Vienna and Bratislava

Monika (another Rotary scholar) and I returned at 1am this morning from a whirlwind tour of Vienna, Austria and Bratislava, Slovakia. Here are some of the highlights:

Vienna
We left Saturday morning on the 9:20am train from Budapest and arrived in Vienna at 12:30pm. We visited the Belvedere museum to see the Klimt exhibition, had lunch across the street from the museum at a Greek restaurant, and then went to meet our host. Monika had arranged through the Hospitality Club, a network of people who are willing to host travelers in their home for at least one night, for free, for us to stay with Franz, this 28 year old Austrian guy who had a fabulous flat near the center of town which he shared with 4 other people. He showed us around the center of town a bit and then we had dinner with some of his flatmates. The city is gorgeous- our guidebook called it the "Wedding Cake," which we finally understood after walking around a bit. I don't know any other way to describe it other than to simply say that it's just amazingly gorgeous.

Bratislava
We took a bus from Vienna to Bratislava on Sunday morning and arrived in Bratislava in time for lunch. We walked around the historic downtown a bit- small but extremely clean and beautiful. They have a lot of interesting, reasonably priced restaurants (Thai, Japanese, etc.) and many shops owned by locals which sell "made in Slovakia" goods, etc. Just very interesting. Outside of the downtown Bratislava is a bit scary- we got lost on our way to the train station and ended up on some path that was empty and not well lit. We ran into a German guy who proceeded to tell us we had passed the train station half a mile back... oops. The train station was a bit depressing- it was probably built in the 1960s or early 1970s and has never been remodeled. The lighting is poor and makes everyone standing in that lighting look a bit shady. That combined with the car (we think) backfiring in the background... scary. We left on the 8:50pm train and got in to Budapest at 11:30pm. Never thought I would admit that it was amazingly refreshing to hear Hungarian again after two days of German and Slovak.

Today is a national holiday to celebrate the revolution of 1956. There is always a large event at the Parliament and this year the event will go on, even though protesters remain camped out on the front lawn of the Parliament and have vowed to stage a very large protest. Should be interesting. I will probably stay home and recuperate from the weekend and get some homework done.