Bratislava and Devin Castle

Bratislava is a small town, compared to the others I have seen (although I guess Prague was small as well), but somehow it provided one of the best weekends of my time here. Maybe because it was so cheap. Anyway, on to the story. Carlye and I met up at the train station at noon on Friday. After searching for maybe 2 hours, we found our hostel, the Downtown Backpackers Hostel. Despite the boring name, it was an incredible place. I'm not sure why I failed to get a single picture of the place, but suffice to say it was quirky and cool, plus clean. It's the first hostel I have ever been to, so maybe they are all like that, but I doubt it. If every hostel I visit is as cool, I'll be quite satisfied. Enough about the hostel though.

We wandered around Bratislava, discovered how small it really is, ate a delicious lunch on the bank of the Danube (The Hungarians and I call it the Duna, the Viennese and Carlye call it the Donau, and the Slovakians call it the Dunaj, so I'll just stick with the English on here), where I ordered a cocktail, which I have never done before. We saw this awesome bridge called the Novy Most (New Bridge), although many refer to it simply as the UFO bridge, for obvious reasons (picture below). At night we went out to a fun little coffee shop and had milkshakes. I hadn't had a milkshake in forever, and was all excited, but these were simply chocolate milk with malt powder in them. Tasty, but not a malt.

Saturday we attempted to meet two girls from Vienna (Laura, a Mac student who I take Japanese with, and Philippine, some girl from Germany? maybe). It didn't work out, so Carlye and I struck out for Devin Castle. I had heard good things, and I was expecting it to be the highlight of the trip. It's a 30-minute bus ride north of the city, at the convergence of the Danube and the Morava rivers. When we left Bratislava, it was sunny and warm, by the time we got off the bus, it was drizzling, chilly and windy. Once we finally saw the castle though, we were enchanted, and it only got better as we climbed to the top of it. Situated on a rocky outcropping nearly vertically rising from the point where the rivers merge, the castle is in a prime position. It's had quite a history as well. People had settled there since 895 BCE, it was an important front-line post of the Roman Empire (who built the first Christian church north of the Danube here), and later was a border post of Hungary (Slovakia was a part of Hungary before 1923). In fact Bethlen Gabor, whose name graces the square that my school is on, was the leader of this region, and hence lived here. Napoleon destroyed the castle in 1809 (along with the Bratislava castle, though that was rebuilt). During the Soviet era, the castle was fortified with barbed wire, as Austria lay across both rivers. Anyway, it's an amazing castle, what you think of when you picture a castle. We got to go inside, and see how it was built on top of solid rock, and rooms were carved into the stone below. It was incredible, in fact it was certainly one of the coolest sights I have ever seen in my life. Saturday night we went out to the 1st Slovakian Bar. I don't know if it was the first, but that was it's name, so we'll believe it. It was a giant timber lodge nestled into a very modern area, or maybe the modern area nestled around it, if it was indeed first. We ate Halusky, the typical Slovakian dish, which consisted of potato dumplings covered in bryndza (a sheep-cheese) and cracklings. It tasted kind of like macaroni and cheese, only the macaroni tasted of potato, and the cheese was a little sour, and there was bacon fat in it. Tasty though.

Sunday we explored the hills behind the city, seeing the Soviet memorial to their WWII victory (they did this in every city), which also had a cemetery beneath it, containing 7000 Soviet troops. We also took a nice walk in the woods, which looked exactly like a Minnesota forest. We had a nice lunch, then took trains our separate ways. Fun.

UFO Bridge


Here it is again from downstream. The Bratislava Castle is on the hill to the right. The main part of the city, including the old town district, and the hipper nightlife region, are on the right just south of the Castle.


Here is a view from atop the Castle. It's a town with lots of history, but there are more new buildings and skyscrapers than any other city I have visited (Vienna was close, and Berlin may have more, but those cities are 3 times and 10 times the size of Bratislava, respectively).


The amazing Devin Castle.


One of the many fun little sculptures.


Travel news:
I've got a weekend off, then I go to London to visit my good friend Matt, my roommate last semester, and next year. After that, I have a free trip to Krakow!! I'm going with Carlye's program, and I get free travel (from Vienna), and free stay in a nice hotel.

