Our drive to Vienna was happily drama free, the only noteworthy events being the stunning Austrian scenery and Czech Vegas. Czech Vegas is our name for a... town?... just on the Czech side of the border with Austria, and announced it's appearance through a series of rather bored and uncomfortable prostitutes lining the side of the road, their lacklustre appearance and pimp on a motorbike forming a stark contrast with the fields of corn and huge yellow sunflowers. Initially puzzled by a series of used looking women wearing very little standing at regular intervals. Our realisation of their purpose came just before we turned a corner and entered Czech Vegas itself, which was a long strip on either side of the road of rather explicit billboards the size of trucks for sex shows and shops, as well as the shows and shops themselves and a variety of casinos decorated with huge statues, often dinosaurs or globes, or made up to look like mini-castles. I'm not exactly sure what laws in Austria cause them to cross the border to visit such a place but that is clearly its purpose and we left it behind feeling somewhat baffled, incredulous and slightly dirtier.
A while later we arrived and checked in to the "Westend City Hostel", which was fairly unimpressive, with small rooms, uninterested staff, crappy wifi and, while it was included, breakfast wasn't great, especially as the staff running it didn't even refill the water jugs so there was nothing for us non-coffee drinkers to drink. Anyway, we showered and settled in to our corridor with bunk beds room and headed out to find dinner. Found a place around the corner that did a student's special meal that, combined with a beer, cost $8 and consisted of a big bowl of excellent soup (with strips of pancake in, because why not have pancakes in soup) and a massive schnitzel and chips.
Got ourselves (or at least, Macky and I did, Lewis' waking up process takes somewhere between half an hour and half a day) up early the next morning and drove 2 hours west to visit Mauthausen concentration camp. Spent all day there, leaving just before it closed at 5pm. Entry was only $2 and included an audio guide with about 75 minutes of information about the locations, conditions, history and with quotes from survivors. Spent the whole day in a sort of fugue, wandering around the various buildings, 3 of the prisoner barracks, admin buildings, the laundry, showers and jails as well as the execution and cremation rooms and the SS buildings. The site also included a huge series of memorials for the various groups that made up the ~100,000 people who died at Mauthausen and the quarry where a lot of the work groups spent their time and the long, steep track and stairs they had to carry huge rocks up all day.
Drove home in near silence, had the same dinner from the same place as the previous night, watched some TV in the common room and went to bed.
Woke up the next day feeling more like ourselves again, had breakfast and then drove straight to Bratislava. We were intending to explore Vienna a bit but there didn't seem to be that many sights and none of us really felt like staying around Austria after the previous day.
Arrived in Bratislava, parked the car right next to where the hostel was meant to be and then spent 30 minutes wandering the Bratislava backstreets (is good you come in summer, in vinter is very depressing) before we found a tiny little walkway which took us through to the main shopping boulevard and we found ourselves outside the barred gates of "Hostel Vegas", which required its guests to buzz to get in, and oddly enough out too, and which filled the hostel with the regular annoying trill of someone seeking entry or exit but was otherwise quite nice. Once we were in we asked the girl working the reception about free parking and she marked a couple of spots on our map. Thus begun our first confrontation with the Bratislava 1 way street system, which I am convinced has a minotaur in the middle and caused us to spend about 45 minutes finding the first marked area, finding out how to get to it, deciding it was too hard to deal with and then reaching the second area, which was just cars parked on the curb, but everyone else seemed to do it so we squeezed ourselves on and, praying we would find her in one piece, left Cumu there and walked back to the hostel and then went clothes shopping for the various pieces we each desired. After taking our picks of Bratislava fashion we then went looking for some authentic Slovak food but mostly found a series of kebab and pizza stalls until we arrived at the "Slovak Pub", which, despite its fantastically original name, had really excellent cheap spicy goulash. Headed back to the hostel to have a few quiet beers as it was storming and, apparently, Bratislava nightlife is nonexistent on weekdays.
Woke up from a crappy sleep, largely due to our Italian roommates drunken arrival around 2am and drunken departure around 6am, both of which involved much loud Italian, stumbling around the room and what sounded like poor, innocent backpacks being horrifically violated. Got ourselves up for a walking tour at 11am, where a funny woman led us through a series of cool little statues, past an awesome bright blue church and ended up at the spot where a student stood in front of a line of soviet tanks, daring the tank to shoot him and was, apparently, one of instigating factors for the downfall of Slovak communism. The tour also included a wide array of anecdotes about our guides favourite shopping places, restaraunts and, for some reason, her grandmother. After the tour we had lunch at an awesome, medieval themed restaurant called "Flagship" where we experienced Slovak garlic soup in a bread bowl. Bread bowls are the best thing ever. Garlic soup was so ridiculously garlicky that neither myself nor Lewis could handle it. Macky had no such problems.
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