My travel buddy and I headed to Bratislava (the capital of Slovakia) for an overnight stay. Early in the day, we made our way to the train station in Budapest. We had to go to a special international train ticket booth that only had two desks that sold tickets. For some reason, people that had oodles of time to wait in line still were not sure where they wanted to go when their number was called. End result: it took forever. We should've showed up earlier, but I didn't realize the international tickets were purchased in a different place. We ended up missing our train and waiting an additional three hours. Do not fear, we made good use of our time by sampling some of the local fare around the train station (palinka and hungarian beer at a townie bar).
TIME OUT. I would like to take a time out for a travel lesson that I learned on that day. When we actually got to purchase our train tickets, we discovered that they were about 25% of the cost of booking on raileurope.com. Note: 25% of the cost.....not a 25% discount. The difference was that huge.
We also had the same experience the previous day when we purchased our train ticket to go to Eger, so we knew it wasn't a fluke. I know that I read in the past that purchasing at the train station could be cheaper, but I didn't realize how much cheaper. I thought back to all of the times that I booked my tickets in advance, and I felt victimized. I am still going through a healing process. All of those dollars down the tubes..... I just want to let you know so that you consider booking in person when you use European trains. Perhaps it was something special for bookings in Hungary, but it doesn't hurt to get the message out there.
Time out over. After getting to Bratislava late in the day, we enjoyed an okay meal and waited for the morning to do sightseeing.
I don't know what you know about Slovakia. It was formerly a part of Czechoslovakia (annexed by the Soviet Union after WWII, communism ended in 1989, and the two countries officially split in 1992). It is now a part of the EU and uses the Euro for its currency. I personally did not have a lot of knowledge about it before going there. I knew it wasn't as developed as Czech Republic (the other part of the former Czechoslovakia). I also saw something about it on Eurotrip. I should be more embarassed that I saw Eurotrip, but I want to state for the record that it was on TNT and I didn't even see the whole thing.
This is a clip from Eurotrip about Bratislava. Start about 2 minutes in, it is pretty funny. It is a rated R movie, just wanted to let you know before you click the link.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbcH_qYkeTc
At any rate, it turns out that Bratislava is nothing like how it was portrayed in Eurotrip. It was very clean, and very nice. Bratislava is a somewhat small city (less than 500,000) compared to the cities that I usually visit. The attractions were mostly within walking distance. Here is a selection of the sites:
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A sculpture of Napoleon. France did lay siege to the town twice. The Slovakians did not find this endearing. There were several sculptures throughout the city. Other evidence of Napoleon includes cannonballs that are still wedged in the walls of several buildings in Old Town.
Another sculpture. This one was of a poor man that lived in Bratislava during the 1960's. He use to dress up in his one clack suit and top hat and hit on the ladies.
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Sculpture of a guy peaking out of a manhole. Kind of a little creepy, but I still like it. |
A picture of Old Town
More pictures of Old Town
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