Two weeks later I go on my adventure, with a new itinerary.
Brussels -> Maastricht (Amsterdam trip while I am there) -> Paris -> Rome -> Geneva (to stay with Kabir and his parents, who live there) -> Venice -> Ljubljana -> Zagreb -> Budapest

Vienna is a City of Parks

Just arrived back from Vienna yesterday. Climbed off the train and went straight to class, actually. Anyway, Vienna is a beautiful city. It's so green and treelined and parkfilled, as the title suggests. It was a beautiful weekend, and we spent a lot of time sitting in parks near ponds with swans and watching families play. Very relaxing. Aside from the parks, the architecture of the city is very cohesive and beautiful. Most of the buildings are imperial baroque beauties from the Hapsburg era, with a couple Gothic cathedrals or city halls thrown in. But my favorite building of all was this one that completely stood out in the cityscape.

It's called the HundertWasser Haus, or something like that. Designed by HundertWasser, who also designed a couple of similar buildings in the neighborhood (also designed a gasworks and a school), none as spectacular as this one though.


It just springs to life out of the boring block it's located in. You can see here below that it looks as though it's moss creeping in on that beige building beneath it.


The street to the left there is pedestrian only, which is a good thing, as the architect lifted up parts of the cobblestones to make hills, and planted trees willy-nilly in the road. One can also see the vibrant green on the building's many trees. They pop out of every balcony and nook and cranny.


My favorite part of the whole thing, I think, is this fountain and the alcove under the building. The black part of the building you can see goes all the way under the building, creating a little picnic place. Also, something I couldn't really fit in to the picture, on top of the building are two Turkish looking turrets. Pretty fun.


Here is the Royal Hapsburg Palace, or something. The Palace is actually named after that fountain you see at the foot of the hill. This place extends forever into huge gardens with labyrinths and pools and everything. Like a mini-Versailles, in fact parts of Marie Antoinette were filmed here.


This is the view from the top of the hill looking back on Vienna. The yellow part is the actual palace.


This is the Danube diverted into Vienna, called the DonauKanal. Both sides are beautiful tree lined walks with lilacs and various other flowering trees. It was great.


This is StephansDom, I think named after the Hungarian St. Stephen, but I'm not sure. A beautiful Romanesque/Gothic structure, complete with Zsolnay tiling. I cut off the top of the steeple because it was only covered in scaffolding anyway. I realize this is a bad picture, but whatever.


This is on a cool square in the heart of Vienna. A large park to the right, the national library to the left, another Hapsburg palace behind me. The two domes are for the natural history museum and the art history museum.


That's all. I didn't get many pictures because I forgot to bring my camera the first two days we were walking around.

Old Pictures and New Activities

I'm off to Vienna in a couple of hours, which should be pretty exciting (and maybe excitingly pretty?) and I'll post pictures and such upon my return. But for now, I'm throwing up some old pictures and telling what I've been doing the past week and a half.

This picture is for Grandma. It's St. Elizabeth Church. Very pretty, just tucked back in to a little corner of town. I'll go inside and get a picture sometime, but here's the outside.



Here is the Millennium Monument and Heroes Square. I don't know if I have posted a picture of it before, so I thought I would. It is at the end of Andrassy Ut, which is like the Budapest version of the Champs Elysee, and marks the beginning of City Park.



This is Vajdahunyad Castle. It's in City Park, right behind Heroes Square. A pretty fun building. And it's quite close to my apartment.


Here it is from the other side. This was when I first got here and it was cold enough for ice.


This last weekend I had many visitors. I think there were 10 Mac kids in town from Thursday to Sunday. Kabir and Jack stayed with me (and Carlye joined us for a night), and the rest stayed at hotels or hostels around town. 6 of them were studying abroad on a Macalester program in Maastricht, the Netherlands, one was studying at the University of Edinburgh, and one was studying somewhere in Rome. The weekend they were here happened to be spring cleaning weekend, or so it seemed. The streets were filled with trash of all varieties. Beds, dressers, cupboards, sinks, appliances, computers, televisions, clothing and more were collected in huge piles on every street. So they saw Budapest at an interesting time. But it was a blast to have them, and kinda crazy to be leading them all on a tour of the city.
Then yesterday two more friends showed up (Paul, a Mac student, and Patricia, his gal from Sarah Lawrence, both studying in London) and I showed them around. So it's been an interesting time, getting to hear what everyone thinks about Budapest.

Now I'm off to Vienna. The next two weekends I'm either going to stick around here, or visit Bratislava or some small town in Hungary. The weekend after those I'm going to London for a little over 4 days. The next weekend I'll be in Zagreb/Croatia somewhere. After two more weekends here I'm off on my big adventure to the West.