The utterly charming capital city of Slovakia, perched on the north bank of the Danube. We both could see ourselves living there. The central district is low-rise, laid-back, and thoroughly car-free. Coffee, food, an opera house, a symphony, the river, all close enough to find with your eyes closed.
April 22
But first we have to get there. The boat ride from Budapest went from the night before, all the way through morning, to lunch time. Along the way, we went through one of the locks on the Danube. The lock works in the timeless way: your ship cruises into something that’s basically a huge room. The downstream doorway closes, and water is allowed to flow in from upstream. As it does so, you float higher and higher until you’re at the level of the upstream side. Then you continue on your way.
Bratislava is an adorable city. The downtown historic district is completely walkable, and almost completely closed to vehicular traffic. The capital of Slovakia, every musician who is everyone has played there. Mozart and Liszt gave concerts in their early careers, when they were still in the single digits, age-wise.
The old city, like so many of the other “old cities,” is beautifully walkable. You hop off the boat and you’re just a short walk to the opera house, the concert hall, the shopping district, and historic sites. Here’s one, what’s left of the Jewish Quarter after the communists got hold of it.
Those walls were the edge of the district. To the left is a highway ramp that slices the old city in two, separating the palace from the rest of it. It’s such an eyesore that I won’t show it. It’s so ugly that I believe that when Robert Moses met the functionary who built it in Hell he said, “dude, seriously?”
Central European infrastructure in every city we visited included clean, quiet and convenient light rail systems.
Here’s the main street:
The Iron Curtain
Our guide pointed this out. On the image below, there’s a tall skinny tree right in the center on the other side of the river. Then there’s a wooded area right past it. When the guide was a child there was a barbed-wire fence, alongside a 1000-volt electrified fence, dividing the west — in Austria — from the east — in what was then Czechoslovakia.
