This is the first time in 5 or 6 years I was due to be in the country for my birthday, so my folks were taking the opportunity to come up for the bank holiday weekend. I couldn’t face just going shopping in the Bullring etc so I booked up for us all to go to Bratislava, Slovakia for the weekend with a planned day trip to Vienna.
We got really cheap flights from Birmingham for Ryanair and when we arrived the weather was amazing, and thankfully it continued through the weekend. When we landed we grabbed a taxi to the apartment and were chuffed with it. It was a huge, modern apartment and had a small balcony so could make the most of the boiling weather.
We arrived early evening so it was a quick turnaround and out we went to explore. It didn’t take long before we ended up in a bar and my father was delighted to see it was one euro for a pint of 10% – 12% beer. Bratislava is broken up into two parts, Old Town and New Town, but the prices very rarely edged over 1 Euro 60 for 0.5l of beer (varied typed all ranging between 10-12 percent).
The food was also cheap and after eating at a local place, we headed on a mini bar crawl where my mother was on Martini’s which were about £1.20 a pop. I treated myself to some Mojito’s, I stayed away from cider even though there was a lot of Strongbow about to be fair. We bar crawled our way around the Old and New town and caught a glimpse of some of the Champions League final at one of the bars which had an outdoor screen.
On the Sunday, we headed out to see the sights of Bratislava in the baking sun. The diet was totally out the window because it was 30p for an ice cream but we did some serious walking over the weekend so I am hoping that helped 🙂 We made our way down to the Danube and strolled along there then bumped into these train tours. We took the one which combined both the Castle tour and the Old town so that covered all the sights, including the castle which I wanted to see. At the end of it, we had covered the whole lot, given Bratislava isn’t huge and then we could get back to wandering around the bars and eating their great food. There was a lovely park near our apartment so we popped in the supermarket and picked up some supplies first. My old man was delighted to see the same 12% beer was around 40p a can in the supermarket and the bottles of Slovak wine were about 3 quid, and around 70p a glass out in the bars.
On the Monday, we headed on the coach to Vienna for the day. Vienna is a class city, full of unreal buildings and we managed to cover the 14 sites which were detailed on the City Walking Map Tour. Obviously given we were in Vienna we had to make some cafe stops and sample the cakes/treats and despite the beer not being so cheap here, we stopped to have one or two of the local drinks here.
We headed back to Bratislava for the evening after spending the day seeing all the sights around Vienna. We went for a meal in a lovely place down by the New Town and it had an opera singer and band playing live which was slightly weird but cool. I was a bit brave, having some local food which was very nice. After food, we pretty much did the same as we’d been doing every night which was walking around between the two towns hitting some of the bars.
I am glad I can still say I’ve not been in the country for my birthday for years and it was good to get away with the folks. Bratislava was very cool and very cheap, but Vienna was a top city full of things to do and see. A year older, but two more countries to scratch off the map!
