Visitation After the Divorce

When I was back in school learning my geography, there was a country in Europe called Czechoslovakia with capital city Prague. And now, well past my school years, I finally got there. Except I didn't. Because there is no such country any longer.

Czechoslovakia formed after the fall of the Berlin Wall. But it was made up of two distinct ethnic groups who considered themselves different from one another, the Czechs and the Slovaks. The Slovaks wanted their own country with their own capital in lands that were peopled by Slovaks. And so an independence movement began.

But unlike many other places in Eastern Europe that wanted a split, this one happened peaceably. No blood was spilled, no forces were marshaled, no musicals will be written of the bloody revolution. The two sides just agreed to separate. It was so harmonious, and so unusual, that this event got its own name: The Velvet Divorce.

So what was once Czechoslovakia is now Czechia and Slovakia, two separate countries. And I visited Slovakia, namely its capital city, Bratislava. (Not just me, Alrica was there too.)

Bratislava has an interesting past, having been controlled by various empires in the past. For a long time it was part of the Hungarian empire. Did you know that Bratislava was even its capital for awhile? You see, what we consider Hungary today was captured by the Ottomans and the Hungarian rulers moved their seat of government to a land they still controlled. Rulers of the empire held their coronations in St. Martin's Cathedral in Bratislava. There are these tokens in the flagstones that show the path of the procession that monarchs took to their coronation.

It's a crown. Get it?

Bratislava has an old town, the part that has existed for centuries. It was once surrounded by an entire city wall, but much of that is gone. There were four gates you could use to enter the city. Today, only one of those gates remains: Michael's Gate.

Showing it from a distance so you can see most of the height of it

The Old Town has flagstone streets (which didn't stop people from going about with rolling luggage.) One site I enjoyed was this large building that was originally built to be a convent. The order of nuns believed in things being very plain, including their building. But there was one exception, it has one spire which is architecturally leagues ahead of the building it is attached to.

One of these things is not like the other one.

We ate the national dish of Slovakia, bryndzové halušky. It is a sort of potato dumpling (think gnocchi) with a white cheese sauce (the cheese is called bryndza) and bacon. It's a hearty food, not my favorite, but not bad either. I'm glad to have tried it.

Now you've seen it, not the same as trying it, but something.

The trip from Vienna is very easy. Normally you just take a quick train ride from one city to the other. But due to recent flooding, we had to take a bus from Vienna to Brück and then take a train from there. (It was train first and then bus to get back.) And at the train station in Vienna you can buy a ticket called The Bratislava Ticket. This not only covers your ride to and from Bratislava but also covers your use of Bratislava public transportation for the day you bought the ticket. (You can actually use the train part to come back up to two days after you left Vienna, but the Bratislava public transportation is only for the first day.)

So Alrica and I have now been to 36 countries, and as I type this I am sitting in the airport waiting to head to our 37th, Albania. More on that, presumably, soon. But, unlike Slovakia, Albania was a country back when I was learning my geography as a kid.