“Namaste, Bratislava!”
The words echoed from the stage of a world music festival as my friend Laura and I wandered out of a gelato shop. It wasn’t the phrase I expected to hear at that moment, or, let’s be real, ever. “And this is why we travel,” I chuckled as we meandered our way up to a castle, the next stop on our Bratislava blitz.
It was one of many times on the trip when we paused to look around and say, “Where are we?” Laura arrived via England, and me via the farm in Illinois, followed by a week in Jerusalem, and then the most bizarre day of travel involving five countries and a land border crossing between Israel and Jordan. When I finally made it through the great in-between and found Laura at the airport in Vienna, I burst into tears.
Seeing as we had approximately 72 hours together, the max we could carve out for this meet-up of our cross-continental friendship, it only made sense to use a few to squeeze in Slovakia, a mere hour-long boat ride from Vienna on the river Danube. Laura mocked this decision, calling my desire to get one more country out of an already tight itinerary very “American.”
She got on the boat anyway.
And she was glad she did, because Bratislava charmed our little socks off. Who knew? Definitely not us. We’d done about twenty seconds of research, where it was clear the travel influencers haven’t gotten to the area yet, because the photos on the ol’ interwebs do not lead one to believe that charming will be an adjective used to describe the experience.
Bratislava feels undiscovered, a hidden gem, which I love, rather than being in a place with a million tourists, cattle herded with the masses. It’s a lovely day-trip destination—enough going on to be interesting, and walkable enough to cover a good amount of the city in half of a day without being overwhelming.
If you pinned me down to guess a color palette of the city before I arrived, I’d have said grays and browns, something a bit austere, picturing the Iron Curtain a little too literally. I was wrong. Blush! Golden creams! A splash of aqua on the bell tower! It was pastel perfection, the buildings casting the city in a rosy, flattering light.
The right blush will go a long way in winning me over.
We steered clear of the Slovakian cuisine and headed to a pizzeria because no one needs goulash when it is 95 degrees. Hot travel tip: The Italians nail the “I’m sweating in places I didn’t know existed” moments, so when in doubt, order a salad, wood-fired pizza, and spritzes all around.
After spritz o’clock, we made our way to the quaint Blue Church, done in Hungarian Art Nouveau, a style I didn’t know I liked.
Then into an old market place to discover an art installation of hot air balloons:
Paid a mere three Euros to wander around a palace of mirrors:
And strolled through the old streets:
Before ending the day with the gelato-namaste-castle moment…
Charming.
So much of my travel in the last few years has been visiting friends at their homes, and I’d forgotten the buzz of arriving somewhere altogether foreign, with no idea where the day will take you. I’d forgotten how much I come alive a little further from home, how much of a place can only be absorbed when you walk the streets and meet the people and see the color palette for yourself.
I’d forgotten how big and weird and wild this world is, and how much I like it.
Yes, namaste, dear Bratislava.
Namaste.
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adored this!
Looks so magical, my friend.