Bratislava

In Europe, Eastern Europe 2002 On 07/08/2002 No comments

My visit to Bratislava was a little fast, I had just two days to get a sense of the place. I liked the city because there weren’t so many tourists as in Prague. The old town is full of restaurants and bars. I walked through the small streets. Since it was cloudy I couldn’t photograph that much. At the same time, I thought people was friendly. Many would speak with a smile, it looks like they were happy with tourists. There was a day I had no coin to pay the tram and a girl paid for me, she didn’t accepted my money back. That’s what I call hospitality…

The castle is by the Danube. It is more modest than the one in Prague but has a great overview of the city. There one can have an idea of the communist Slovakia. From the top I could see almost the whole city. It was good to “appreciate” the buildings, all similar on the other side of the river. There were a lot of them, lots of uniform rectangles. They looked like a toy by its symmetries.

I stayed only two days in town but I liked, I could get the sense of the place. For me, one of the greatest problems of traveling in Europe is that it seems to be a distant tourism. We can see museums, cathedrals, palaces but it is hard to feel the place. It seams there is a great barrier in between the tourist and the city. Here, in Bratislava, this barrier wasn’t so big.