Bratislava

This trip was really humbling. In such a beautiful setting a person could see hints to a checkered past. Pins and stickers made jokes about how other countries loved to take their land. There was a "KGB" bar that poked fun at people being taken in the night, and their lack of substantial museums all showed me that these people had been through a lot. The castle was nothing like what I had expected. It had been destroyed by a fire in the 50s so the inside was all plain white stucco. It was not elegant and seemed to remain isolated from the fashions other castles I have seen had adopted (like mimicking the French).

From the top we could see a famous bridge that had been built by their comunist government and we could also see the communist housing complexes. It was easy to pick them out because unlike the Karl Marx Hoff in Wien they were seperate but did look all the same.

The people were very welcoming and I had some of the most amazing gulash. We spent the day after food and the castle just walking around exploring the many parks and found a street square that had carts selling lots of fun stuff. The things being sold were very arts and craftsy, I could see how the person selling them had probably made them himself. For example lots of wooden knick knacks with puff paint. This was such a different scene than Wien and it was an adjustment. I began questioning what a person needed to survive and decided that their gulash was good enough to tempt me to stay.

After some delishous ice cream and more shopping around the market we stumbled upon a life size game of chess in the middle of a park. It was so tempting we had to join in. After emerging victorious we did as the locals and began to amble about to find a plague colum. Plague Colums seem to be all over Eastern Europe and I have found one in every city I've been to so far. The plague was a huge deal to the people and the rulers had to show apreciation to god for delivering them from death unscathed while so many around them had died.

I feel like this particular trip has humbled me as a person. I've realized that all the clothes and objects that I have are unnessisary and people survive with so much less. I also kept thinking of the invasions this place must have seen historically and after reading my guide book's specific history of Bratislava it mentions how certain people just see who's ever in charge as another oppresive force. This points to the absolutist movements in monarchies where they would find themselves rulers of peoples that had no idea who their ruler was. The people in the Slovak provinces according to the Lonley Planet book all spoke different forms of the same language and felt very seperate from each other. This reminded me of the way that Germany took so long

to form because so many different people lived in such a vast area and external forces were keeping the nation apart.