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Bratislava, Slovakia — October 2006
Bratislava is wonderful! It's a stunningly beautiful city with really nice people and lots to see and do. You know how the movie Hostel is supposed to be in Slovakia (it was actually filmed in the Czech Republic) and the Slovakian government was all pissed off about the way the film portrayed Slovakia and its people? When we arrived at the train station I found a flyer for an actual hostel in town that bragged (like many hostels do) that they have a common room with a big tv and lots of dvds, but also that they're showing Hostel every night. Man, awesome. But we ended up staying in a hotel. And keeping all our fingers.
Bratislava is one of the most decorated-with-monsters cities I've ever seen. A few more coming up.
This guy reminds me so much of one of the characters in the Lenny-Bruce-standup-routine-turned-animated-short, Thank You Mask Man, which feels like a really dumb thing to have stuck in your head when you're all the way over in Slovakia.
Sculpture on the crazy-ass city hall building.
Little dragon guy on city hall.
Crazy little bat guy on city hall.
He's pretty good at killing three-headed dragons for a guy in a skirt.
Man at work. There were goofy bronze sculptures like this all over town. There's a neat one of a photographer leaning around a corner to snap a photo, aiming right at the doorway of a bar called Paparazzi. I'd forgotten my camera the night I'd happened upon it.
This is Lewis Carroll, but I don't know enough about Lewis Carroll to know why he'd have a midget on his shoulder and a giant snail rubbing up on his leg. Was he one of those writers who used a lot of hallucinogens?
Here's the main town square at night. That's city hall in the middle, and if your monitor's not too dark, you can see the statue of the guy leaning on the bench, front and center.
The city hall building has a million different incongruous design styles going on, so much so that it's gotta be on purpose. You've got these red white and blue tiles surrounding just these three windows and then nowhere else on the building, and there are one or two ugly red brick walls here and there even though the rest of the building is stone, and some of the stone is natural gray and some is painted white and banana yellow, and then there are gothic motifs and little monsters climbing around all around the doors (see bat and dragon, a few photos up). There's also a cannon ball stuck permanently in the wall, left over from who-knows-what old war. You can see it in a couple zoomed in views, here, dead center, next to the window, and here center-bottom.
Another Pharmacy Museum! Don't ask me why there's a lobster. We didn't go in this one.
This is really cool; a compass on the ground with the directions and distances of a bunch of other big cities.
There's Paris, 1094 kilometers from this spot; I was glad we were flying back rather than taking more trains. It's also kind of strange to know that as I write this I am sitting exactly 6856 kilometers from where I was standing when I took this picture about a month ago.
A near old cannon. I only took a picture of it because I wanted to show you...
...These devil heads! Wow! It's amazing to see that kind of craftmanship and artistry in military stuff from back then.
I really like how this plaque describes a "witch burnt to death," rather than "an innocent woman accused of witchcraft, burnt to death (and we're sorry!)." So... I guess she was totally a real witch!
That's the end of the big trip! From here, we flew back to Paris, and a few weeks later, moved back to the States. What a great way to end a nearly two-year stay in Europe. I can't wait for the next one.
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