My bus to Bratislava was about an hour and a half. I was almost late since I got very lost in the Vienna train station, which is terribly marked. I have no idea who thought it was a good idea to put the A-B terminals across the street and to the right of the chain of terminals from K-P (you'd think that A and B would come before K in the sequence rather than after P), but so it goes. Bratislava made a decent first impression as I found my hostel - the old city has some nice architecture and there's a castle overlooking things from a hill nearby. I checked in and then went out to explore.

A few hours of exploring left me feeling very confident in my choice to only spend one night here - there's not a whole lot going on. While there are some nice sections around the old city, it's really only half a square mile or so before it mostly falls back into being commie blocks for miles and miles. It reminded me of Szczecin in a lot of ways, and I don't think that's a good thing. There were definitely parallels to Ljubljana too, though Bratislava is vastly more depressing and unattractive. It wasn't all bad, though. It has what appears to be a pretty decent tram system with solid coverage and, unlike Szczecin, has some rolling stock from after the fall of communism (certainly not all - Wikipedia confirmed my suspicions that quite a few of the trams are from the 70s). I hiked up to the castle and liked that it's open mostly free to the public (certain exhibits inside the building itself require a ticket but the whole grounds, battlements, and courtyards are entirely free), and it had really great views of the city around us. I tried to see if I could spot the Vienna skyline but I think there were some hills in the way. Bratislava has more of a skyline than I expected, actually, with quite a few things that probably qualify as skyscrapers marching along on the opposite side of town. I got an ok sandwich at some shop in the old town (their card reader was broken but mysteriously fixed itself once I realized I didn't have as much cash as I'd thought) and I headed back to the hostel.

The hostel was nice but very "party" oriented. As far as I can tell pretty much everyone there gets drunk basically every day and I seem to have been one of the oldest guests. I figured I'd go out to the bar crawl they were hosting in the evening so I hung around the entrance until people started to leave. I talked for a while with a guy from North Carolina whose perspective on American issues was really refreshing since it's so rare to find people out here who have an actually informed opinion about life back home. Anyway, the bar crawl left around 9 and it was pretty chaotic. They tried to tell me I couldn't come with them since I didn't pay €20 to join at the hostel, but it didn't work since these were public venues and I couldn't really be barred from entry by a third party. I definitely felt too old for the event though, not because I'm too old for having fun at bars, but since almost everyone else there was an annoying college kid. I've had a lot of experiences on this trip with people somewhat younger than myself that have made me reconsider my normal stance on this sort of thing - take the Swiss guy from Brussels/Amsterdam, who was only 19 and yet more mature and worldly than most people I meet my age back home. Miriam or Jade or Nikolai are all in a similar age range and have been (or at least give the impression of being) similarly mature. I think the difference is that these people are travellers trying to explore and broaden horizons, whereas those at this hostel event were pretty much all just there to get drunk in a cheap foreign country. Anyway, I much prefer the former and found little of that here. After making some ramen in the kitchen around 1 AM and chatting with a UConn grad for a little while, I went to bed.

I've decided not to bother with Czechia - I'd love to go someday and Prague sounds awesome, but the logistics of it all seem extremely annoying and I think it's ok to leave some stones unturned. Hungary tomorrow.