Last weekend my roommate Mark needed to go to Slovakia to apply for a Czech visa. Apparently you have to apply for one from out of the country. He asked me if I wanted to go, and I thought that it would be a good adventure. We took a bus and went to Bratislava, the capital where the Czech embassy is.

Bratislava was a little colder and a whole lot windier than Prague. There wasn't too much to do there. A lot of the city looks the way it did in the 80s--Soviet Bloc housing and dilapidated buildings and bits of rubble all over the place and all. It was nice, though. quieter and less busy than Prague. We had breakfast both mornings we were there at this place called Bagel & Coffee Story. It was relatively pricey (Slovakia just switched over to the euro, and we're not used to paying five or six dollars for breakfast), but really good. They had VH1 playing, and the Matchbox Twenty videos made the place feel like home circa 2000.

We saw this one thing called the Blue Church. I don't know what i was expecting, and I probably shouldn't have been surprised when I saw this.

Incidentally, that's the only place in the country you'll find a color that bright.

The first night we were there, we spontaneously decided to see if we could get tickets to the Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra. Twenty-five minutes later, we were sitting in the front row at the Filharmona. With our student discount, the tickets came out to €4,80 each.

It doesn't always look that scary, I promise. I took this picture the next night when we were in the neighborhood and there was some mayor's ball going on. The inside word from a guy with the band playing at the entrance was that they weren't checking invitations, but we were hardly dressed for a ball, or else we would have tried to get some free food.

One more thing. Wherever we went into a bookstore we (which I like to do for no other reason than I like bookstores, okay?), we saw this:

This time in Slovak. I just can't get away from it.