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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!

Even before arriv­ing at this con­ti­nent, I knew there was one place I wanted to go; it was Swe­den. Why Swe­den? Two main rea­sons, firstly I know Swe­den is as hockey-crazed as Canada, so that was a big insen­tive to go, and sec­ondly, I wanted to see if its true what they say; a coun­try full of gor­geous blond haired blue eyed women. My room­mate Kevin has always wanted to go to Copen­hagen, Den­mark, and so we decided to go, and while over there check out Swe­den at the same time, since there is a bridge that goes to Malmo. I wanted to go to Stock­holm, but this was a good compromise.

Malmo, Swe­den

The moment we got to the Copen­hagen air­port, we took the first train to Malmo, Swe­den. When I got sight of the ticket prices, I knew this coun­try wasn’t going to be cheap; $20 for a train pass to go over the bridge. So, we bought a ticket, and took the first train to Swe­den, with no idea where we were going to stay for the night. The first thing I see when I arrive is a Burger King, and if you know me, that made me very happy; until I saw the prices that is. A Whop­per combo came out to an equiv­i­lent of $12 CAD. I like Burger King, but not that much. But, it turns out that these are the typ­i­cal prices in this city, every­thing is extremely expen­sive, the cheap­est thing we found was $3 CAD for a muf­fin and a coffee.

Kevin with our cof­fee and muffins in a burger joint called Max

So, with caf­feine in our sys­tem, and our stom­achs slightly more filled, we decide that its time to explore the city. Now, while in Scan­di­navia, we didn’t do the typ­i­cal tourist thing, like find spe­cific mon­u­ments or find places where Vikings died, we just went off and explored (although one thing I found that was pretty cool is when you actu­ally find a statue/historic area, there is a num­ber that you can call and a voice recorded mes­sage tells you all about it, might be a good idea in other places of Europe as well). There were a lot of things about Malmo that reminded me of Van­cou­ver, there were plenty of nice parks, there was lots of green, and the build­ings were sig­nif­i­cantly more mod­ern then Prague in most areas.

Town square

After a cou­ple hours of explor­ing, we decided it was time to find a place to sleep for the night, and while explor­ing we did step into a bunch of hotels to get some prices, but when we asked a lady at a Best West­ern where the cheap­est place to stay was, she directed us to a hotel on the other side of the Cen­tral Sta­tion. We went to check it out, and hey, what do you know, she was right, it was the cheap­est place to stay for the night (~$55 CAD for the night, yeah, Swe­den is expen­sive). But, not only did we have our own room with two beds, but we got a free all you can eat break­fast the next day, and all you can eat waf­fles all day long. This was the decid­ing fac­tor in choos­ing our hostel.

Waf­fles, we could made these all day, any time. Awesome.

So, after get­ting set­tled in, we went out to buy some food and beers from a super­mar­ket we ran­domly found when tak­ing the wrong direc­tion back to the city (starv­ing stu­dent style). After hav­ing a few, we decided it was time to see what the nightlife had to offer. It turns out Swe­den was stricter then we had ini­tially hoped, not strict by North Amer­i­can stan­dards, but def­i­nitely by Euro­pean stan­dards. Alco­hol was no where to be found on the side stores, the only drink we could buy were beers that were 3.5%, quite a weak beer. We went to a cou­ple pubs in the main area, but unfor­tu­nitely the pubs were quite expen­sive, and we couldn’t find any real clubs. After a bit of bar hop­ping, Kevin and I found a big line into a build­ing, so we decide to go check it out.

Line in the distance

We ended up meet­ing a really awe­some Swedish guy who answered a lot of the ques­tions we were hav­ing. We found out that we couldn’t get beers over 3.5% because that was the max­i­mum any cor­ner store could sell, any more and you have to buy alco­hol from a des­ig­nated liquer stores, just like Van­cou­ver. We also found out that the club­bing age in the city is 20, mean­ing I made the bare min­i­mum, but Kevin wasn’t old enough, so the line we were in was com­pletely point­less… We headed back, and went back to the burger joint were we got the cof­fees in the morn­ing, and got a cou­ple burg­ers and fin­ished off the night talk­ing to a forty year old Swede who was com­pletely out of his mind.

