Breaking it Up: Bratislava

"A battle is won by the side that is absolutely determined to win....but we had told ourselves early in the day that the battle was lost, so it was lost."

 --Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Is that artsy enough of a quote for you? It is for me. But this is an artsy blog post. Because I'm writing about Bratislava, and I'm writing about a small town in the South Moravian region of the Czech Republic called Břeclav. But I'm also not really going to write about those things. I have some pictures, but you could probably find them on Google Images if you wanted to.

I had planned this trip as carefully as I could, so I bought a ticket on the Eurolines bus from Prague to Bratislava, Slovakia far in advance. The night before I was leaving Prague I had looked up the route to walk to the bus station, screen-capping streets and directions. I had calculated what time I needed to leave the apartment based on how long it would take me to walk to the bus station. But I hadn't factored in two elements: how the vicious cold of pre-dawn, mid-winter Prague and a solid 20 pounds of wintertime clothes stuffed into my backpack would slow me down. I also decided to deviate from the route I had mapped out, ended up on the train station which was across a highway from the bus station. Five minutes before my bus was leaving. So I made a new plan: bought a train ticket to Bratislava.


Dawn from the Prague train station.

Except then I made the exceptionally stupid decision (which I can only blame on Dayquil, my never-ending cold, and my own idiocy) to exit the train at Břeclav. Except that Břeclav is actually still the Czech Republic. And I walked about thirty minutes into the town before I actually accepted that I was not in Bratislava. Then I had to turn around (still in the freezing cold, still carrying my massive backpack) and return to the train station. Where I found out the next train was not coming for another hour. Except that it was delayed an hour. And then it ended up being an hour and a half delay. So I spent an interesting afternoon hanging out in the Břeclav train station bar, drinking my woes away. And then I finally arrived at Bratislava just as the sun was setting.

So all in all, one of my less successful days of travel. The next morning Cait, Christian and I went out to explore the city for an hour or so before it was time for us to leave for the airport.

Buying excessive amount of American junk food in a store we stumbled upon near our hostel. The people working in the store were kind of bemused by our enthusiasm but seriously, Reeses's and Kraft Mac 'n Cheese in Europe? Goldmine. 

Exploring the Bratislava castle from the outside/courtyard.... not going inside because it's a museum and nobody felt like paying.

And that was more or less it for our winter break, except for the night Cait and I spent in Skopje in a hilariously weird AirBnb where I decided it was probably time for me to leave the Peace Corps. It was a good time and also a bad time, thus my only getting around to actually writing this blog post seven months later. Although let's be honest, I'm not exactly a prompt or timely blog post writer.

Where are we again? Vienna? Vancouver? Verona?

At last, my travel buddy Joanna arrived in Milan! Though our meetup ran into a couple hiccups we did eventually find each other at the central train station, wherein I rushed her onto a train to Venice! She had wanted to see the cathedral in Milan and although it was a bit slapdash we did get a chance to see it at the end of our trip. But for the time being I had only one mission: get the hell away from Milan. So after some train station/ticket-buying confusion (WHAT is the point of a ticket machine that will not accept a DEBIT card, seriously?) we managed to get a standing room only ticket for the next train, leaving at approximately now, to Venezia. Venice. A city I'd heard plenty about. A city where I could not find a Couchsurfer host within the city, and where a "hostel" (Hotel Astoria, a "cheap" hotel that packed multiple people into every room, had no common area, no coffee/tea/breakfast/any service, and whose windowless bathroom was a toilet and a showerhead, directly next to it) set us back an amount of money that did not correspond to the quality of the place. But I'll give them this: the location was good. We were just one or two bridges away from what felt like the center-ish of town, San Marco Square. They gave us beds. The beds had blankets. There were doors. I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel of nice things to say about the place, though.

For that small bonus, I will also add: they locked their front doors at night, and when Jo and I tried to leave bright and early the next day, at 7 AM, which I think is a totally reasonable traveler time to be up and out, we were pretty dismayed to find ourselves locked in the hotel. We had to wait until about 7:20 before the guy working at the front desk finally showed up and let us out. I guess you can say we got what we deserved considering the place has a 62% rating on Hostels.com and is consistently rating badly for most of the reasons I just listed, but for those who are thinking: eh, it's just one night. I'll survive. I say to you: not if you're leaving on an early-morning train or bus, you won't.

