Bratislava, Slovakia ... May 23, 2009

In the three years that we have lived here, we have never visited the capital of Slovakia...Bratislava (except to fly out of the airport once, or drove through it on our way to Prague or something). It is only an hour drive, yet like many places that are close (most of the Hungarian cities we waited years to visit), we always figured we would have plenty of time to visit in the future. Plus I have been there a few times before and was never overly impressed. So, considering we only have a couple of months left, we decided this was the afternoon we would spend in Bratislava.
I don't remember ever visiting the main square and was pleasantly surprised. All I remember from prior visits is crowded city streets and the castle, so sitting in the relatively quiet square surrounded by standard European architecture (AKA awesome) with a fountain in the middle was quite nice. We walked through the square visiting the different vendor booths that surrounded it. The girls ran around, probably too rambunctiously. We hung out on some famous bench with the "statue", which I guess is good luck or something.
From the square we tried to WALK to the castle. We meandered through the side streets of Bratislava only to come to a dead end where we would have to cross the highway to just get to the BASE of the castle. Considering we had spent the morning in Vienna and we were all pretty tired, we decided to just take in the castle view from the road and we headed home.
So, I get that we probably missed out on a number of other things to see in Bratislava since we just spent a couple of hours there, but at LEAST my thoughts of the city are much more positive than they had been over the last 10 years.