Bratislava, Slovakia

In the distance you see the UFO bridge- there is a restaurant up in the top!

This city, the capital of Slovakia is located 1.5 hours south of Brno (which was the second city we visited) and less than 1 hour east of Vienna. We didn't really know much about this city before we decided to go there, except we had some friends that had lived there for a year and we really want to visit more of Eastern Europe.

A nice pedestrian street in Old Town

The city is about half a million people, but didn't feel like too large of a city. And it had a great Old town, which is where our apartment was located. We literally walked out the apartment door and two blocks away was the Old town.

In Old Town, St. Michael's Gate

The weather wasn't the best while in Bratislava, raining about 30% of the time, but it was still our favorite city out of the 3 we visited.  I think the outskirts of the town probably aren't as nice, but the Old town (while still recovering from communism) was very nice. My favorite part was the coffee shops with little areas for children to play, not with dangerous things to climb on but simple buckets of toys (Brno was also full of these types of places). It was great, because we could sit for a coffee for 30 min and actually sit and not constantly wonder what Hannah was getting into.

Hannah happily playing while we enjoy coffee!

Switzerland needs to adopt this coffee shop idea!

Not sure if you can see the item "Bottomless Coffee"- reminds us of good ole' American Coffee Shops

We walked up twice to the Bratislava Castle that overlooks the city. We didn't make it out to the Devin Castle which is about 10k outside of the Old Town, you can see into Austria on a clear day! Next time!

A section of the Castle

We are already thinking of our next visit, as you can take a boat on the Rhine river and then to the Danube river which connects Vienna to Bratislava. It sounds like a fun way to see the cities.... next time, oh wait there are so many places on our list to see while living in Europe!

Also LOVING the cheap food!!