Me, with the Bratislava castle in the background.
Bratislava is usually just a night at most for the Eastern Europe backpackers, a cheap junction point between Prague, Vienna and Budapest. The guide books don't even recommend going. You know those "if you have one day...", "if you have three days..." things? Well, even if you have 1-2 weeks in Slovkia, a country the size of Florida, seeing Bratislava, the capital, doesn't even make this list.
It's like Central Europe's second son: it's got a castle, just not a good one (and rebuilt so many times it's barely the original one). It's got churches, they just happen to be mediocre. It doesn't stand out for its culture, its food or its archetecture. But here's what it does have: subtitled movies.
Unlike in Ukraine, where everything is dubbed in Russian, Slovakian movies (save for children's movies) are in the original language with Slovakian subtitles. Now, there's nothing really wrong with watching movies in Russian (as I have done for Mr. and Mrs. Smith, War of the Worlds, Star Wars III and countless others...). I get to work on my language skills and miss badly acted lines like "hold me like you did by the lake on Naboo" ("dershite menya kak vi cdelali azerom na Naboo" hurts less to hear), but I do miss the subtleties and jokes that I would get were I to watch a movie in English.
Add in the fact that Slovakia is one of the few fronts where Pepsi one the cola wars, and Carrie and I were happily sitting in an air-conditioned movie theatre out of the summer heat, watching "Batman Begins" in English, eating popcorn and drinking ice cold Pepsi and enjoying every second of it.
The other exciting thing was that we found the Slovakian version of Wal-Mart and stocked up on train food that included pretzels, pudding, tortilla chips and two well-missed bevies: Mountain Dew and Gatorade.
My GQ pose on the Danube. Notice the Mountain Dew in my hands. My shirt is open in these pics because it was 98 frickin' degrees and I was doin' it Florida style.
Someone might point out the ills of globalization and franchising this represents, but I think the real fault lies in buisness ethics and how unilateral the trade is. No one complains about Dutch beer or Japanese electronics in America (well, not since the 80s), and as there is no problem with picking up ingredients from Mexico in the Spanish aisle of an American grocery store, so too should I revel in getting a Gatorade in Slovakia. As long as the buisnesses are ethical, I see no problem with shipping American products abroad, just as I see no problem in foreign franchises setting up in America. In fact, I would love to see a Wagamamas (British chain in America. When everyone can find their favorite foods everywhere and everyone has a the chance to have authentic foreign food in their home country, we just might have world peace.
Posing with one of the natives.
Anyway, five other things of note in Bratislava:
1: Walking through the arch in Michaels tower, the only thing left of Bratislavas original walls, you are not supposed to talk lest you be unlucky in love. I remembered the first time through, not the second. Whoops.
Carrie, at the top of Michaels tower.
2: Cows. I had seen such a thing in Belgium: distribute huge, white, plastic cows to artists and displaz the results around the city. Carrie hated nearly every one, as she pointed out repeatedly.
A flying cow.
Carrie and cow, eyeing each other.
3: I had goats cheese filled dumplings, a Slovakian delicacy. Pretty good, actually.
Slovakian food, the goats cheese dumplings on the right.
4: A church called St. Martins, where they used to crown Hungarian kings (Slovakia has been conquered by the Hungarians, the Franks, the Austrians, the Turks, the Nazis and the Russians), had an out of the way area with plexiglass on the floor. The plexiglass was scratched, but when I got down on my knees and looked past the glass, I could see the churches foundations underneath. And then I saw, just lying down there on the rock, two skulls with spines.
St. Martins church, the Hungarian crown on the top.
5: Not only was there still a gold reprodution of the Hungarian crown on top of St. Martins, but monuments left by the Soviets were still around (not to mention a space saucer on top of a bridge and hundreds of block apartment buildings). This is interesting, because other countries have torn most of them down. In Hungary, Slovakias southern neighbor, all the Soviet statues have been moved to one park in Budapest so that people can peruse the past, and there is a court case where they are trying to ban the red stars on Heinekin bottles because displaying Soviet symbols, which the red star is considered to be, is illegal. I dont know if the Slovaks leave them up because they are better able to deal with past attrocities, they have been conquered so many times that they just dont care, or it just takes too much money to tear these things down.
The Soviet flying saucer and all the block apartment buildings across the Danube river.
In any case, it was a nice bit of Americana to be in Budapest, and all for cheap, too. The next stop, which wasnt even on the itinerary, is Vienna. Carrie did not feel like taking the 38 hour train back to Kyiv and has to get back to work with her new job at American Councils (she quit Peace Corps a month ago to make a million times more money doing pretty much the exact same work), and so is flying back because she can now afford to do so. The cheapest flights are out of Vienna (although Vienna is not cheap and my cash strapped self fears the Euro) and so that is where we are headed.
Weird Daniel Artsy shot of a woman looking out over the city, taken through glass.