Frus­trat­ing night in Sweden

Copen­hagen, Denmark

The next morn­ing, we took the train and headed over to Copen­hagen. This was almost the same sit­u­a­tion as Swe­den, we had arrived in the city and really didn’t know were we were going to sleep that night. The plan was to stay with one of the girls that Kevin and I had met in a bar in Prague, but we were still com­mu­ni­cat­ing back and forth, unsure of any­thing. Copen­hagen was a very gor­geous city, large and full of cool look­ing land­marks. A big bonus was that in this city, we could get alco­hol almost any­were, and there­for the guy we met in Swe­den was right; Den­mark has a much bet­ter drink­ing cul­ture. But the big down­side was the price of this city, a Whop­per meal came to ~$15 CAD.

The archi­tec­ture to me seemed like a mix­ture of Ams­ter­dam and Vancouver

Turns out that we had a place to stay for the night, Sille (dan­ish girl) came through, so for night two, we had a bed. The house was on the out­skirts of the city, a decent bus/train dis­tance away. The house itself was very cool, made of brick on the out­side, and the inside was filled with what you would see in a typ­i­cal fam­ily house; kids draw­ings on the wall, a cou­ple rooms, and a (inter­est­ing look­ing) fur­nace. Luckly the fam­ily wasn’t there that week­end, they were in Swe­den, although I wouldn’t have minded meet­ing a full Dan­ish family.

Where I slept; Sille’s sis­ters room

After we were all set­tled in, it was off to the city to see what the nightlife had to offer. Sille went to go meet up with some friends, while Kevin and I went to go to a bar that offered cheap drinks for a Sun­day night. There wasn’t many peo­ple in the bar, but we made friends with the bar­tenders, whom we bought drinks for. One was a Columbian who came to Copen­hagen on a stu­dent exchange, loved it so much he decided to stay and bar­tend (a big insen­tive was min­i­mum wage is equiv­i­lent to $20 CAD). The other was a gor­geous blond haired blue eyed bar­tender, the one who ini­tially cought our eye when we were pass­ing the bar, we later found out that she sang as well, and was pretty decent. The bar­tenders rec­om­mended us to some event, and so they marked it on a map and won­dered across the city to this place, which ended up being an hour and a half walk, and it turns out it was were Sille was going as well. Along the way, she tells us not to go there, but to go to the bar she was at, and so we headed over there instead. This bar was quite a grungy bar, and we were def­i­nitely the only tourists in the area, we later found out it wasn’t the safest area in Copen­hagen. While in the bar, I noticed three Danes who wanted to play foose­ball, but clearly needed a forth man, so I offered my ser­vices, and they were happy to have me. We played a cou­ple games, and for each game, the loser bought the win­ners a round of shots; my part­ner and I won twice.

Foos­ball part­ner; Turns out his wife is Per­sian, and he spent a lot of time telling me to go to Teran, Iran

After­words, we headed back with Sille on a bus, and thank­fully we were with her, because there is no way Kevin and I would have found it on our own using the bus, it was a big maze. We went back, passed out, and woke up to a new day. Sille made us cof­fee, I took a shower, and we were on our away. Her par­ents were com­ing back that night, she said it would be fine to stay another night if we couldn’t find a place to stay, but we didn’t want to over­stay our welcome.

Thanks for tak­ing us to Dan­ish secret nightlife, and the free place to stay. We owe you one Sille!

