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| Bratislava! |
Hypothetically, a free weekend to explore Europe is
something people dream about. Before my semester in Gaming, when posed with the
question of where to go, the scene of my consideration might be described as
one not far removed from that of a dog drooling over a bone. ‘Perhaps Venice,’
I’d think with slightly glazed eyes, ‘or maybe a small town in the heart of
Germany,’ I’d drool. Well, I’m wiser now, and slightly worse for the wear, but when
it came to our first really free weekend this semester, we (Alex, Mark, and I)
had quite the time of it figuring out where to go. It wasn’t really a matter of
where we
wanted to go, we could
easily all agree on Venice, Paris, Spain and a few others, the issue was more
along the lines of where we could
afford
to go without a EuRail as none of us had activated it yet. We researched
several possibilities, each more expensive than the last, until finally in
desperation, the night before we were to leave, we settled on heading back to
Vienna to look around a few places we had missed the last time and to ask at
the train station about fares to other nearby cities. Accordingly, we booked a
hostel in Vienna and prepared to make the journey, packing anything and
everything that might be necessary (young inexperienced travelers that we
were).
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| Mark and Alex outside the Hapsburg |
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| St. Peter's dome |
We spent
that afternoon locating and checking into our
hostel, exploring the major churches in Vienna: St. Stephen’s Gothic Cathedral,
St. Michael’s (a beautiful little church that the palace servants attended), the gorgeously ornate Baroque church St. Peter's,
and making our way to the Jewish Quarter of town with
the Judenplatz. This had been a special request of mine, after reading about
this square as the place where hundreds of Jews were rounded up by the Nazi’s
in Hitler’s Anschluss of 1938.
Alex wanted to
see the apartments of Ceci, a young Hapsburg ruler featured on many posters and
paintings throughout the city, so Mark and I made our way over to the artists
quarter of the city to find the Musikverin,
another
part of the city featured in a series of books I once read. This area of town
was full of street musicians and performers taking part in some sort of street
fair. We spent some time watching them before finding Alex again and heading to
find dinner.
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| Gothic stonework in St. Stephen's |
Our stay in the hostel was uneventful, though I did perform
several investigations and tests to determine that we were free of bed bugs,
and we awoke early the next morning to make our way to the train station, where
we learned that it was only 15euro roundtrip to Bratislava. This was perfect, I
thought, since I had been thinking about making a visit to Slovakia, the home
of three out of my four great-grandparents on my mom’s side. The train ride was
only about an hour long, and as we set foot off the train, we realized that
this city was very different from the artistic Vienna or picturesque Salzburg.
Where Vienna has sparklingly white stone edifices, Bratislava has easter-egg
pastel houses, where Salzburg has statues and monuments, Bratislava has
graffiti, lots of it. Everywhere you turned there were signs of the recent
Communist regime made strikingly visible in the several “symbols of Communism”,
oddly shaped monuments throughout town. We had a vague map from the train
station and were able to find our way to the touristy part of the city, a few
cute little streets lined with shops and bars. Alcohol was very present in
Bratislava. Every other restaurant sign proclaimed cheap prices for beer,
vodka, and other varieties of hard liquor.
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| Pastels in Bratislava |
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| I will definitely be going back. |
The
diamond in the rough proved to be a small honey shop that we stumbled upon a
little before lunch. The owner, a young man in his late 20s, was an excellent
salesman and reeled us in bit by bit, but it was worth every penny. First he
allowed us to sample as many varieties of the flavored honey as we wanted,
ranging from wildflower mountain honey to a creamy hazelnut flavor. As we deliberated
over which flavors to buy, he produced several bottles of honey wine, or mead.
To seal the deal, he proceeded to let us sample each of these until we were
pretty set on buying not only a few jars of the delicious honey, but also
several bottles of the sweet drink. Even though we recognized his sale tactics,
it was honestly one of the best purchases of the semester thanks to the
genuine, natural sweetness of the goods.
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| They're big into their graffiti there |
We had
packed sandwiches from the hostel’s breakfast (a cheap traveler trick for when
you don’t want to pay for lunch) but the constant drizzling rain forced us to
seek out a small coffee shop for lunch. Surrounded by poofy, feminine colored
cushions and a large, Canadian group who felt the need to express in loud tones
how much the American economy depends on Canada, we licked ice cream cones and
ate slightly squashed sandwiches out of napkins while we planned our next few
hours. We had done zero research before the trip, so we pretty much only had
our little train station brochure/map to go off of, but it seemed to hit all
the highlights. After lunch, we made our way to a few churches which were all
locked and closed to the public. Deciding to take a different tack, we climbed
up to the fortress on the hill and spent about half an hour taking pictures in
the gateway simply because we were sick of walking about in the rain with our
overly-packed backpacks. None of us felt particularly like paying to see the
inside of the palace, so we wandered about the ramparts a bit before heading
down to seek out St. Elizabeth of Hungary’s blue church.
