Bratislava is the capital of Slovakia. Like Vienna, it is on the Danube River. Our hotel in Bratislava for two nights was not in the Old Town. Because we had a chance to use points, we picked this hotel that would have been a long walk to the Old Town but is right next to a tram stop that takes you to the Old Town in less than ten minutes. The trams are incredibly efficient here (and at the other cities we were in). The trams come about every four minutes, so there is no need to check schedules. A 24-hour pass was less than $8 for the two of us. Plus, the tram is the way to go because cars are not allowed in the Old Town. The hotel was perfectly fine and was connected to a shopping center. The door to the bathroom was interesting, as it could also serve as a separate door to the toilet room. Neither of us had ever seen that before.
After unpacking, we headed out. We had been wandering about 10 minutes in the Old Town when we passed an Irish pub with a Kilkenny sign out front. So of course we stopped. Cindy had a Kilkenny, and Tom had a Czech beer. The draft beer list would list the beer, and its degrees, much like you might see a beer bar in the US list the ABV %. The degrees (for example, Kilkenny beer was listed at 11°), according to Google search, is a measure of the concentration of dissolved solids at the wort stage. We saw this “degrees listing” everywhere. By the way, a half liter of beer there is less than $3.
We stopped at an interesting small bar a bit later and had a very wonderful local craft beer. We then had dinner at a fantastic place serving Slovakian food. It was duck season, which made for very good eating. By this time in the trip we’d learn to make reservations for our dinner meals, and that was to our advantage here as the restaurant was very popular with locals.
The next day we went back to the Old Town and saw the remaining sights we had not seen before, and finished the afternoon at a wine bar. In addition to bottles of wine you can try by the glass, this place had four big tanks of wine from area wineries. Our waitress was superb and explained all the wines to us. The average price of a glass of wine there was about $2. We then took a tram that was right outside the front door of the wine bar, to have dinner at a restaurant that had craft beers on tap. What we noticed is that a lot of people had flights of beer. Unlike in the US where flights come in small glasses, each glass here looked to be about 10 ounces. After dinner, we caught a tram back to our hotel.
We had an early lunch the next morning at the connected shopping center, then we took an Uber to the train station for our 2.5-hour train ride to Budapest.
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