Our last major stop was Bratislava. We’d never heard anything much about Bratislava, but from research done prior to arriving, it seemed that it was going to be considerably smaller than the other capitals we had visited, but was supposedly very popular with the English bucks-party scene… hmmm.

Again, we’d rented an apartment (and again – much better value than an hotel). This time, our apartment was right in the centre of the city. Next door to the American embassy in fact – so at all hours of the day we had Slovakian police and American security walking around. Literally ALL hours of the day.

Bratislava is indeed much smaller than cities such as Prague and Vienna. I wouldn’t recommend a week there – a day or two would be plenty as a stopover enroute to destinations further east or south. Finding accommodation in the centre of the city wasn’t difficult either. We were able to walk across to the Old Town, where there are various restaurants and of course the old streets. A quirky but enjoyable part of wandering the Old Town streets is locating all the bronze statues. Lifestyle statues of people in various attitudes decorate the pavements. The most famous of these seems to be The Watcher – a man leaning out of a pothole. Judging by the number of people taking photos of him (and the number of souvenir T-shirts with him on them), he’s arguably the most popular of the statues.

The Old Town itself is quite a nice afternoon’s exploring. Part of its charm is that it is so small, compared to places like Prague where you can get lost. Bratislava Old Town takes only a few hours to full explore, but it’s quite nice nevertheless. There are a number of run-down buildings which I hope on my next visit may be in the process of being restored… It would be a shame to lose such lovely architectural examples.

Bratislava Castle sits over the highway from the Old Town, but is still a relatively short walk – just look for the hill looming over the town. While it’s fairly impressive to look at, the castle itself wasn’t heart-stopping, but the grounds were nice enough to walk around, and the museum in the castle houses the Venus of Moravany (a prehistoric statue). We weren’t really in the mood for a museum, so we gave it a miss. While wandering around the courtyard though, we did find some stairs leading down to who-knows-where. My husband, being the curious type, took the stairs and we found ourselves in a tunnel under the courtyard, which leads to a large well, constructed in the 15th Century. A plaque on the wall explains the history of the well. No one seemed to be manning the entrance to the tunnel, but it’s a nice little 10 minute distraction.

While up at the castle, it’s also worth looking out over to the other side of the river, where you see rows upon rows of apartment blocks. They all look very similar, and I have no idea how you’d tell them apart from each other.

One thing we learnt very quickly in Bratislava – more so than in other cities – was to really check the prices on menus outside restaurants. By the time we came to Bratislava, we had gone from the Euro, to the Forint, back to the Euro, to the Czech Koruny, to the Slovak Koruny, so we were lagging a bit with our conversions. Particularly in the Old Town, cafes and restaurants will easily charge AUD$20 for a salad. We learnt our lesson well!