Vacation: Budapest, Bratislava & Prague
April 19, 2006 - May 1, 2006

Day Four – April 23, 2006

11:45 a.m. - The good news is that we got nine to ten hours of sleep, thank you. The bad news is that Lady Awesome woke me up and said, "We have to leave in half an hour to catch our train to Bratislava." But we made it. I'm on the 12:05 train waiting for it to depart. We splurged on first class seats and it seems to have paid off.  We have a six-seat compartment to ourselves.

4:00 p.m. - The three-hour train ride was very thrilling. I stuck my head out of the window a lot, like a dog in a car. So much countryside. I even got tired from being in the sun and fell asleep. Our taxi driver in Bratislava spoke English pretty well. He also wore b-boy clothes. He was a good man, so we gave him a good tip. "Don't wear b-boy clothes." Now we're at the Hotel Ibis. It's an efficient little room. We're just glad our bath is connected. I can watch Lady Awesome shower from a mirror's reflection while I lay on the bed, so I'd say this place is already pretty great.

11:30 p.m. - Slovakian TV is hilarious. We're watching an American western dubbed into French with subtitles in Slovakian. We had an awesome dinner at a very romantic restaurant called Blue Star. Fantastic. I love Bratislava. We saw a castle, an amazing view of the city, lots of beautiful churches. It's just incredible underline extreme! We went to a bar... a reggae bar of all things. We left there pretty quick. We then found an old-timey soul bar where the patrons played chess, but more importantly, they weren't raucous jerks like the guy at the gelato cart who told us to "Fug off." Jerk. We love your city!

Day Five– April 24, 2006

11:30 a.m. - The hotel breakfast was... different. There seemed to be a focus on bread, pickles, tomatoes, cheese, and some sort of skinned beets (they might have been plums). Speaking of which, have you had this Cappy drink?  It's a fruit juice blend made by Coke. It tastes like uncarbonated Sunkist soda mixed with pear juice. Lady Awesome and I are hooked. Our train out of Bratislava doesn't depart until 5:15, so we're being very leisurely about leaving the hotel.

11:45 p.m. - The train ride was long. We were hungry and greasy. Our hotel room is in an attic, so the ceiling is sloped on each side. I've been here an hour and I've banged my head five times already. Stranger still is the lack of a shower. There is only a big-ass bath tub at the foot of our bed. After freshening up, we went to Wenceslas Square, which is touristy like a lesser travelled street in New Orleans or Las Vegas. After being ripped off by a currency exchange window and discriminated against by a restaurant, Lady Awesome said, "I'm beginning to see why people prefer Budapest over Prague."

Day Six – April 25, 2006

6:10 p.m. - Pretty late for a day's first entry, but that's because we've been busy reaffirming why we came to Prague. It's not such a bad city; it just has very big shoes to fill compared to Budapest and Bratislava. We walked in the opposite direction of the jerky part of town and really liked what we saw. I do have a hunch that my boogers will be black, though. There is a lot of pollution and haze in these busy streets. We caught a train to Kutna Hora, which is an hour east and saw some of the nicest countryside I've ever seen. Tulips, tulips everywhere. We visited Kustnice ossuary (bone church) in Sedlec. A bunch of rich people were buried in a cemetery, I'm told, but then the plague swept Europe and there was nowhere to bury the recently deceased. So they dug up the old bones and made a church out of them. It's quite impressive and impossible to take a bad picture. We walked around town for a couple of hours and ate lunch at a real gem of a cafe. I ate carp with white wine sauce. I think Kutna Hora translates into "puppy town" or "mothers pushing strollers town."

12:00 a.m. - We had not only one of the greatest meals of our relationship, but also in all of humanity. The restaurant is/was called Taj Mahal. Cheesy name, I know, but the prawns in cashew sauce is unanimously (according to two people) the greatest consumable object ever created. In the words of Lady Awesome, "I feel like I've never had Indian food until now." Taj Mahal single-handedly put this city over the top, and now we love Prague. Maybe not as much as the other two, but it's still a love. -- P.S. Wenceslas Square can still suck it.

I should note that Lady Awesome and I had an amazing converstion on the train about Gremlins. I'm certain it's been noted before, but if water makes mogwais asexually reproduce, then how come they were mammals with presumably a high body percentage of water? Contact with hydrogen and oxygen sows the seeds, huh? Good one, Hollywood. The other rule of keeping them out of light is flawed, too, because that would make them cold-blooded, but I guess scales don't make an animal so damn cute.

1:00 a.m. - Yeah, we're going to have to get a pole for our bedroom back home.

Read Days Seven, Eight, and Nine of Sir Awesome's Eastern Europe Review