Bratislava: The Poor Man's Prague

Oh Bratislava, how I love you. Everything about this trip was absolutely ridiculous, so ridiculous I can't even tell all of it here. However, I will give you the highlights.

Myself, Scott, Chris, Kyle, Sam (a girl) and Allison left Prague on Friday night, Feb 6th. The tone of the trip was set in the first moment. Scott and I walked up to a bus to ask him if we were at the right area. The man slowly and dead-faced turned to us, then turned away, never answering our question. When we knocked on the window again, he yelled something to us in Czech and pointed to gate 11. We went and waited there only to have the same fucking bus pull up and let us on. Uh oh.

Our five hour trip wasn't too bad, aside from the blasting Czech-subtitled Clooney movie that was on volume 1000 and the fact that they wouldn't let us go to the bathroom until we were almost there. Immediately upon exiting the bus, we started ripping shots of Tesco (like safeway) brand rum and wandered around, trying desperately to find our hostel. We finally did find it an hour later and after walking into the sketchiest back alley ever. Upon hastily dumping our bags off, we embarked on an adventure of a night. For the record, by the time we actually left the hostel, it was around 1 in the morning. We started the night with a bang and threw back two absinth shots at The Slovak Pub, a large, old and wooden restaurant/bar. The rest of the night is one big blur of random events. We thought we were about to fight a group of Slovaks, but it turns out they just wanted to play a friendly game of Rock, paper, scissors. Obviously, America emerged victorious and we celebrated our win with a few more shots at the nearest bar. We finally ended our night around 4 am.

The next day we worked off our groginess at a delicious lunch place. And by delicious, I mean not at all and ridiculous. Not only did we discover 1 L of beer is a great hangover cure, but apparently it is quite normal to get cheesy potatoes with a side of sour milk. Crazy Slovaks. After leaving our baffling meal, we headed over to Bratislava Castle, the only known cultural sight in the city. Turns out the castle was (re)built in the 1950s and was under renovation so the whole thing was covered in scaffolding. To make the Castle a bit more interesting, I tried to scare the girls by hiding in a corner. I somehow managed to miss Sam walking around the corner and jumped out belatedly. To my surpise, I ran straight into an older man and proceeded to scare the shit out of him and myself in the process. The ensuing laughter of my friends died down a good ten minutes afterwards.

That night we again dined in the Slovak Pub. This time however, our waiter (pretty sure he was a busboy that spoke good english), took us into the very back of the place and proceeded to block us in. He thought we asked for non-smoking and therefore placing chairs in front of the doors would stop the smoke. He even kicked out other diners from that room. So we supped in private and consumated the dinner with a fiery shot of absinthe and several beers. We then went out in search of Subclub. The place is the hardest damn place to find in the world. At one point, a man on a Razor scooter lead us down a hill and onto the freeway onramp. Despite our skepticism, scooter-man was correct and a few hundred meters down on the freeway we found the club. We walked in and down about 50 stairs to two huge metal doors. You see, Subclub is in fact a converted nuclear fallout shelter. After paying 7 euro to get in, we walked down a tube that was spalshed in red light and emerged in the coolest club I've ever seen. The place was a raging trance-techno bar. Check out my pictures in my last Flickr album to see how insane it was.

We woke up the next morning a bit later and had a leisurly lunch. Not by choice however. Our waitress either decided to mess with us or really didn't understand english. She proceeded to mess up every single one of our orders and laughed at/with? us the whole time. So our quick lunch ended up taking around 2 hours and was ok at best. Finally, we boarded a Slovak lines bus (the ticket cost a whopping $12) and headed back to lovely Prague. When in Bratislava...