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We woke up this morning about 07:30 and had our usual muesli breakfast in the apartment. The plan for today was to take a day trip to Bratislava, just across the Austrian border in Slovakia. We prepared fairly lightly. I took my camera backpack to carry a few things in, but left the extra lenses at home to avoid carrying too much weight.
We walked over to Karlsplatz U-bahn station again and caught a train to the Hauptbahnhof. There we used a machine to buy tickets to Bratislava. The short distance trains ran once an hour, with a few extra faster services on intercity expresses shaving a few minutes off the journey, but costing a lot more. We got the regular service, which made about ten stops along the way and took just under an hour.
We arrived in Bratislava at Petržalka station, which is in the southern part of the city, across the Danube from the scenic Old Town area. We could have caught a bus across, but elected to walk, passing through some fairly dull apartment block neighbourhoods before reaching an expressway that we crossed via a pedestrian bridge, before walking across the Most SNP bridge over the Danube. This was an interesting bridge design, with pedestrian paths on either side underneath the roadway above, which was good because it provided shade all the way over the bridge. The day was much cooler than yesterday, but still a little warm in the sunlight.
Once over the bridge we headed up the hill to Bratislava Castle. You can walk through the grounds, including an attractive Baroque formal garden, for free, but there is an entrance fee to go inside the palace building. We went mostly to admire the gardens and get a view of the castle and palace from outside, as well as the views over the city and Danube below.
By now it was a little hot and we'd been walking a long way from the station, so we stopped in at a restaurant called Hradná (meaning "castle" in Slovak) which was inside the walls with a view over the city. We just got drinks. I got a lemonade with mint, while M. got an iced coffee. I noted that my lemonade cost exactly the same as a shot of vodka, or a half litre of beer.
After drinks and using the facilities (I added some more sunscreen to my face and arms), we left the castle and descended a flight of steps to a courtyard where there is a modernistic bronze statue called Bosorka ("Witch"), a stylised woman in flowing gown, with large birds staring admiringly at her. It's meant to be a monument to the women falsely accused of witchcraft in medieval times.
Continuing down the hill we passed a series of colourful houses which made a picturesque scene. From here we crossed the main road into the Old Town area, where we spent the remainder of our time. We walked around the pedestrianised streets, among the old buildings, many of which were filled with shops and restaurants. There were a few tourists around, but it didn't feel nearly as tourist-packed as the centres of Prague, Vienna, or Budapest. Also, in those places there were mostly American accents, but in Bratislava almost all of the people walking around speaking English were British. We also came across a large and raucous group of teenagers dressed in orange and green who were clearly from Ireland.
We walked through the Old Town Hall courtyard, through Michael's Gate—the only surviving gate of the medieval city walls—and through St Martin's Cathedral. This cathedral was the site of the coronations of eleven kings and queens of Hungary from 1563 to 1830, when Bratislava was part of Hungary. It's also built on multiple crypts, and one area of the floor is made of glass, showing a pit where three skeletons are visible, partly buried in the earth. We also visited the main town square and walked along a section of the old town walls.
Along the way we stopped for lunch at Pressburg Bajgel, a bakery that claimed to have opened in 1890 (when Bratislava was known as Pressburg). M. had some traditional Slovakian bajgels, which were crescent-shaped pastries filled with almond or walnuts or poppy seeds. I tried a Slovak bryndza bun—a bun with sheep's cheese (bryndza) inside and obvious pieces of bacon on top—and a pagáč—described as a traditional bread with fried bacon. The bryndza bun and pagáč were both heavy and buttery, the first with a slightly cheesy taste, the second quite salty from the bacon and what seemed to be small chunks of rock salt in the dough. They were good, but left a salty aftertaste. A few hours later it began raining a little, and we stopped in a bar to get out of the rain and have a cool drink. I had a local beer, and M. got another iced coffee. My half litre of beer cost 1.50€ less than the lemonade I'd had up at the castle!
Eventually we departed the Old Town and went to the nearby bus stop under the bridge approach. M. bought a popper seed bajgel from the Pressburg Bajgel shop as a snack for the road. I bought tickets for the bus and we hopped on a route 191 that went past Petrzalka Station, to avoid having to walk all the way back. We arrived with about 15 minutes before the next train to Vienna. I looked for ticket machines, but didn't see any, so resorted to the old fashioned ticket window where a man sold me two tickets to Vienna. The train pulled in soon afterwards to let off passengers and we boarded and got seats at a table so we could do some sketching of the day's sights as we travelled back to Vienna.
We reached our apartment a bit before 19:00. I did a bit of research to find a restaurant for dinner, something with Austrian food and good vegetarian options. I found Das Augustin, which had vegan "meat" dumplings and vegan schnitzel among other vegetarian choices. It was four stops away on the U3 U-bahn line from the closest U3 stop to us, Neubaugasse, a ten-minute walk away. We did this and took the train to Johnstrasse, and the restaurant was only a block from there. We went inside and the place appeared completely empty. A waitress told us to go out the back and check with her colleagues see if there were any tables. We found an open-air courtyard there, with dozens of tables and packed with people. The waiter there found us a table, but we noted that a lot of people were smoking, so we said we'd prefer an indoor table. We ended up being the only customers sitting inside.
We ordered some tortilla chips and salsa as an appetiser, and when it came we realised our mistake as the serving was huge. In an odd Austrian touch they were drizzled with sour cream. For our main meals M. got the vegan dumplings with sauerkraut, while I decided to go with another classic Wiener schnitzel, this time with pork instead of veal. It came with potato salad and cranberry jam, which were both nice. The servings were huge, but so good that we got through most of it. We left most of the chips though.
Then we walked back to the Johnstrasse station around a large church nearby to see the view from the front. A short train ride and a walk later we were back at our apartment for another night.
Tonight we did another load of laundry. This time we didn't have any competition for the washing machine, and got it done quickly. One thing about the laundry room is that the light is on a motion sensor switch. There's no way to just switch it on permanently—I tried the switch in the room and it just turned the light off completely. But when it's on, the motion sensor turns the light off if it doesn't detect anyone moving right near the door (about two metres from the washing machine) after about five seconds. So we were both standing at the machine, I unloading clothes and M. holding the bag for me to dump them into, and every few seconds the light would go off, leaving us in pitch darkness, and M. would have to move over to the door and wave her arms around to get the light to turn back on so we could see again. It took us about five or six rounds of this before we had the machine fully unloaded and all the clothes in the bag to take upstairs.
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