We ven­tured into the city, and we needed to fig­ure out what to do. The ques­tion was, do we find a place to sleep, or do we tough it out and stay out all night. We decided on the lat­ter; we fig­ured we were get­ting back late any­ways, we would really only get 4 hours of sleep at most, and con­sid­er­ing the cheap­est hos­tel was ~$60 CAD, it wasn’t worth it for us. That night in Copen­hagen, we were home­less. We walked over to the Cen­tral Sta­tion, bought some lock­ers, and kept our bags there for the night. The first thing we decided to do was to finally get some­thing to eat, we had been liv­ing off the food we bought in Swe­den for the last cou­ple of days (bananas and nuts). We found an amaz­ing mid­dle east­ern all you can eat buf­fet, and sur­pris­ingly for a decent price.

All you can eat din­ner, the can­dle in my opin­ion was kind of mis­placed, but who cares when you get unlim­ited food. But hav­ing so much food made me real­ize how much my capac­ity to eat has gone down. I may not eat the most food at the next Christ­mas eve dinner…

We decide to look for a pub, and to our sur­prise, the bar has the same deal that it had on Sun­day. This time, we tried a bunch of Dan­ish shots. One tasted like licorice, one tasted like chil­drens med­i­cine, and one tasted like some­thing I can’t com­pare, its a drink that old peo­ple drink; I hated it, Kevin liked it. It was a lit­tle more lively this night, a lot more locals. After about eight shots or so each, we decided to find a dif­fer­ent bar. We won­dered around aim­lessly, and we hap­pened to see an mid­dle aged cou­ple, and we asked them if there were any good pubs in the area. They said they were head­ing to a jazz bar, and we were wel­come to come of we’d like. So we fol­lowed along.

Myself, Kevin, Hen­rich and Henne

We ended up spend­ing a cou­ple hours with this cou­ple, they bought us a cou­ple rounds of beer, and we did like­wise. They also bought every­one a shot of the old peo­ple drink; I wasn’t very excited about this, but I’m not one to turn down a drink. We found out that they were both teach­ers; Henne was a teacher for the dis­abled, and Hen­rich was a his­tory teacher. They told us a lot about their lives, and Copen­hagen as well, they marked a cou­ple places for us to go. After­words, we headed out, and almost every­thing was closed, so there was noth­ing left to do but find a place in Copen­hagen to sleep. The first place we found was a lit­tle enclosed space we had pre­vi­ously ran into when going the wrong away, we saw it and fig­ured it would be a good place to sleep.

Tighe passed out, I didn’t sleep here, I wasn’t tired so I played Wolfen­stein on my iPhone instead

While we stayed there, a white truck pulled up, and it kind of freaked us out since we didn’t know who it was, and we were in an enclosed space with no other way out, so we got out of there as fast as pos­si­ble. The next stop was to see if we could sleep at the Cen­tral Station.

Cen­tral Station

Unfor­tu­nately, we were kicked out by a secu­rity guard. The next thing we decided to do was to go to a early morn­ing break­fast place that the Dan­ish cou­ple told us about, and it was a pretty far walk on a cold night, but we decided to give it a go. We get to the exact loca­tion that she marked, but there was no break­fast to be found. We found a church and slept on the out­side bench instead. It ended up being too cold to sleep, I couldn’t do it so we con­tin­ued to walk. We found a bak­ery that was open­ing in an hour, so we slept out­side of it until it opened. I fig­ured, if I bought a sand­wich, they wouldn’t mind if I rested my head on the table for a bit, but I was wrong, they kicked us out after I paid for a $10 CAD sand­wich that was worth about $2. By the time that whole ordeal was over, we found an open McDon­alds, bought some burg­ers, and took a nap. Clearly, I can always count on McDon­alds to save the day.

Me out­side of the bak­ery, extremely tired

There were a cou­ple more places we slept, like the park, and I’m sure there are more that I can’t remem­ber. Over­all, it was a ridicu­lous night, and I have new found respect for the home­less, its not easy out there. We headed back to the air­port, and our Scan­di­na­vian adven­ture had come to a close.