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| Roommate Besties |
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| St. Elizabeth's |
St.
Elizabeth’s really was blue. I’ve never seen a church like it before or since,
though we were unable to explore it fully because a wedding was going on
inside. Finally, we decided it was about time to make our way back to the train
station as we had several long rides ahead of us. It was an uphill trudge
through the rain with our bags heavier than ever upon our backs, but we made it
and I bought a Slovak sausage from a vendor at the station, which was nice. Our
ride back to Vienna was uneventful and we managed to catch an earlier train
towards Gaming than we had hoped, this time paying the proper amount. Our
conductor was quite friendly and explained to us at which stops we would have
to switch trains. We were a little confused by his directions but got off at
St. Polten as he suggested and looked for the next train to Pochlorn. Alas,
this train did not leave for another hour. Well, no matter, we thought. We
could just look around for some more food while we waited. As the time for the
train drew near, however, we realized that the sign had “nicht something”
written underneath our train number. We asked a few people what this meant and
discovered that the train we were expecting to take would not be traveling out
of St. Polten that night. Slightly annoyed and exhausted, we checked for the
next train at the information booth and found that it would not run until about
9pm, which meant we wouldn’t catch the last train from Pochlorn to Scheibbs
(where we catch the bus to Gaming). Afraid we might have to spend the night in
Pochlorn but helpless to do anything about it, we bought more food and sat
around looking forlorn as swarms of strange-looking teenagers milled about the
station. They had evidently just participated in some sort of huge event that
included being coated in large amounts of colored chalk, which simply added to
their rather loud, annoying presence and the peculiarity of our predicament. We
were so fortunate as to board our train an hour or so later with a bunch of
them, but when we embarked at Pochlorn, every human in sight quickly
disappeared to their homes and warm beds. We alone were left in the empty train
station with only the promise of the sparse Sunday morning train schedule
linking us to Gaming and our vacant beds. Despite our exhaustion, I was all for
walking (we had googlemapped directions at McDonalds in St. Polten just in
case), but Alex pointed out that by the time we got there, it would be the same
time as if we took the train.
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| Queens of the castle |
We
decided to walk about the town just in case there was a restaurant or hotel
open but in the typical small-town Europe style, everything had closed hours
ago. Only bars remained open. We located the least sketchy looking bar and
began staggering our drinks so as to spend as much of the night as possible
there without spending a fortune or getting drunk. Alex calmly requested Earl
Grey tea, to which the bar tender laughed, but at least she was not in danger
of getting drunk. Mark searched out every hotel in the area, while we sat and
drank, but to no avail and we finally decided to walk back to the station and
spend the rest of the night there. We took turns waiting up, which meant that
Mark basically stayed awake the whole time while we slept fitfully on our
backpacks, hoping we wouldn’t get some sort of dreadful disease from the train
station seats. After several false alarms when trains that were supposed to
come (on a regular week-day schedule we later discovered) did not arrive, and
several hours of an obnoxious girl smoking inside the station and giving us all
sore throats, our train finally came and we boarded it utterly spent and rather
disheveled. I have never been happier to board a train, and the smell of
breakfast at the Kartause was pure heaven. Likewise, our beds were waiting and
I spent a good portion of the day sleeping blissfully under my very own duvet
with my head on a cushy pillow.
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| Bratislavan Fortress Gate |
Though
this unfortunate ending rather marred our overall experience, it could not be
denied that we learned a lot from this trip. Not only had we figured out the
complicated mix of trains and hostels, but we had seen two cities successfully
and kept our overall expenses under $100, which was a lot better than most
people that first weekend. It’s a trip I look back on with a mixture of
fondness at the thought of our naïve traveler’s sense and bitterness at the
remembrance of the dehydrated, sore throat feeling of that night in Pochlorn.
Never again will I pass through that station without shuddering, but never again
will I fail to check and double-check a Saturday evening train schedule. In the
end, however, I’m left with a sweet memento of the journey in our Slovak honey,
of which I have several, beautiful, full jars.
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| Traveling buddies |
