Bratislava, Slovakia

The chilly ferry ride from Vienna to Bratislava took a little over an hour. The Twin-City Liner takes you on a fast trip down the Danube River from Schwedenplatz to Old Town Bratislava for €30. There is a bus that costs only €9, but I felt like a little contact with nature would be necessary at some point. There’s a bar on the ferry, where you can order cold cans of Budweiser for two euros. Not the Budweiser we get in the US, but the one brewed in Ceske Budejovice (aka Budweis), the original one. I grabbed a can and headed to the deck, but the cold wind and the effects I felt from the drunken walk in Vienna made me go back inside in less than fifteen minutes. Contact with nature: check! Time for a nap! When I woke up, I was in Slovakia.

I have to admit that my first impression of Bratislava made me think of the famous quote from Eurotrip: “It's good you came in summer, in winter it can get very depressing.” Once we all got off the boat, it almost seemed as if people started disappearing. I found myself alone on a Saturday afternoon in Old Town Bratislava. It was also cloudy and chilly, which contributed to the melancholic feel. The walk to Hostel Blues took about twenty minutes, and all I saw on the way there were a few parked cars, but no drivers anywhere near them. I was in a ghost town.

The hostel was all right. The front desk where you check in happens to be a bar as well (great!), and the receptionist/bartender gives you a coupon for a free drink along with the key to your room. I dropped off my stuff, took a quick shower and came back down for some mild socializing with the other guests. My free drink was a half-liter bottle of Staropramen, traditional Prague beer. I approached a group and quickly engaged in conversation about what to do that night. No one had any idea; they all agreed that it was a little scary out there since it looked like all the locals were in hiding. While some of them chose to just chill at the hostel, I was somehow feeling adventurous. I grabbed a map from the bar/reception and successfully convinced two of them to come with me, an American guy about my age and a Chinese woman in her mid-20s. First stop: Slovak Pub.  


Slovak Pub (Obchodná 613/62  81106 Bratislava - Staré Mesto-Old Town) joined the Tasquinha as one of my top five restaurants. This place was huge. We walked in and saw what looked like a tiny dive bar on the right, with a few tables on the left and stairs leading to the 2^nd floor. We walked up the stairs and saw that the restaurant didn’t have an end. It looked like a maze filled with tables and waiters running around. The mystery had been solved: the streets were empty because everyone was at the Slovak Pub. We chose one of the 75,000 tables, and the waitress came shortly after.

There was something particularly interesting about this restaurant. They have a menu for students, which consisted of soups, snacks and some beverages at a very low cost. In addition, (no joke), if you get an “A” on your exam, you can show them your grade and get free soup and Kofola (Czechoslovakian version of Coke). I thought that was a nice incentive. Our waitress didn’t speak any English, but the menu had English and German descriptions of the main dishes. We attempted to ask for suggestions, and after consulting another waiter and the busboy, she recommended bryndzové halušky and bacova kapsa. The first one was a very rich dish with potato dumplings and lots, loooooots of traditional Slovak cheese. The second dish was unbelievably delicious. Also called Shepherd’s Bag, bacova kapsa is, simply, put, a spicy pork mixture in a potato pancake. A more detailed description of that mixture would be charcoal-grilled pork with peas, chilies, a thick gravy and ketchup, served with vegetables. We shared that and had some tea, while debating whether or not to join the Bratislava Pub Crawl. This one was 15 euros, but looking at how ridiculously cheap everything was, we decided to follow the pub crawl and just pay for our consumption.

After dinner, we walked to the first stop of the Pub Crawl, where we mingled with some French and Spanish travelers. I don’t remember what it was called, in fact I don’t remember a lot of things from that night, but this was an underground pub that served shots of real Slovak absinth for one euro. Keep ‘em coming (bad idea)! One of the French guys lit the shot glasses on fire, so we could drink them “the right way”. A few shots later, we thought we’d check out another place, so our group, which was then nine people, stumbled outside and started walking aimlessly, because apparently that’s what you do in ghost town Bratislava at midnight. The goal was to walk until we found a cool hangout spot, and Tatyana’s eyes convinced us to stop at the Sunshine Bar (Obchodná 37, Bratislava).

Tatyana ‘s job was to stand outside with a tray filled with free shots of some kind of liqueur and talk people into coming in for the “party”. She looked incredibly bored, so I stood there and chatted with her for a few minutes until I started seeing some smiles. Her boss, a 6’5’’ 300lb man, came outside and screamed at her for not doing “her job”. He also gave me that “I’m going to eviscerate you” kind of stare. I could see why she hated her job so much. That dick of a boss was also the bartender, so I met him again a few minutes later. One shot of absinth and a beer: three euros. Give him a five, and it’ll be five euros. Ask him for your change, and he’ll turn purple and annihilate you.

We were just sitting at a table outside when a creepy guy approached us and offered us drugs. He introduced himself and invited us to a party in the outskirts of Bratislava. We didn’t get a good first impression of him, so we politely said “No thanks”. One thing is to approach a local and engage in conversation to then be invited to a party. Another is when a local comes up to a group of tourists and says: “yo, I got some cocaine, let’s go to this crazy party about forty minutes from here”, which we understood as: “yo, I’m going to rob you and most likely kill you and dump your body somewhere about forty minutes from here”. 
 

Everything after that were just hazy memories. At some point there was a bar fight. Some kid took his pants off on the street.  I remember we ate some fruit, might have been a vegetable. All I know is that I woke up at 10am the next day with the housekeeper screaming at me in Slovak, no idea how I got there. I would have believed that it all had been a dream, if my head wasn’t pounding, and I didn’t feel like the devil had punched me in the stomach. Everyone had already checked out, and I was the last one there. In addition, my train to Ceske Budejovice was departing in less than two hours, so I really had to go. I wasn’t in the best shape for the 8-hour train ride that awaited me. I dragged myself to the train station trying not to pass out.