Bratislava

Sunday, April 4 – Happy Easter! This was a first for me to celebrate Easter in 3 different countries! We left Austria and had a short bus drive to Bratislava, Slovakia. We had a short bus tour around the city and up on the hill overlooking the city. This was the most expensive place to live in Bratislava – from 1-7 million Euros! But the homes were not very nice; it was very surprising. We drove up to the castle (basically the center of what Bratislava has to offer) and overlooked the old part of the city and the Danube River. The castle was under construction, so we couldn’t go inside. On our walking tour, we went through the old part of the city. It was very small and slow paced with cute little squares and statues that all have stories behind them - the most famous is a man coming out of a manhole (below left). We passed the Old City Hall that had a cannon ball still stuck in the side of it from the Napoleonic Wars (below right)!

After our tour we went to the Easter market (below) and looked around at all of the food and the traditional Slovak Easter eggs – they are in every color and are decorated, very pretty. We had a quick lunch, although the customer service was terrible, and got back on the bus again…

Bratislava wasn’t on the top of my list, but it may have been because I had already seen so many amazing cities. It just really didn't have a lot to offer. Everything our tour guide said was about famous people who had visited there for a couple days. “This is a dedication to Mozart because he visited Bratislava for 13 days when he was 9!” and “This is a statue of Andy Warhol because he may have spoken a dialect of Slovak because his parents were Slovaks, but he never actually visited here.” I think I would have liked it a lot more if we had visited here first. It was a very nice quaint little city though.