On Monday we took a tour of the town of Mikulov. We saw our five billionth castle, and no, it was not any more interesting than any of the others. In the wine cellars we also saw the largest barrel in Central Europe. So…now I can say I’ve seen the largest barrel in Central Europe. Mikulov is a very cute little town, though, and I liked walking around it. I also had the BEST HOT CHOCOLATE EVER in a café. It was more like melted chocolate. Mmmm.
In the afternoon we went to another wine cellar about an hour away, which belonged to someone our bus driver knew. These cellars were medieval. We tried more wine there, obviously. But now that I mentioned our bus driver, let me say how AWESOME he was. He didn’t speak much English but oftentimes, after we’d drag ourselves back onto the bus after looking at a castle in 40 degree weather for 3 hours, he’d be waiting there with pastries or candy for us! Good old Pan Ziman. Love that man.
I don’t think we did much else in Mikulov that night; just went to dinner and then bed.
Tuesday: Bratislava
Tuesday we awoke and our luck had run out – it was pouring rain. And it continued to do so all freakin‘ day, so that unfortunately my experience of Bratislava was not ideal. We only had one day to see it because supposedly it’s not a very interesting city, despite being the capital of Slovakia.
Our first stop was Devin Castle, which is about 30 minutes outside of the city. In good weather, it would have been really cool, because it’s actually castle ruins rather than a preserved one. It looked like a castle I’d expect to see in Scotland or something. That said, the experience was fairly miserable because we all got soaking wet and freezing walking around the stupid thing.
The day didn’t improve much when we then arrived at our hotel. During the Communist regime, the Hotel Kyjev was the only hotel in Bratislava where foreigners were permitted to stay, much like the Hotel Intercontinental in Prague. So basically it was this big, weird Communist hotel where seemingly nothing had been updated since the 1970s. I guess it wasn’t actually terrible – I’ve stayed in worse. And I didn’t have any complaints about my room, personally, other than that me and Anna could never open the goddamn door. But other people said their bathtubs looked as though someone had been murdered in them and never cleaned up. So…yeah.
After lunch at the hotel we took a tour around Bratislava. I can’t say much about this other than I didn’t pay attention because I was cold and wet and miserable, and our tour guide was not an actual tour guide but a “real Slovak girl“ whose hair dye was dripping down her face the entire time. Bratislava looked like it could be quite pretty in nice weather, but it basically sucked while we were there.
We finally got a respite from the horrible weather when we got a lecture on Slovakia’s recovery from Communism at an American-created center for democracy. It was really, really interesting. Slovakia has always been more agricultural than the Czech lands and thus it’s always had more economic problems, which became even more pronounced after 1989. Nowadays it’s still poorer than the Czech Republic, but Slovakia is actually closer to adopting the Euro than the Czech Republic. The problem is that now they have a very socialist president who’s kind of moving them backwards. I guess we’ll see how it goes.
After the lecture we had free time the rest of the night. I ran to Tesco and bought rain boots, because my sneakers were COMPLETELY soaked through by that point. Then about 8 of us went for dinner at nearby pub. The food was pretty similar to Czech food, but a bunch of people got halusky (some kind of gnocchi-ham thing? I’m not sure) and it came with little Slovak flags in it. That was cute. That was the only picture I took on my entire day in Slovakia.
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