Bratislava by Night

Bratislava
Slovakia

We said goodbye to Budapest while the Danube River was racing alongside our train on our way to Bratislava.
Our second tour by night was magnificent with the city a bustle with the Christmas market and last minute Christmas shopping. Although small, Bratislava is beautiful. The city was full of great bars and restaurants at relatively inexpensive prices compared to the other Central/Eastern countries that have gone Western prices!

While we were choosing our restaurant, (we finally decided on a Spanish one, and of course one that accepted credit cards, which we found to be almost inexistent) I got a lovely scare (yes, I screamed) from a nice photographer shoving his bronze telephoto lens in my face (below, right). You think I would have been warned since I read in the guide book that there were 3 photogenic life-size bronze statues around the small city center, but no, no, the statue lurking around the corner in the dark caught me off guard! We also ran into The Peeper (below, left) who leers out from a manhole; however, we never ran into The Frenchman leaning on a park bench.

Buda+Pest

We arrived in Budapest, Hungary, and as what became a habit in each city, toured the city by night.





The city is divided by the Danube River into Buda, which has the Gellért Hill and Citadella, Várhegy (Castle Hill, which houses the old city and the palace), and the famous Gellért Fürdö (thermal spa, baths, and swimming pool) and Pest, which acquired the new and lively downtown, shopping boulevards, the Parliament, Magyar Állqmi Operaház (Hungarian State Opera House), and the City Park.


The Szabadság szobor (Independence Monument; Gellért Hill; Left) proclaims freedom with the palm leaf as a tribute to the Soviet soldiers who died liberating Hungary in 1945. Right, photo of Laurent and I after we had a nice, steep hike up Gellért Hill with the snow surrounding us and feeling the true beauty of winter. But after seeing the sights on the hill and freezing our faces off, we realized that the beauty of winter was not so beautiful on the way down, probably the wrong side of the hill. What little traction I had on my boots was now inexistent as we spent ½ an hour sliding (or skiing) down the icy and snowy slope. I only fell 4 times, knees, bum, knees, arms. We laughed all the way down, which was good comic relief.


We went to the amazing and stunning neo-Renaissance Opera House and watched Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. It was great and I felt like I was in an old movie in that amazing Opera House sitting in the over-hanging boxes filled with gold, Victorian-style furniture, and red velvet—luxury at its finest.






Matyas Templom (Matthias Church on Castle Hill) has a colorful tiled roof . Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Coronation Mass was played here for the first time at the coronation of Franz Joseph and Elizabeth in 1867.





Below, is the Fisherman's Bastion, a fanciful neo-Gothic arcade built on the fortification wall of Castle Hill. We saw some great views of the city, even though it was gray and snowy, and of the parliament (Below).