We got to Bratislava around 4.30 AM, luckily my input was not needed for this. This is the third capital city we are visiting and the smallest of the lot with only around 500,000 inhabitants. That still means that about 10% of Slovakia lives here.
We began our day with food because that is the entire focus of a cruise. We then left the ship for a walking tour of the city. The roads are cobblestones and were a bit difficult to walk on, but weren’t as uneven as in some places.
We made our way through the old city with many beautiful buildings that had been changing hands over the eons as one power unit after another steamrolled over the region. In 1945 the locals were saved from the Nazis by the Russians. Like any big brother, they told us, the Russians forgot to leave.
After the end of the first War to End All Wars, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was broken up into several smaller countries, but they still lumped several of them together for some reason or another. Pressburg became Bratislava but the region was still predominantly German by population and language. The entire region was still a powder keg because the people who ended the war didn’t actually speak with the people who were being affected by their decisions.
There remain many of the old beautiful buildings and some of the statues of the liberating Russians are honored in the old quarter. The streets are winding and the city centers are huge in this part of the world. Apparently no one really cared about straight lines in medieval days and they just built wherever the whim suited as long as there was a large market place in the center.
They love to build monuments thanking God for saving them as they died in droves.
Dragos recommended a local taste treat of a chocolate and honey confection. We looked for it at the grocery store, roaming up and down the candy aisle and the cookie aisle and even the honey aisle. We could not find it. We gave up and met for lunch and clarified the name of the tasty treat.
After lunch, on this hottest day of the tour, we went back out into the city to walk to the Blue Church. It is called that because – wait for it – it is blue. It is actually blue and white as is the companion building next to it. The school across the street is tan and brown. We stopped at one of the “functional” design buildings the Russians built during their occupation because the front door was open and we could peek inside. These are not luxury buildings in any sense of the word. They were functional as they were meant to be.
We tried again to find the chocolate/honey treat. We looked in all the usual places. I finally asked a clerk who didn’t speak English for some help. I tried to pronounce the name of the treat and failed miserably. However, she offered another name and I shrugged and said maybe. She took us past the candy, cookies, honey, and the rest of the store to the produce section and there in the middle of the vegetables, were the treats. We bought some. They are delicious. BTW over here every single ESL person calls them veg eh tables. Every single one.
Today was the day for our home hosted dinner. In the past, local people who contract with Grand Circle would cook up some food for us and we would go to their house and have something to eat and talk about their culture, way of life, or anything we could think of. However, the EU is just as stupid as the US when it comes to infuriating interfering laws. They decided that anyone who cooked food to feed to strangers was a “restaurant” and would need a license and inspection as well as clearly marked men’s and women’s bathrooms. So, the food was catered and brought to the houses by a professional service and then the bathrooms didn’t matter any more, but we didn’t get some home cooked food. Governments are stupid everywhere. The catered food was okay, but not the same as cooks showing off their local favorites.
We met a woman in her apartment. She was single and had already been retired for nine years, but didn’t look all that old to me – perhaps sixty at most. What amazed me most was that she was rather nostalgic for the Communist regime. She was around 20 when they left and had a good job before the economy collapsed.
The Communist philosophy was that everybody worked, perhaps in a job you hated or were not suited for in any way, but you worked and were supplied an equal share of the very few resources available. Part of everyone’s job was to stand in lines to try to get possession of the rare items appearing on shelves for a brief moment. But at least there was something, even if it wasn’t enough.
After they left, there was about a 30% unemployment rate and our host shifted from job to job until she could retire. She has two small pensions from her previous jobs and is able to live in a rather “large” apartment she bought about 20 years ago. It is a two bedroom place, perhaps 750 square feet. There is no air conditioning but there is central heating and each apartment does have its own bathroom. We ate in the warm, dark room as she never turned on any lights even as dusk approached.
They talk a lot about “free” stuff here, but none of it is actually free for everybody. They have free college IF you can get into one of the free slots by having a high enough GPA and passing a test with a high enough score. We call these scholarships. They have their pensions or what we call Social Security and it no more really enough for them than it is for us.
