Bratislava!

On Wednesday we went to Bratislava, Slovakia for the course of the day. Who goes to Bratislava? I guess we do. Bratislava is located about 50 km from Vienna, so the bus ride took about an hour. When we got off the bus in Bratislava, a few of us were in desperate need of a bathroom and we set off to find a lavatory. We stepped off the bus platform… and almost got hit by another bus. It was quite a close one. It missed us by barely two feet. So far, so good. We eventually found what we were looking for, and after some Slovakian lady yelling foreign things at us, we met back up with the group. We were told to meet back at the bus stop at 5:50, and then we were set free.

To be honest we really had no idea what we were doing. We were in a strange country where almost no one speaks English and they don’t take Euros. So off we went, into the unknown. We could see a small castle from where we were and we decided to go check it out. It turned out to be pretty cool. There was a museum inside with inventions of DaVinci recreated, along with prints of his sketches. There was also a dungeon-like area with a very deep well. We threw a penny down and it took four seconds to hit the water down below. It was pretty sweet.

After the castle we found a small pizzeria and sat down for lunch. I, (being Elizabeth, as we all know she is the only one actually writing on this blog…), had some pasta. I cannot remember eating a more divine dish of pasta. It had chicken, corn, mushrooms, and leeks in a cream sauce. Not exactly your typical dish, but mouthwatering nonetheless.






We then wandered around downtown for the afternoon. The city is simply beautiful. One thing that I really liked was that it isn’t a huge tourist attraction, so the streets were pretty empty. But my favorite thing of all was all of the random statues scattered throughout town. A few crazy girls, a foreign city, fun statues, and digital cameras and we were set for an entertaining afternoon. We really had fun imitating the statues as well, which I suppose is fully evident. We also had some fun with some cute scarves that we had bought, pretending to be babushkas and Miss America contestants. There was also this sweet modern art statue. We weren’t really sure what to do, so we decided to imitate it. People were laughing at us so hard as we walked by, and one lady thought we were weird enough to take a picture of her own. It was great.





Later on in the afternoon, we spotted a young guy in slacks and a white shirt with a backpack, looking for people to talk to. As we came a little closer, we also saw exactly what we were expecting: a little black nametag. We approached him and I shouted, “Hey Elder!” He responded with, “Whoah- you guys speak English!?” He was too excited. I think his name was Elder Talbot; he was from Utah and had been in the field for only two months. We explained who we were and asked how the language was going, and he just laughed at that. Turns out there were 35 Elders there from the Prague mission collecting enough signatures to open up the country for more missionary work. If they are successful throughout this month, it is likely there will be a Slovakian mission in two years or so, which sounds pretty sweet. We stopped and talked to several, but many had already run into other small groups of us and already knew who we were. They were all pretty grateful for friendly hellos instead of wary glances. There was, however, one missionary, Elder Hassel (appropriately named, I thought), who tried to flirt with every BYU girl on this trip. After we had all met up as a group again we realized he had given his address out to each of us, telling us to write to him and to send him pictures. He gave the excuse that “A happy missionary gets mail. A happy missionary is a good missionary. Good missionaries do good work.” We didn’t buy it. He just wanted to flirt.

Instead of taking the bus back to Vienna we were able to get tickets on a ferry to take us back down the Danube to Vienna. It was so so pretty, as you can probably see. On the upper deck we watched the sun set through the river spray the ferry made. It was a nice relaxing end to a long day.




Bratislava was beautiful. It had a very quaint atmosphere and so many fun statues. I loved it.