The first time I saw Bratislava was from the Austrian border. At this point Austria is mainly flat with a few sheer gradient hills, it’s open countryside and then you join a traffic jam on the border. I wondered what the Hell was going on and got out of my car and walked along a line of German, Austrian, Slovak, Czech, Hungarian and Polish cars until I saw it. Oh my! It was my first sight of the Carpathian Mountains; they literally came down to the edge of the Danube River. Perched on top of one of them was a huge TV/Radio tower that looked like Thunderbird one ready for take off. Beneath it was a smaller mountain with the meanest looking castle I’ve ever seen, it was a huge granite bedstead turned upside down (this was Bratislave Hrad). But what stunned me the most was the endless panorama of high-rise apartments. It was a visual horror story and it was a stone’s throw away from the checkpoint that I was waiting at. The queue was caused by the Slovaks and Austrian’s lack of love for each other. I was later to find that the Slovaks failed to make friends with any of all their neighbors except Poland. After an hour I finally got into the Slovak Republic and soon this was going to be home! Usually nobody stops you at any border in Europe, but Slovakia isn’t JUST Europe; it’s ex-Communist East Europe. Welcome to another world!!
I had crossed the Checkpoint into the Petrzalka district, on the South Bank of the Danube (the main city is on the Northern bank). Petrzalka consists of 130, 000 people packed into an 8KmSq area of high-rises. There’s a horseracing course to the east, a park called Sad Janka Krall just across a dual carriageway to the north, the Austrian border to the west, the Hungarian border to the south and one heck of a drugs problem in the middle. Hardly holiday country! I crossed on the first bridge that runs you onto a road just west of the city center and passed a dismal looking zoo with depressed camels looking vacantly into the exhaust fumes. I later christened them the ’coughing camels of Bratislava’. I was already lost in this vision of ’Blade Runner’s’ LA. After a few bum steers I finally found the Hotel Forum, it looked like a polished marble bunker, but it was the best place in town. CCTV camera’s seemed like a fashion craze in the building, but I got used to it in a while. I’ll stop telling a pointless exploration tale here and get on and tell you about the city.
The city isn’t half bad once you get used to the surrounding high-rise estates that the communist authorities built for the hapless Slovaks. There’s the old town, which is really somewhere to be during a summers day and night. There are fantastic restaurants that cover most tastes, except Indian (?) The food is good quality, cheaper than most of Europe, but a bit more expensive than in India. The old town used to have a wall that the Hungarian King’s used to parade around on coronations but that has mostly gone, it has been replaced by a laser beam at night that perimeter’s the whole of the old town. There is a fantastic Opera building (used in the James Bond film, ’The Living Daylights’ at the start), with a beautiful fountain in front. There are excellent coffee shops, good beer halls and an Irish pub. The whole of the old town is predestrianized that makes it safe and there aren’t Prague’s infamous pickpockets to spoil your time. You can take a boat to Vienna and to Budapest just near the Most SNP (Bridge of the Slovak National Uprising). This bridge was built after WWII to commemorate the uprising of the Slovak’s against the German’s in 1944. As with everything in the region the tale is one of double cross after double cross. When Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in 1936 the Czech’s didn’t like it too much so they got occupied by German forces, the Slovak’s however made a deal and finally got an independent country out of the deal as long as they allied themselves to the Nazi cause. Anyway they did their fair share of removing ’undesirables’ to the SS run concentration and extermination camps. Then the Germans started losing the war in a very big way and the Russians were at Slovakia’s borders. Hitler sent in a Panzer army to defend the area, but the Slovaks knew the Germans were defeated and to save their own skins decided to rebel and welcome the Russians in. The Russians supported verbally, but Stalin saw them as a threat to his expanding empire and decided not to send his armies in until it was all over (he knew the Germans would beat the Slovaks, but weaken themselves in the process). Things began to look for the Slovaks in early September 1944 and they were on course to take control of the giant Slovnaft oil refinery in Bratislava, until the Russians asked the Americans and British to bomb it flat. The Slovaks were finally defeated and the Germans exacted revenge on them for their treachery, and then and only then did Stalin launch his campaign to ’save’ the Slovak peoples!! The bridge itself is huge and ’beautifully’ ugly. A huge disc that houses a restaurant (The Bystrica or ’Sky High’ in English) sits on top of huge sloping concrete supports. The next bridge along to the East is Stare Most (old bridge); this is the only bridge left standing after the war and is the pontoon bridge built by the Soviet army during the liberation of Bratislava. There are many interesting things to see in the City too, St Michael’s Cathedral; where Hungarian Kings were crowned for centuries, when the Moslem Turks ravaged their royal lands to the south. There is a museum to medieval torture (don’t ask! They just seem to like that type of thing). There’s the Slovak Radio concert hall. There’s a lot.
There are only three hotels that I personally know, although there are many more. The Hotel Forum has it’s own nightclub, but the Hotel is extremely costly and makes Sheraton and Taj prices look insignificant. The hotel nightclub seems to attract prostitutes, so it’s best to avoid. The best hotel for comfort and price is Hotel Echo a little way out from the center, but you can easily get a tram into the centre. If you’re brave you can try staying at the Suza Hotel (look for this on any search Engine and the other places I mentioned here). Suza is situated in the Stare Mesto part of town, behind the castle on one of the initial spurs of the Carpathian’s. The views across the Danube into Austria and Hungary are magnificent from the balconied Hotel rooms, but the food here is yuck!! This is the old Communist authority hotel and gives you a good idea what it used to be like. You can walk down to town from here and get the tram back after. Electric trams are a major form of transport in town.
There is a thriving nightlife community too, check out Club KGB’s website!! The weirdest place was the U-Club, based in an old Nuclear bunker under the castle. There are four balconied levels under ground and it’s huge! I’ll say no more.
Bratislava is a good place to start your exploration of the Slovak Republic, and if you use your common sense you can avoid trouble. I do also encourage a look around Petrzalka and see what real-life in the City looks like. It’s a very desolate experience although at one point, it was worse; this high-rise estate had the iron curtain running along it’s western perimeter (complete with guard dogs, high fences, guard towers, search lights and machine guns) before the collapse of Communism in 1989. I was once lost in the estate at night for two hours and could see the giant disc of the Most SNP between buildings’s but just couldn’t get there. I got fed-up in the end, turned out the lights on the car and drove through a park and derelict playground to get home! I will never forget Bratislava and the experiences I had there. I will always miss her ex-communist chic…