After a short ride this morning we crossed the old Iron Curtain border into Slovakia, now an EU and even NATO member. We crossed the Danube to the capital city of Bratislava and left our bags at our hotel in the old town area and went to explore the city. We took a tram tour up to the castle above the city, with a narration which gave us a basic orientation.
Bratislava was a crumbling backwater during the communist era, but seems to have come a long way in the 20-plus years of independence. There are still a lot of rundown old buildings but a lot of building and reconstruction going on. Most notable is the amazing number of sidewalk cafes, bars and restaurants. There's a long tree-lined pedestrian mall in the middle of the old city and other pedestrian side streets. An attractive and appealing central city, but there are also great expanses of drab Soviet-era apartment blocks on the opposite side of the Danube.
After a few weeks in Germany and Austria, I am pretty comfortable in German within the range of my needs and interests, but that language useless right over the border here in Slovakia. After WW2 the majority German-speaking population was brutally expelled. So, no Jews and no Germans. Not even many Czechs. Slovak is a slavic language, written in the Roman alphabet, for all the good that does us.
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