Hotdog-i-slava

A couple of weeks ago, Ty and I went on a trip to Budapest, Krakow, and finally Bratislava. Bratislava is the capital of Slovakia. "What is there in Bratislava?" Well, really great food, and an even better friend. So basically, that brings the tally of "Things Kelsie knows about Bratislava" up to two.

1) Food. Easily the best food I've had since I've been in Europe. Seriously, there wasn't one single meal where everything wasn't perfect. To top it off, it was all reasonably priced! Our first night in Bratislava, we walked into a random bar called "Cobra Bar" and we ordered a large pizza, "Gordon Blue" (I'm guessing this is Slovakia's version of Cordon Bleu) with french fries, a salad, and two beers for... eight Euros. That's like ten dollars. The only drawback was everything was in Slovak and the waitress didn't speak English, but she was very friendly and ended up giving us a great meal! This set the precedent for the rest of the trip. There was literally nothing I didn't enjoy food-wise.

In the words of Templeton, from Charlotte's Web. "It's a sporgasbord-orgasbord-orgasbord!"

2) A very wonderful person lives there! My sophomore year in high school, I was fortunate enough to meet a girl named Sona. She was a foreign exchange student from Slovakia, and her host brother was in football. Since my brother was in football, we both ended up having to wait--sometimes for hours--for their practice to end, so we had plenty of time to get to know each other! She is really one of the sweetest people I know. If someone would have told me I'd be going to Slovakia someday to visit her, I probably would have laughed. (What? Me? Go to Slovakia? Yeah right!) But life takes us weird places and it ended up taking me to visit a great friend!

Sona and I in Bratislava!

Bratislava is considered a "small town" in Europe. It (only) has 400,000 residents. (To a person with less than a thousand people from their hometown, it is an astronomical town!) However, despite its lacking size, we found plenty to do in the short time we were there! We saw a few cool sights, and ate a lot of great food.

This is a picture of the Danube. The view from the restaurant we ate at with Sona. Very beautiful!

We were also really lucky with the hostel we stayed in. It was called "Freddie Next to Mercury." They need to let me take over their marketing plan, because nowhere in their advertisements did it even mention that They are the Champions of hostels or Mama mia! Are we a good hostel! Anyway, the main reason I consider us fortunate was because we didn't relive the movie "Hostel." The second reason we were lucky was because of the people we stayed with. One very friendly and helpful Slovakian girl, and two nice Danish boys. We stayed up and talked with them for hours... mostly figuring out that all the stereotypes are true. (Did you know in Denmark, it is nearly impossible to fire someone? From what they told us you practically have to try to get fired.) Their company was really enjoyable and it made for a good night!

Overall, it was a wonderful trip!

Hats off to Bratislava! ;)