As ever, I took the walking tour. It was a pretty good tour, taking in the UFO building, the castle and the Blue Church but nothing really special, it was a fairly standard tour around a fairly small city.

He did manage to make most of our group very angry though. It was a small group, just six of us, and four of the group were ladies from Italy and Spain. All was fine until he told us about a Slovak Easter tradition, where single ladies are “doused with water and hit with sticks and then the guys are given chocolate or money” — I’m paraphrasing, but you get the idea.

Understandably I feel, we were all a little uncomfortable hearing this, and I’m not certain the guide saw much wrong in it. Go look it up on YouTube, search for “Slovak Easter Tradition”; I’ll wait here for you.

Unpleasant, isn’t it? It must be very difficult being a woman sometimes.

Thanking my lucky stars I had the fortune to be born male I scurried off to my next tour, the Communist tour. This was much better and had a guide who seemed to know much more about her subject, and who was better with a group.

Bratislava has gained some unusual buildings as a result of its time under Communism. There’s the UFO building, which is a suspension bridge with what looks like a UFO perched atop its pillar. You can go up to the top, to the observation deck and have a look around, or go to a restaurant that’s up there.

Stranger than that though is the upside down pyramid building of the Slovak Radio. It is, quite literally, a building that’s pyramid shaped but with the pointy bit pointed into the ground. I disliked it; it’s too out of character with everything around it and has large amounts of steel everywhere. Had it been made more transparent, say out of glass, it could have been much better. Less steel would have been an improvement too.

The very concept of it confused me too. The classical Soviet style of building is very functional; largely they’re just concrete blocks, but at least they are practical. Here, in a building that took 25 years to build, there’s so much wasted space that somehow seemed anathema to the Soviet approach. Still, who am I to criticise? If you asked me to design a building I’m not certain I would provide enough walls.

Leaving pyramid critique to the Egyptians, I took myself off to Vienna for a day trip. Bratislava and Vienna are closely located — just 60km or so apart — and with Vienna’s reputation for being ferociously expensive I decided any longer than a day would be to invite financial ruin. Fortunately a bus there and back was only 10 Euro, which seemed reasonable to me.

It is certainly a very grand, imposing city. The former capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it seems to be too big and grand a city for the small country that modern day Austria is. The area around the Hofburg Imperial Palace for example is almost overwhelming in its opulence.

I took a tour with a remarkably disinterested tour guide, had a fairly expensive but tasty coffee at the Cafe Central where apparently in January 1913 alone Tito, Freud, Stalin, Hitler and Trotsky were customers. I couldn’t see any megalomaniac dictators, but I did keep my eyes open (and tried to avoid mirrors too so I can make the above claim).

For me Vienna was far too grand. I know I was only there for a short time and there’s much I didn’t do there, but it seemed hard to imagine anything exciting happening there. It was all so ordered, so neat that it didn’t really seem very real. It also earns its reputation for being expensive.

It was a bit of a relief to go back to Bratislava. The people were friendly and the prices were pretty good, with most things being quite cheap. I was fortunate enough to happen to go to the Castle Museum when it was free (the first Sunday of the month, if you’re interested). It’s a nice museum, set in the restored castle so you can appreciate some of the splendour.

On my last day I ran in to someone I’d met in Sofia about a month ago, when I first went. I love it when this happens. You feel like a real traveler when you do all the questions like “Where did you go after?” and exchange tips and plans for future destinations. (Of course the worst thing about these encounters is when people greet you by name and there’s the moment of horror when you can’t remember their name or where you met, but that usually passes pretty quickly).

Anyway, if you’ll excuse me I need to go find out where they sell Pringles. I have a record to set! Written on February 6th, 2018 by David Seddon