Rail and the dying of the light (Thursday, September 06, 2007)

Poor Charlie’s sinuses were badly exacerbated by the relative dryness in our room. And I’m sure that my periodic hacking didn’t help matters. We ultimately slept in a bit & decided not to take a train straight to Bratislava (for a brief visit) & head straight to Vienna instead. We noticed once again, that when you negotiate a price with a taxi, they don’t use their meter. I’m sure there are some interesting tax implications involved.

The train from Budapest from Vienna was far more crowded than the intra-Hungary trains of the past few days. First Class was still spacious & many seats were available, but we definitely no longer had a full car to ourselves.

We had our first experience with the border crossings on trains. They are fairly simply---the current country’s people check you, then the new country’s people come through. In some cases they stamp your passport, in other cases they don’t. Certainly, security from Hungary to Austria isn’t anything like it would have been 20 years ago.

We got into Vienna & made our way to our hotel (which was about 2 blocks from the Schonbrunn Castle (the Hapburgs’ Enormous Summer Castle). Shortly after we got settled, we headed back out to Vienna’s other major train station & took a train to Bratislava in the Slovak Republic.

Rick Steves’, our trusty tourism guide, didn’t seem too impressed by Bratislava (going so far as to not recommend any hotels in town). Neverthess, we ventured out (if for nothing else than to say we’ve been there). The train station is a bit shabby & the main street towards the old town wasn’t all that impressive (especially in the continuing rain). That is, until we came to the gardens behind the Slovakian “White House”. It had an interesting set of statues & very nice flowers. I think one of the trees was presented by the people of Krygistan. The front view was a bit more traditional, including the 2 costumed & absolutely stationary guards.

We arrived at the old town & literally everything changed. It was beautifully restored, with many cool artistic touches (including leaving a few stray Napoleon era cannonballs in walls. They also had very unusual public sculptures, including a statue called “the peeper” which resembles a less than honorable guy peering up from the gutter level.

I took a number of photos of this statue, before having the good coordination to drop my camera (with the lens not retracted. As it was almost exactly dusk, one could say that camera faded into the dying of the light. Camera first aid efforts were not successful. While it’s good that the pictures on the memory card were pretty clearly safe, the prospect of trying to repair or replace my 13 month-old camera in Austria wasn’t appealing (especially my recent experiences with replacing my razor).

Still, all in all, Bratislava was a pretty nice place. Did I mention that the town was overrun with Irish men, mostly sporting the Irish green Soccer jersey? Their singing and enjoyment of very large glasses of beer were watched closely by a large cadre of Slovakian federal police. I’m fairly certain that they were in town for the preliminaries for the Euro 2008 soccer tournament.

I have one additional hypothesis regarding Bratislava: They must either deport or hide their unattractive women. At times, it felt a bit like a voyeur in the “Land of the Leggy Supermodels”. Mind you, I am in no way complaining! Except that it would have been far more cool to drop my camera due to some extraordinarily attractive woman than my general clumsiness.

After a decent dinner, we hiked back to the train station & returned to our hotel in Vienna. I can now say that I’ve been the Slovak Republic, and sampled a bit of what it had to offer.