Our weekend in Bratislava was wonderful. It started off with a bang - prosecco upon check at our hotel and an upgrade to a big suite (living room and kitchen area, 1.5 baths, 2 TVs . . .)! We could run laps, it was bigger than our apartment! Oh, and there was a complimentary bottle of wine waiting for us as well. Nice nice nice! We took a 45 minute taxi ride from the Vienna airport so we still had time to go out and check out the town at night. It was very lively -- all the restaurants and bars in the old town were crowded with outdoor seating and lots of people were walking around. Good vibe! We found space at a wine bar and enjoyed the warm evening and people watching (it was next to some sort of club with a throng of people going in and coming out).
Saturday we headed to the "new" area on the Danube, which hosts a nice shopping mall and a ton of outdoor cafes. Pretty swank! There's also a nice path to walk along the river. There was some sort of event at the mall, so they had a stage set up and Slovak bands playing (pretty loud for 10 AM, I might add!)
We toodled around a bit more, walked along the river back to the old town and took in the St. Martin's Cathedral, the site of coronation masses for Hungarian kings and queens for almost 270 years. On the ground there's a trail of small brass circles with crowns etched on them, from the Cathedral to St. Martin's Gate. Now it was time for the Walking Tour!
We had a great time learning about the history of the region while seeing all the major sights. Bratislava is quite small, but packed with a lot of charm! And there were definitely tourists around, but it didn't feel overly crowded, which was nice. It felt very relaxed.
In the afternoon we headed up to the Castle (fortress really, which looks like an upside down table) and admired the panoramic views of the city.
We continued on to the hilltop memorial Slavín, passing beautiful stately homes and embassies along the way. Slavín is a monument and military cemetery in memory of the 6,000+ Soviet soldiers who died pushing the Nazis out of West Slovakia during WWII.
On Sunday morning, we took a (slow) boat ride up the Danube to Devin, a scenic hilltop ruin surrounded on all sides by fantastic views of two countries - Austria and Slovakia. Perched on a hilltop above the river, it offered an excellent location for defensive and lookout purposes. The original wooden fortifications date back to the 8th century and the stone fortress ruins we see today were built a few centuries later. There were even medieval costumed men and women offering target practice, jousting and there was some sort of hookah tent as well. Here, we had a good kielbasa, nice and spicy! We also sampled the local soft drink, kofola, which tasted kinda like root-beery medicinal coke, not super good.
A quicker boat ride (30 minutes) returned us to the city, and our afternoon ended with tall glasses of refreshing lemonade (all the cafes advertised different varieties of fresh lemonade) before heading to the bus station for the airport. We had a wonderful weekend - much love to Bratislava and the wonderful Tulip House Boutique Hotel!
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| One of the city's multiple statues |
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