One day (or, rather, a couple hours) in a new country-- Slovakia

Unfortunately, I'm a little behind with my other posts-- Lourdes will get updated as soon as I can (finals will be starting in less than a week) and I will get a post up about Mariazell as well. Hopefully while I'm at home I will be able to post pictures from these wonderful adventures.

April 21, 2011

Julie and I are staying in Gaming for Easter break, but we decided to take a day trip to Bratislava, Slovakia on Thursday since there wasn’t much going on here then. And I have now been to all the countries of my ancestry!

Me at the train station in Bratislava.

We left at 4:30 am with Claire, Jeff, Katie, and Regina who were flying out of Bratislava to Ireland (however, we didn’t know that we would be on different trains once we got to Vienna because we were going to different train stations). The only problem we encountered on the way there was that we got off at the wrong “Wien” stop. But there was a train going to the same place five minutes later and we had a 20 minute layover, so it wasn’t a problem. But we didn’t have as much time to buy our supplement ticket for our Eurrail (Slovakia doesn’t take Eurrail), so we just bought the full-price ticket, which wasn’t too expensive anyway.

We found a Tube station sign in Bratislava!

Once we arrived in Bratislava, we didn’t know which bus to take to get to the city centre, so we bought our ticket back to Austria, which turns out was only 26 cents since we only had to get to the Austrian border to use our Eurrail. Then we were looking at bus schedules and finally figured out how to get there after asking the lady at the desk who spoke English. (We don’t know any Slovak—at least when we went to Prague, I at least knew how to say ‘No’ and learned how to say ‘English’ in Czech.)

The Castle in the background. 

Unfortunately, once we figured out the right bus, we got on it, but going the wrong direction. But it was easy enough—just hop off and cross the street, and get on the bus going the other way. We were really, really surprised at the small amount of people that we saw—this is the capital of Bratislava, so we were expecting it to be pretty large. But, it was really tiny.

When we reached our destination, we found a Capuchin Church and they were singing Praise and Worship in side, but we weren’t able to go inside. Down the street a little bit was another Catholic Church, but again, we couldn’t go in. However, we were able to peek through the windows on the doors.

Julie and me outside a church wherein they were
singing praise and worship in English.
Unfortunately, we couldn't figure out
how to get in.

Then we walked up to the Bratislava Castle which had a tremendous view of the city (the only disadvantage of visiting castles is that they are all on top of hills, and you have to walk up the hills). In front of it was a statue of St. George.

Me and the statue of  I think it's St. George. There's
probably a legend about it, too. I think he might have
turned his head at a crucial moment.

Then we went to the Cathedral. As we arrived, we saw tons of priests, nuns, and a bishop exiting the church. We talked to one of the Missionaries of Charity who was stationed in Bratislava and she said that it was the Chrism Mass. It was a gorgeous Gothic style church, and had beautiful side altars.

Priests exiting the Cathedral. Notice the
castle in the background!

The tall building with scaffolding I believe is the cathedral.

St. Michael's gate

After that, we did some shopping and saw St. Michael’s gate. Then we went back to our bus stop and to the train station. We ate lunch outside and then boarded the train for Wien. Our one train was a bit late, so we ran to the next platform, and made it. And we also met up with Hannah, and later several other FUS students who had also done day trips.