Thankfully we weren't

Anyway, by the time our train got to Venice we had stood most of the way (around two hours), we had backpacks, although being a novice at the backpacking thing mine was a lot heavier/bigger/unwieldier than Joanna's, the sun was viciously hot, and we were starving. So we stopped at the first pizza place we saw and relaxed for a bit.

FYI: This is the size of my beloved companion, Big Boy Blue, when completely empty. Just for reference.

There we ate our first of multiple pizzas, soaked up that sweet, sweet wifi, and figured out how the hell to get to Hotel Astoria from the train station. This is me going from digital back to analog, because I am a Luddite.

After finding our abominable hotel and ejecting another couple pounds of clothing from my bag, Jo made our way into the city to see the sights. I know this post is sounding pretty whiney, and that is because I was not that in love with Italy. It was expensive, it was hella crowded, the service people (aside from Ostello Bello!) were either not helpful/friendly or were that weird, overly fake friendliness. Of course the city is beautiful, but there are lots of beautiful cities in the world. I don't regret stopping there at all, but I was definitely to move on the next day. The being said:

Cheesin'.

  

Beautiful things to be seen!

Crazy Pizza. I feel like this place can be taken one of two ways. First: we have so much pizza here, it's like crazy pizza all day every day. Too much, one might even say. Second: This pizza is insane. You're not gonna believe it. It is some crazy-ass pizza. I'm a fan of both interpretations.

So many shops like this, everywhere. Enough masks to disguise that small nation's obese, prompt and knife-wielding army from my last post!

I do not even really care about shoes outside of their comfort, but... I wanted those purple shoes. The shop keeper was NOT happy about my taking this photograph.

Dusk looks quite nice on Venice.

Very cool astrological clock, I believe this was in San Marco Piazza.

Probably one of the more famous places in Venice? I think, judging by its crowdedness? The Rialto Bridge.

The view from said bridge. Lovely, although this vacation and the results of my attempts at nighttime photography were what finally convinced me that my FujiFilm FinePix A500 (from about 2004, I believe) was really no longer cutting it. We had a good journey together, little FinePix, over several continents and multiple countries. Good night, sweet prince.

Some jokester did this with a bunch of the signs leading to various landmarks. It should only have one arrow. This obviously makes it a lot more difficult to navigate throughout Venice. Italy, so welcoming!

Gondolier checking his phone. So romantic.

San Marco by night.

One of several jazz bands playing outside. This was pretty lovely, I have to admit.

Masquerade, paper faces on parade!

Like I said, Jo and I were up and out bright and early the next day, after our hotel unlocked our front doors and released us into the wild. It was then that we discovered something that held true for most of the rest of our trip. Extremely touristic places are the practically empty first thing in the morning. I'm not even talking sunrise. These photos were all taken between like, 7 and 9 AM.

No one.

Ghost town.

Crickets.

Empty and quiet enough that the cats and birds were freely congregating around overflowing trash cans to rummage together for their breakfasts.

The same alley could not be seen the prior afternoon; it was a never-ending stream of people.

We had enough time to stop and have a leisurely coffee/croissant breakfast, explore one or two squares and tourist market areas we'd wanted to see, and still be at the bus stop with plenty of time to spare. It was a nice morning. Although, sadly, I bought a gloriously tacky fan (everywhere we went was hot and having a fan ended up being worth its weight) I ended up losing it on the next leg of our journey...

I would also like to say at this point that although Jo and I researched about a half dozen different ways to get from Venice to our next destination, Ljubljana/Postojna, Slovenia, we finally ended up paying a little bit more for the convenience of a GoOpti shuttle that took us directly from Venice to the caves/castle/park in Postojna. I would seriously strongly recommend this to anyone trying to get from Italy to Slovenia. Although there are buses and trains, each one is complicated and requires are least one or more transfer. There are some more direct routes to Ljubljana but even a lot of those require transfers. Plus our driver was on time, very nice, let us know what was happening each step of the way (we stopped to pick up some people at the airport and at another location), and the van was clean and air-conditioned. Even though I was disappointed not to take the train because I love traveling by train, in this case it was 100% worth it because we were on a schedule and this shuttle let us get to the caves quickly and then onto Ljubljana in the same day (although that was a bit more of an adventure since we took public transit). Anyway, GoOpti. This is my very strong recommendation for their services. Go GoOpti!