Vegan Voyager: Slovakia

After Vienna, we hopped on a train over to Bratislava.
Apparantly Vienna and Bratislava are the two closest capital cities in the world, at a whopping 45 km apart. Cool, huh?

Anyhow, I absolutely LOVED Bratislava! In general, I think I'd say that Slovakia was my favorite place that we visited. Guillaume says that this is because it was the most "bleddard," which basically means middle-of-nowhere/backcountry ish. He's probably right. . . much to his dismay, I quite like "le bled."

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Me and Guillaume at Bratislava Castle, with the ex-communist side of Bratislava behind us.


MY FAVORITE PART OF BRATISLAVA:The city was full of all of these really ridiculous but cool statues. Guillaume and I did a sort of statue finding scavenger hunt, and, while I know we missed some, I think we did manage to find most of them.



Supposedly there was a mostly naked imp hanging out of a window, which we missed. My favorite was either the ear guy (see above) or the one that was supposed to be a paparazzi (see left). Definitely click on one of the pictures to go to the album to see all of the other statues.

We rented a car to leave Bratislava, and we headed to small town Slovakia. We spent a few nights in Piestany, where no one was smoking and everyone was running and biking everywhere. I was totally into it.
This leads me to



MY FAVORITE PART OF SLOVAKIA: (which was not my favorite part of Bratislava) We took a day trip from Piestany to see Trencin castle, which was SO awesome! It was really like I always dream of castles being. Guillaume and I got to shoot a bow and arrow, and Guillaume also shot a really old school gun. I got to pet a donkey and a goat (which totally rubbed it's horn up against my leg trying to get my food bag and gave me a horrible bruise). We took a tour of the whole castle; we got to see the kitchen and the bathroom (which was a hole in the wall that went out into a small enclosed area outside of the castle) and the portraits of all the people that lived there.


Us shooting the bow and arrow - Guillaume was way better than I was



View from Trencin Castle


MOST ANNOYING THING IN SLOVAKIA:This would be the incredible lack of vegan food. Seriously. We found one restaurant in Bratislava that had ONE (yes, count it, one) vegan option that was one of the more disgusting things we had ever eaten (see photo to right). Luckily, there was a kitchen where we were staying. In Piestany, though, there was no kitchen. Luckily, I had brought along some vegan pad thai to which one just had to add hot water. We borrowed a hot water heater from the hotel. We'd also luckily brought along some bread and so bought things to make sandwiches. Which were not good because the vegetables we found were crap. Apparently they just do meat there. I shouldn't complain, though. We didn't starve, and that's what counts.
So, VEGANS GOING TO SLOVAKIA - stay in places with kitchens!!!! This is actually hard to do outside of Bratislava, so also BRING ALONG YOUR OWN FOOD!!!!

So, yes, aside from the food sitch, Slovakia was totally awesome.



Click on this photo to go straight to the album of all the photos. Or click on any of the other photos to be led to the album! Enjoy!