Saturday, April 7th. Vienna-Bratislava. We left the house at 10:30 for our 11:16 train. The walk to the train station took less than 10 minutes but we had to leave early due to the check out time of our Airbnb. I forgot to write earlier that this Airbnb also claimed to have a dryer machine but it didn’t. It had five parallel poles high up close to the ceiling in the bathroom. I told the owner to take the dryer off the listing for the sake of future Airbnb travelers who filtered out places without dryer. She apologized and complied. Meanwhile, we had to make do with the lack of dryer.
Our clothes took at least two days to dry. The more heavy ones dried only the day before we left. I didn’t know it was going to take so long to dry. At least in Warsaw and Krakow there were heated towel racks, but here, there was nothing. And the bathroom had no ventilation so the clothes took a while to dry. We should have done another batch before we left Prague, but how was I to know? Anyway…
When we got to the train station, we sat for a while. Arthur was asleep. We started walking towards the train platform at 11. The train was already there. So we got on and sat in the seats closest to the door. There were no required seat reservations and there were plenty of seats. Since we had taken the elevator to get to the platform, and we entered the train through the door closest to the elevator, there were not many people on our half of the carriage. Most people took the escalator to go up, so most of them sat on the other half of the carriage.
Arthur was awake throughout the whole train ride. He had woken up as we got on the train. He was at first fine being in the car seat but after a while, he got antsy and we took him out and held him instead.
10 minutes before we arrived, we could tell he was getting sleepy. Sean tried to put him to sleep but it was difficult. When we finally needed to get off the train, Arthur was still awake. Oh, well.
Getting from the platform to the main entrance, we had to carry the stroller down a set of stairs and then up again. There were no slopes, escalators, or elevators. I wondered how people in wheelchair would get on the train.
Once outside, we used the app taxify to hail a ride. There was no uber. While waiting for our ride, we were approached by two university students. They are doing a photograph project. They asked us a couple of questions about our travels and then they took our headshots using a Hasselblad analog camera. They said they’d send us a copy of the headshots. We have yet to receive them.
The apartment was only a 10-minute ride. It was conveniently located at the edge of Old Town, right by the Old Town Market Hall. After we settled ourselves in the apartment, we decided to go out and grab a late lunch at Flagship Restaurant. It was only a 2-minute walk.
I had the bryndzove halusky (dumplings with sheep cheese) and Kofola, a Czechoslovakian coca-cola. Sean had steak with spicy vegetables and wine. The vegetables were indeed spicy. The wine was cheap. Even though the currency is Euro, the prices here were cheaper than in Vienna.
After lunch, we stopped by a supermarket, Billa, which was right next to the restaurant, and grab breakfast essentials and other groceries needs.
On the way home, we stopped by the Market Hall to check out what they had.
It was a beer- and wine-tasting event.
We then went home to start unpacking and laundry. At some point, Sean went back to the store to grab another bottle of prosecco. He came back with not just the bottle, but also McDonald’s. Yes, McDonald’s. I had a McFlurry.
two backpacks and a diaper bag 