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I’ve gone to a lot of dif­fer­ent cities, seen a lot of dif­fer­ent places, but they were always in hos­tels, always new to the city. In Bradislava, I found out that one of the best ways to expe­ri­ence a city is by going with some­one who knows the city. Hor­atiu and I set off to Bradislava to fin­ish our own lit­tle mini exchange; we accom­mo­dated Luke and Brooke in Prague, and in turn, they accom­mo­dated us in Bradislava. We went to the best places in Bradislava, and also ven­tured off to hid­den gems of the city as well.

The city is very rem­i­nis­cent of cities in the Czech Repub­lic, and right­fully so as Bradislava was once part of Czech­e­slo­va­kia, these two cul­tures are not far apart from one and other. Bradislava doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily remind me of Prague though, its sig­nif­i­cantly smaller, but it ben­e­fits because its much eas­ier to get around, and it has a small home­town feel to it. It has a cas­tle, but its much smaller then the Prague Cas­tle, it has a town square, but again, much smaller, but I’m sure you all get the pic­ture. In a way, its a minia­ture ver­sion of the city I’ve spent 4 months liv­ing in. A large por­tion of the cities pop­u­la­tion lives in large com­mu­nist style apart­ments that are located a 5 minute tram ride away from the city cen­ter, and that’s exactly where we lived. Luke’s grand­fa­ther (or Dedko in Slo­vak, who will be intro­duced later on) has clients who occa­sion­ally need to come to Bradislava, and that appart­ment is for them; luckly they weren’t com­ing when we arrived, so all four of us stayed there.

Cas­tle view — Credit Hor­atiu Hal­maghi for image, click for original

One of the first things we did in Bradislava is some­thing the most of the locals do, and not many tourists; ride the bob­sleds and play on the obsti­cle course. Now, the bob­sleds weren’t any reg­u­lar bob­sleds, and the obsta­cle course wasn’t a reg­u­lar obsta­cle course. The bob­sleds weren’t in snow, it was sim­ply a bob­sled that went down a large slide, and I believe it was wheels at the bot­tom of the carts as you go down. They exist in Prague too, but I’ve never had a chance to check them out. The obsta­cle course was one of the most intense things I’ve done in a long time, basi­cally, you were strapped into a suit, given two ropes, and you have to go a cross a series of ropes to get from one plat­form to another in a large col­lec­tion of dif­fer­ent trees. All of the trees are attached by strong metal har­nesses, and the rule is you have to have one rope on metal at all times, for safety rea­sons. Some ropes you had to bal­ance on, some you had to climb, and some were just plain impos­si­ble. You have to see it to believe it though, I just wish some­thing like this existed in Van­cou­ver. Unfor­tu­nately, I for­got my cam­era in Prague for this trip, so when Brooke puts up pic­tures, I’ll update this post.

The next thing we did was we went into town to find a pop­u­lar pub, where we sat and had a few drinks, while drink­ing large bot­tles of Kelt beer along the way. Now, gen­er­ally when your walk­ing from one place to another, you don’t exactly expect to be chased town by a large Slo­vak man, but that’s exactly what hap­pened to us. See, Luke is an artist, and he has a cer­tain mark which I’m sure most of you have seen in Van­cou­ver. Well, that night he brought his spray cans, and we hap­pened to run into a wall that was just ask­ing to be marked, and so, Luke pulls out his bot­tle and starts mak­ing his mark, ask­ing me to stand on watch. As he starts going, we see two men sit­ting at the nearby park, and I notice one of them starts yelling at us, but we had no idea what he was say­ing. I turn around to tell Luke that this guy isn’t happy about him paint­ing on the empty white wall, and when I turn back, I see the guy run­ning at us, full speed ahead. We all run, and the guy gets almost within arms reach of Brooke, and at that point Luke and I were ready to turn around and get into our first Slo­vak fight (well mine any­ways, Luke is born in Bradislava and I don’t know the full extent of his past), but just as we were about to turn around, the man stops in his tracks. I guess he decided he had ran far enough, and damn, it was far enough, he chased us for a good while, some­thing Luke hasn’t even expe­ri­enced spray paint­ing in Van­cou­ver. I guess the com­mon Euro­pean man takes a much larger offense to spray paint.