There are hundreds and hundreds of the social housing units made of prefab blocks of concrete that were put together “like LEGOs” and then ignored so that they have had to be renovated and spruced up as they were starting to disintegrate. They were built to last 80 to 100 years and so their shelf life is about half over and much of the city resides in them. They have already started to talk about what they are going to do when they crumble into dust.
We spent the night in port and then went on the Communist Bus tour the next day. It was a real Communist era bus built in the 1970s in the Czech region of the Eastern Bloc. It had been refurbished and was a bright orange in color with all new seats. One assumes the engine had also been overhauled. The suspension was quite bouncy and it was a stick shift, unlike modern buses. There was no computer on board and none of the extra gadgets so prevalent on tour buses of today.
We went past thousands of units of the social housing stuff. They look different than they did when we first saw them six years ago. Today, the outsides are partially painted with various colors and in various designs. They look much better than the rows and rows of bare concrete, but they are still in the functional style and less than beautiful by any stretch of the imagination.
We turned down this narrow road, more like a driveway. We did not meet any oncoming traffic which was just as well as I’m not sure it would have fit. There was a median strip and then another narrow lane to our left. That was Austria. During the Communist regime, this was heavily guarded and the median strip still had the posts every few feet that held up the barbed wire fencing.
We came to a military cemetery where soldiers from WWI were buried. This was lost for over forty years because the entire area for about 250 to 500 meters from the border was a no man’s land. There was also a replica of the border displayed. There was an inner electrified barbed wire fence with a space that was often filled with sand to find footprints, and at one time also held landmines, but these were removed when more guards than escapees were killed, and then a second barbed wire fence. There had been raised searchlights every few hundred feet all along the border as well.
Over 300 people were killed while trying to escape the brutal regime. More than twice that many guards died and many more committed suicide after having to shoot their fellow citizens (often in the back) as they tried to escape. This area was simply a reminder of how cruel we are to one another all for the power hungry who demand ever more power.
We somehow managed to get out of here and I can only say I could never have been a bus driver. I don’t know how they do this.
We then wended our way up the hillside along the road where all the embassy bosses have private housing. The US house looks like a small White House. At the top of the hill is a memorial for the 7,000 Russian soldiers buried here. The statues represent the gratitude of the Slovakian people to those who died to liberate them from the oppressive Nazi occupation. As our guide said, they were not responsible for what happened three years later.
We got back to the ship and set sail for a quiet rest of the day on the water. We went through the largest lock in this part of the world and were in there with at least two other large cruising ships. Some locks are so small, they barely contain our one ship (and this limits the size of sailing along the entire river).
After our return, I was so embarrassed to overhear some idiot American complaining that he didn’t see an Iron Curtain. He apparently thought there was some sort of iron shower curtain or drapery all along the border between free and non-free regions. I am mortified at times by our lack of intercultural understanding.
We had a discussion with our Program Directors. All three men were affected by the Communist occupation. Both Dragos and Dom were children born into Communist controlled countries. Dragos is Romanian and while his stories were heartbreaking, Dom is Croatian and his stories were terrifying. The breakup of Yugoslavia impacted his family personally. Although none of his closest relatives were killed, many family friends were. Both of these young men are in their 30s and so their memories are not as scary as they might have been if they had been responsible adults at the time. They were somewhat protected by their youth.
Harold was born in Western Germany and didn’t really understand the entire situation. He is a year older than me (and still working!). He knew that part of his family was in Eastern Germany and although some of his relatives managed to get to the west before the Berlin Wall was erected, others didn’t make it. His introduction into the difference between West and East came when he was in college and tried to visit the other side of the wall. His stories were not as personal but still quite moving.
We ended the day with a “talent show” by the crew. It was quite entertaining and we all toddled off to bed happy and content and wrapped in the safety of a free world, at least the part we live and travel in.
A recreation of what an iron curtain looked like
