We’re not in a rush to get up as we saw a lot of the Old Town yesterday when walking around to find dinner, but we head out in search of breakfast and are glad that the weather is still looking good. We decide to talk a walk through the Old Town following the coronation route and will find breakfast once we’re on route.
Our hotel is near the castle and so we are already near the Cathedral that once saw Hungarian kings crowned and entombed. We like our exploring and, up a set of stairs at the back of the church, we find an exhibition of the crowns and golden treasures that have passed through here. In the other direction we find steps cut into the rock below, taking us into the crypt where each branch of the narrow corridor is lined with bricked-in royalty and important clergy. The Cathedral, we assume, was at some point stripped of its grander decoration. The building is simply too impressive for the rather dowdy interior to have done it justice. The ornate carving of the choir stalls, and the intricate designs of the stained glass windows suggest that the Cathedral once experienced much grander times.
It’s a lovely morning to be out as not only is the weather in our favour but it’s also incredibly quiet out – we are almost the only people on the streets despite it being after eleven on a Saturday morning. Hardly anything is open and as we walk we start to wonder what time everyone else gets up!
We get breakfast on the main square, choosing a restaurant that didn’t have a table free last night, but it seems this isn’t a guarantee of quality as the food is nothing too special especially considering the price is considerably higher than dining on the main square in Krakow.
We continue on the coronation route and find small streets criss-crossing themselves. We easily walk every street in the Old Town centre and are happy as the city is winning us back after our poor introduction to it yesterday at the station. While wandering through the only surviving original city gate we find another way-marker to major international cities. This time we find both Cairo and Budapest.
The route finishes just a street away from the rive,r and so we take the opportunity to find the port. This is obviously not the first port of call (‘scuse the pun!) for most visitors to Bratislava but as we’re getting to our next, and final, city by boat we want to check it out. It’s small with only a few shops and two ticket offices. Maybe we were expecting the international port to be larger but, with only a few boats a day coming through (either upstream to Vienna, or downstream to Budapest), it doesn’t really need to be big and fancy.
As we leave the port building we go on the riverside walk back towards the castle area. The path is lined with benches, and each has a little sticker advertising free WiFi. We’ve got the radio show on tomorrow and there isn’t free internet in the hotel, so we grab a seat and see if it’s for real. It takes a few tries but the touch is eventually connected. Yes it’s internet, but it’s pretty slow. A shame, really, as a proper OB would have been excellent – seems like it will be another hotel-room special!
Back in the Old Town we grab a quick lunch as we’re finally having some luck finding somewhere that does sandwiches (that are cheap too!) for that quick bite. We then grab a cold drink and head up the steep steps to the castle that overlooks Bratislava Old Town and the Danube. On our way we pass a rather curiously-worded plaque, ‘in commemoration of the first witch burnt in Bratislava’. Even now we’re not sure whether it’s a memorial or a celebration.
The view across the river is absorbing as we try to work out where the border with Austria might be. We’ve read in a travel guide that you can catch a bus and then walk into Austria, and think that this sounds like a cool thing to do tomorrow. The castle is being heavily renovated and so not many rooms are open, which means this is a quick trip. We try to extend our time by walking through the green grounds and gazing at the speed the river is flowing beneath us. The view from here looks straight out onto the UFO Bridge and it’s amazing to see it carve up the city as the road runs between the castle’s steep cliffs and the Old Town.
With the walk last night and the walking today we have pretty much exhausted the Old Town. We could do a museum tomorrow, or spend a day sipping and sitting in cafes, but we’re not ones for taking it easy on holiday. We decide to check out the idea of walking to Austria tomorrow and so decide to find some free WiFi since we think investigating it online is going to be more successful than another trip to the railway station. It’s typical, though, that once you start looking for something you can never find it and it takes us a few tries to find a cafe with the ‘free Wi-Fi’ sign. The first place that has it which turns out to be a cocktail bar called Paparazzi so we pick a table out front and get set up. We decide to go against our usual order of beer so opt for cocktails as this is Paparazzi’s speciality (Slovakia’s speciality is wine and we haven’t tried any of that yet!). We end up ordering some cucumber-based drinks (Alice’s is a cucumber gin, and both come with a stick of cucumber as a swizzle stick) which are really quite nice. We manage to sip them perfectly to time with the amount of WiFi access needed. While we sit there, a stark naked woman walks past trailed by a TV crew.
Our research has found that actually it’s not all that practical to walk to Austria, which is a shame. The roads seem too busy, and the towns that are on the bus route don’t have much going for them. The browsing has allowed us to formulate a new plan of action for tomorrow, though, and so we settle on going to a place called Devin Castle. It’s been listed in a few guide books and is at the end of a bus route direct from Bratislava Old Town, so hopefully it won’t be too complicated getting there. If it’s a bit dull then we know we can fall back on the sipping and sitting plan.
We decide to go to dinner at one of the awesomely named places on the main drag and go for Cafe Rock over the Allstar Cafe. Both the food and beer are decent enough and, like the Fighting Cocks pub in Kingston, it seems that you have to have tattoos or Goth-like hair to work here. We have a table outside to take advantage of the nice weather but inside the place is cavernous. It gets us thinking about how mainland Europe is set up for such weather extremes: really pleasant summer evenings with tables lining the streets in the summers, but deep, warm insides ready to be used in the winder months.
While we have dinner there are the occasional interjections from the stag parties that are in town (it is a Saturday after all). There are at least three groups we can see from our table, all at different levels of rowdiness. We can see the attraction of coming here (primarily cheap beer), but we’re finding that it’s actually not as cheap as it could be. The beer was cheaper in Warsaw, and the food was cheaper pretty much everywhere we’ve been, so we wonder how long it’s going to be before the stag-dos cotton on to this.
On the way back to the hotel we decide to stop off for a final drink as it’s an excuse to see what some of the small cafe places are like. We find ourselves in Cafe Hemmingway and manage to mess up the ordering protocol again – after a while of us sitting at a table the barmaid (who is only two metres away) has not taken our order so Scotty heads to the bar. She responds by saying she’ll be over to take our order shortly. Despite the initial confusion it seems a pretty chilled out place, and it’s quite a relaxing way to end the day. We spend the drink pondering the beer descriptors in the menu. Everywhere in Bratislava describes their beer by percentages, but they seem staggeringly high; this is 12% apparently. We figure that there is no way it can actually be 12% ABV as with this being our second beer of the night we’d be on the floor. We’ve seen % and centigrade interchanged before and wonder if maybe they could be advertising the brewing temperature, but that doesn’t quite seem right either. We leave the bar quite confused.
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