Lukes bird, if you look for it in Van­cou­ver, you’ll find it. — Credit again to Hor­atiu Halmaghi

We ended up find­ing the city, grab­bing a few drinks (at cheap cost too, the prices were rel­a­tively the same as Pragues, except using the Euro), and head­ing back to the apart­ment. The next day we finally met Babka and Dedko (mean­ing Grandma and Grandpa, respec­tively), and they let us into the house with a very warm wel­come. His grand­fa­ther was a police­man, which is a very dar­ing pro­fes­sion dur­ing those com­mu­nist times, he had been one through the cold war, and the sep­a­ra­tion of the Czech Repub­lic and Slo­va­kia. First, they made an amaz­ing plate of food made of ham, pota­toes, and a great cream (I can’t exactly remem­ber what it was called, Hora can you?), accom­pa­nied by wine and/or beer. After­words, we headed to the gar­den, where we spent the major­ity of the day. We checked out the gar­den where Dedko grew all types of food, such as gar­lic, straw­ber­ries, grapes, etc. It was quite an impres­sive gar­den, but what was more impres­sive was how much wine we were served, and how much we drank. Between Hora, Luke, Brooke, and I, we fin­ished off 6 litres of wine, and topped the day off with a bar­beque. By the time we decided to go to the city, I was already drunk enough to call it a night, which is essen­tially what we did. By the time we got into the city cen­ter for the sec­ond time, I felt as though I was nurs­ing a hang­over, it was a strange feel­ing for it being 10 o’clock at night.

Dedko, Babka, and Brooke — Credit again to Hor­atiu Halmaghi

On the final day, we set off to do some­thing Luke and his older brother had done a few years ago; raft down the Danai. Our first mis­sion was to get float­ies, and so Hora and I bought a pair of donut float­ies, and we set off to the top of the river. We took a bus to an area that quite a few Slo­vaks like to come to, it was a nice area, and so we had quite a bit of spec­ta­tors look­ing on (quite pos­si­bly in dis­gust, it was not a very clean river). The plan was to enter from another river, and from there merge into the Danai. Unfor­tu­nately, it didn’t exactly hap­pen; Brooke saw a snake and freaked out, and decided not to do it. The plan was to go from the top of the Danai all way way into town, but since we couldn’t leave Brooke by her­self to get back since we didn’t have cell­phones, we did the next best thing, which was to go down the Danai and exit some­where that we could see from the dis­tance so that we could see and meet her, which is exactly what we did. Float­ing down the Danai was a lot of fun, its a shame we didn’t get to go all the way down, but don’t worry Brooke, I don’t blame you for being scared, I know you didn’t want to go in the first place. Its alright, we still had a lot of fun.

The Danai — Credit again to Hor­atiu Halmaghi

Over­all I had a ton of fun in Bradislava. We cooked food together for a lot of the nights, it was nice to finally have an oven. We just had a great time over­all, hang­ing out in a city with a semi-local, cook­ing food with friends, drink­ing with grand­par­ents, swim­ming down a dirty river. It has the mak­ings of a week­end I def­i­nitely won’t for­get. Thanks for every­thing Luke and Brooke!

Alright, so its been a while since I posted, and the first thing I should be updat­ing about is my trip to Istan­bul, but it was a while since then, I think I’d be copy­ing most of what Hora said any­ways, since we did most of these things together. Here is his post

http://halmaghi.com/2009/05/istanbul-not-constantinople/

One of the things that I did that Hora did not was the pub crawl with a bunch of the peo­ple in the Hos­tel, and it was run by some of the employ­ees. We went to Taxim, and I’ll tell you, I’ve never seen such a con­cen­tra­tion of peo­ple in one place at 2am. The streets were packed with Turks and tourists roam­ing the streets, look­ing for the best bars and clubs. One of the first bars we went to had a live band play­ing, and so we watched and drank as they played old school North Amer­i­can music.

Tell me thats not a messed up design.

Band at the first pub

The next bar we went to was sim­i­lar, it had a live band, although this next one had a lot more younger peo­ple, and more Turk­ish peo­ple for that mat­ter. There actu­ally ended up being a big brawl in the wash­room when I went to go wait in line, it was fun to see, I was right there in the mid­dle of the action.

Sec­ond pub

After­words we headed off to our first Turk­ish club, which was a lot of fun. Lots of gor­geous Turk­ish girls to talk to, a cou­ple of them talked to me first, but in Turk­ish, although I can’t blame them, I do look like a Turk (I mean, Turkey is prac­ti­cally the mid­dle spot between Iran and Italy). I couldn’t talk for too long though, because where ever the pub crawl went, I had to follow.

Over­all, it was an amaz­ing trip. Excel­lent food, lots of his­tory, beau­ti­ful women (when they are actu­ally out, which isn’t often), very cheap, and the best thing of all was that it was so much dif­fer­ent then any other city I’ve ever been to. It was so great I’m con­sid­er­ing going a sec­ond time in the sum­mer. Turkey is one place I’d def­i­nitely rec­om­mend to any­one, I have noth­ing bad to say about it.

Ital­ian jer­sey I found for 3 lira ($1.80 CAD) to replace the one I ruined. I really can’t tell that its fake.