Bratislava. Thank heavens for detours!

My how time flies! I realised that it's 9 days since my last post and I'm already a third of the way through my European Adventure. I am definitely having the fun that speeds things along!

I want to start by saying a massive thank you for the support I received after my last post. Mary was very special to me and the kind words I received from so many of you were very much appreciated.

I left you in Pécs after an up and down time and spent a night in a wonderful hostel in Budapest (Unity Hostel) which was clean, had really friendly staff, free breakfast, great wifi - seriously no complaints from me for this one!! This was just a quick stopover as I made my way to Bratislava by train (this time with no rail replacements thankfully!). I've never crossed a border by train before (England-Scotland doesn't count!) and wasn't quite sure what to expect, but it was all very smooth and literally just involved a couple of guards walking through the train. A little anticlimactic really... On arrival in Bratislava I was all psyched up to get my bus ticket (which I did) to get public transport to my hostel (which I didn't) as the X13 bus I'd been told to get from the station to my hostel, turns out didn't exist! I asked some random woman who kindly told me I needed to get two different buses, changing at the hospital, but having just arrived in the city, that all seemed a bit too complicated! So I sucked it up and walked the 1.5(ish) km to the hostel instead. Boy was I in a bad mood when I arrived (yep, you're all picturing it perfectly!) but it dissipated in an instant as the staff in the hostel were super-lovely! After checking in and getting the low-down on where to go and what to do, I went for a meander around the city. My first impressions were really good and they only continued to be so. 

My first full day, I started off by getting breakfast from Tesco (I know!! They even have the 'Finest' range and F+F clothes) then I joined the free walking tour with Lucia. The tour was fab and took us to all the major sites worth seeing starting at the Hviezdoslav Statue.

Apparently this guy was an important Slovakian poet and you have to learn a lot of his poems in school.

The cathedral (which I went and looked round inside on my last day but you have the photo here)...

Castle...

Various other buildings and memorials...

I have been so lucky in Bratislava in meeting really lovely people. I had some fab and really interesting roommates in my hostel dorm and then on the walking tour I met Emma and Diego. Emma is from London and was interrailing round Europe. Diego is from Santiago and had come over to present at a conference in Barcelona before using that as a starting point for visiting some other European and Central Asian countries. After the walking tour, the three of us went for lunch where I tried the Halušky (potato dumplings, cheese and bacon - what's not to like?!)

Preceded by the local brew of Slivovica (plum brandy) (My S drink for Slovakia!). 

Let's just say once is enough, and we almost killed Diego by getting him to drink as the locals do in one go (he's a doctor and should have known to swallow rather than inhale it!). After lunch the three of us took a trip to Devin castle (about a 20 minute bus journey away) and had fun looking round there and practising our archery skills (mine needed some work). 

Devin sits at the confluence of two rivers, the Danube and Morava and being on a hill has great views.

Sadly Emma had to leave us then as she was heading down to Budapest so Diego and I looked round a bit more and came across a pop video being recorded. If anyone recognises this guy, please let me know who he is! We asked someone but she didn't know who he was though was sure he wasn't from Slovakia.

When we got back into the city, we went up to the UFO where we had the most amazing views and were there around sunset and the colours were just stunning.

After that we went and got a bite to eat and I had the local creamy garlic soup specialty, which should have been served in a bread bowl but they'd run out, so I had it in a non-edible bowl instead. 

This prompted Diego to change his mind what to eat (he wanted the bread bowl) and so went for the kapustnica instead, a cabbage soup.

This one had lots of onion in it so I reckon between the two of us the aroma must have been lovely!

Some of you may remember that in an earlier post, I gave some of my personal development aims for this year, one of which was to be more spontaneous and stop planning things to death. So when Diego asked me if I wanted to go with him on the trip he had planned to Banska Bystrica the next day, I was so proud of myself for saying yes, let's do it, rather than making some excuses as to why I couldn't which would have been my usual reaction these days. Admittedly, it did involve setting an alarm for the first time in 3 weeks and getting up early so that I could meet him at the train station for 8.30am; but I didn't let that stop me! Not even when Diego called at 7.45am to say that his hostel receptionist had suggested somewhere else and how about there instead, did I change my mind. Personal Development progress I'd say!!

So off we went too Trenčín (via the Slavin War Memorial where the nearly 7,000 Russian soldiers who helped to liberate Slovakia at the end of the Second World War are buried, as the train which we'd been promised was at 8.30am was actually at 9.55am!)

It's fairly safe to say that the main attraction of Trenčín is its castle but there we managed to find a number of other interesting places too...

This inscription is from 179AD. Bizarrely you have to walk through a hotel to go and look at it.

Whilst we were in Trenčín I needed to buy a lip balm and so duly went to the chemist and asked for one. All seemed fine when she took it out of the drawer, but I didn't see what it was called. You can imagine my horror when I got outside and saw that it was called...

And yes, hydrolyzed placental protein is one of the ingredients!!

Ewwwww!! Had it not been for the fact that my lips had virtually disintegrated by this point (it was the start of the shortest cold in history which lasted approximately 12 hours) nothing could have persuaded me to use it, and I must say the thought of it eventually made me heave so I now own a Labello lip balm too!

Our next stop was Trenčín Castle,

the views from which were amazing...

With of course the obligatory selfie (that's Diego obviously).

On our way back to Bratislava, we had thought about stopping off in Trnava but unfortunately our lack of local language skills let us down here as we couldn't work out if there was going to be a train home if we did so and so we decided to head straight back. One of the place neither of us had seen was the Blue Church, an Art Deco building that I'd been told was painted the colour of smurfs. Admittedly it was blue, but not quite as bright as the Smurf blue! It was very pretty though!

After that, we went and had the creamy garlic soup (again for me) and as having the soup in a bread bowl had been Diego's aim all day we found somewhere serving it in a bread bowl - voila!!

The next day, my extremely short-lived cold started and after a healthy breakfast 

(which I'm sure is what banished the cold!), a wander round Bratislava in the rain and meeting up with Diego for a farewell coffee, I went and treated myself to a ticket to the ballet - the Slovak National Ballet were performing Swan Lake. It was almost perfect, I was just missing my buddy Cathy who I do the vast majority of my theatre trips with. I have a student card which gave me a 50% discount! Tickets were only €15 full price so it was a bargain event at €7.50!

I'm now in Vienna, and given how ludicrously beautiful this city, rest assured my next post will be much less text and many more photos!!