Bratislava

Last weekend Jason and I made a little juant down across the border to Slovakia. The capital of the Slovak Republic, Bratislava, is only about 4 hours away from Prague. I only have one class on Fridays and it has been canceled for the last 3 weeks, and Jason only has 2 Friday classes which he was able to reschedule. We knew that we wanted to head to Bratislava at some point while we were in Prague, but we had a little bit of motivation for going on this particular weekend. As you should know, Jason is a big soccer fan. The US national soccer team had a friendly game scheduled to play against Slovakia for last Saturday. So we decided it would be a good time to check out the city. So we caught a 7 AM bus on Friday morning and made it to Bratislava a little after 11.

It's a tiny little capital, but has some nice areas to walk around in the old city center. There are some great pedestrian streets filled with shops, restaurants and pubs. We wandered around for a while and made our way up to the Bratislava Castle, which sits on a small hill overlooking the city. Unfortunately, it is undergoing renovations, so you can't go inside and some of the ground area closed. The main castle building has recently been repainted bright white. Now it looks so new and perfect that you'd think it was some fancy new hotel, not a centuries old castle.

But there were nice views of Bratislava and the beautiful countryside and the winding Danube River. Looking west from the castle, you can see dozens and dozens of electricity generating windmills. Looking this direction you think Slovakia must be concerned about the environment and is trying to do their part to help. Then when you turn to look at the view to the east, you see dozens and dozens of factories with smoke stacks polluting the air. Lovely. I take back my previous statement. You can also see the city's "famous" bridge, the Novy Most, which looks like a UFO is landing on bridge. It's interesting, and clearly from the '70s.

So after a day of wandering around the city, testing Slovak beer (simply for testing purposes, to compare to Czech beer), and a tasty meal, we went to pick up our tickets for the USA vs. Slovakia game. Thanks to some of Jason's soccer connections in the States, we were able to get 4 free tickets to the game. We had to run by the Holiday Inn where the team was staying and meet with the team manager to get our tickets. Before we went, we had all these ideas of how excited the team was going to be that we made it all the way to Slovakia for a game and they were going to invite us to dinner and give us warm ups and a special VIP box at the game. But, surprisingly enough, none of that actually happened. Huh.

We then went to meet up with our wonderful host for the weekend, a very friendly Slovak girl named Dana who we found through Couch Surfing. For those of you who don't know about Couch Surfing..... it's an online community similar to Facebook, but it is specifically for finding people to stay with or meet up with while you're traveling. I know, it sounds like it could be a little sketchy, but it actually seems pretty safe/legit. Everyone has a profile with photos and information about themselves. Then after people stay with them, they write reviews (just as you would review a hotel) for other people to learn about the person. I know there could still be some problems, but it really seems like they're making it as trustworthy as possible. And I think most people who get involved with it are like minded people and really just want to meet other travelers. Anyway, it is a great way to meet locals and save money at the same time. If you're interested, check it out here.

So we met Dana and went to her cute little apartment in one of the many old communist block apartment buildings. Her place was comfortable and we enjoyed staying with her and hearing her stories and getting some great travel advice from her.

Saturday was the big game. Online, we found a group of Americans that were planning on meeting up in a pub in the center a few hours before the game. So we found the pub and met about 15 other Americans there. Most of them were living in England, either working or studying. There were also a few diplomats from Vienna, and even one couple who flew all the way from Chicago to Bratislava for the weekend just to go to the game. Wow. It wasn't even an important game!

We had a good time chatting and getting to know one another before heading to the game in the afternoon. When we got there, we were quickly escorted by a few security guards who showed us to our special Americans section. The security guards stayed with us the whole game, I think we had about 8 of them surrounding the group of 15 of us. The US ended up losing the game, bummer. But we still had fun in our little cheering section, trying and failing to cheer as loud as the thousands of Slovak fans.

For our last day in Slovkia, we took a bus about 15km outside of the city to another old castle, called the Devin Castle. It is completely in ruins now, but you can walk around and stones and get some great views. There are still some towers standing that look pretty cool, and you can imagine what the castle must have looked like in its glory days. It is also right on the Danube River and is only 3km from Austria and about 12km from Hungary. We had warm, perfect weather that day and it was just wonderful to walk around outside.

Outside the stadium with some of the American crew.