Bratislava and Krakow.

Bratislava – Make your own fun. One of the more boring cities we’ll visit on our trip, but that isn’t to say that we didn’t have a great time. As the slogan suggests, you have to go out looking for fun, but you can find it. We arrived to a bit of a bumpy start; the 10 minutes it was supposed to take to get to the hostel turned into about an hour, due our difficulty in telling the difference between a bus and a tram (no we’re not actually that retarded, the bus did look a little like a tram). Anyway, from the lack of tourists and abundance of strange stares we got we figured this stop might have been a mistake. A wander around the city the next day however proved that the city is actualy quite nice, with a nice view from a hilltop castle and the fact everything was cheap as chips.

So I’ll try not to bore you with too many details, but that night we met a couple of dutchies and a couple of english guys and all went out for a drink or two. We got a few more strange stares in our first bar when the shot we ordered with out first beer turned out to be eggnog, not quite the usual party starter. We hit up the best club in town, which we were convinced was playing ‘So Fresh; the hits of summer 2004’ from a CD player behind the bar. But the night got better, and reached a climax when we found a trolley at the top of a small hill and we [I] thought a good bit of trolley surfing would be reasonably harmless. The police that pulled us over just as I hit a curb and fell out didn’t seem to think so. They checked our ID’s, muttered something under their breath (I assume it was something along the lines of ‘bloody tourists’) then burned off. The ‘almost get arrested by european police’ box has now been ticked. What menaces to society we are.

Then, after sleeping through 3 alarms the next morning, we finally got up and caught 3 trains to Krakow. Unlike Bratislava, Krakow rocks. Cheaper, cooler, more to see and do, and our hostel was one of the best I’ve stayed at, Soph spent the best part of the next two days ranting about the all you can eat breakfast (?). Spent half a day wandering around the city, and the other half at Auschwitz, which was heavy man. Also, turns out that if you buy the cheapest antihistamines from a chemist, they might not be non-drowsy. I fell asleep at 2pm. Then on the train on the way back we made a new friend who we named Trent from Poland (a play on words from the youtube character ‘Trent from punchy’, for the foreign or youtube n00bs). After singing an amazingly enthusiastic rendition of the sex pistols, complete with lap drums and vocals, he prodecded to strip and show us his stomach tattoo’s, then left dragging his cap on the ground via a piece of gum attached to his arse. Classy stuff.
I miss Trent from Poland.

That evening we had a rendevouz with Hugh in Krakow and went for a beer, and this morning we set off for a marathon 10 hours of trains to get to Budapest, where we have booked a hostel called Grandio Party Hostel that suggests if you intend to sleep before 3am, you should drink enough to pass out. Should be an interesting night to say the least. So I’m in the waiting room of a train station, waiting for a train that may or may not be 50 minutes late (if only I could understand Czech). Getting on a train, then finding out where it’s going seems to be the order of events now. We, like, totally know what we’re doing.