Friday, August 30, 2013

Europe Day 16

So! Bratislava!

We got up at a reasonable hour, checked out of the hostel & stashed our bags there, and went in search of breakfast! (We still had leftovers, but at this point we just tossed them 8D)

So there was this free walking tour, which I think we found out about the previous night when we checked in, and due to our limited time we thought that sounded good, so we went to Greentree Cafe, which was closeish to the meeting pointl.

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On the way, crossing a street, I saw those planters, super cute!

Bratislava in less than 10 hours!


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Jey and I actually unwittingly coordinated today with our light blue Who shirts (I had the Doctor Hoo owl shirt on 8D)

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Every single drink they had sounded DELICIOUS. I don’t remember exactly what I got, but it was good.

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Pizza bread! I only remember that ‘cause I wrote it down. It was all really good and I wished we had this place here (maybe we do? I actually never checked, I should do that now… Nope)

Then off to meet up for the tour!

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The meeting place was in Hviezdoslav Square, we killed time by looking at souvenirs and statues.

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So this tour is put on by Be Free Tours, their tours are totally free and operate on tips only, so you just pay what you think the tour was worth. I thought it was a pretty neat idea.

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Our tour guide was super cute!

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Oh hay there ‘merica 8D

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This is their Old New Town Hall. See that tiny spot on the yellowish tower on the left? By the window? That’s a cannon ball from Napoleon’s invasion.
The guide explained the political position of Slovakia really well, but it boils down to it’s tiny and gets pushed around a lot so there have been many revolutions and uprisings and so on.

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As always, I like buildings.

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I don’t remember what year these cannons hail from, but I liked those handle… things.

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We passed by Bratislava Castle (not this, this is a church, but this is where you could see the castle from the street) and she explained that “castle” is really a mistranslation (everything makes sense now) and it should be more like “fortress.”

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This was a super neat Art Nouveau church, I reeeeeally liked it.

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We need to paint more churches like this!

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This statue/art thing is fairly famous, I’m not totally sure why.

She also talked about their witch burnings (sad), I know I took a picture of the plaque but I appear not to uploaded it.

Anyway, the tour ended around 1:30-2:00, where some thought-they-were-funny guys dumped our guide in the fountain (she had said in the beginning if you didn’t like the tour, feel free to do so, they said they liked it fine but wanted to do it anyway so… they did), we bought some stuff, went back to the hostel for our luggage, and to the train station, Budapest bound!

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