Before I talk about Slovakia, let me first talk about the pressures of travel. Travel is stressful. There’s a lot that can go wrong. If you do it enough, you learn the value of all the little tricks to make it easier on yourself. Maybe that’s showing up early and relaxing with a drink. Maybe it’s packing a lot of snacks. Maybe it’s bringing books or crossword puzzles or mobile games to distract yourself with.

That’s just half of it, though. The other part, the part out of your control, is the waiting. You’re always getting somewhere at least a little early, and you could be there a very long while if your connection doesn’t come through. You need someplace to wait, whether it’s a train station or an airport or a cruise terminal.

Bratislava is only about an hour’s drive from Vienna, so I decided to take the bus. What I discovered is that Vienna’s Erberg International Bus Terminal is, hands down, one of the most miserable places I’ve ever had the misfortune of waiting for a ride.¹ It’s in a grimy cement lot next to a multi-story parking garage. The waiting room, which contains the vending machines, is closed and locked on weekends, because … fuck you, I guess?² There’s uncomfortable seating around, which doubles as the smoking area because it’s outdoors, so I hope you don’t have asthma and want to sit down, which you probably don’t because it’s a grimy cement lot next to a parking garage and there’s exhaust fumes all over the place. There’s a single food stall selling prepackaged sandwiches and stale pretzels. There is at least an electric sign announcing departures, but it’s mounted on the side of the waiting room and not visible unless you’re standing right in front of it, not if you’re standing at any of the bus departure points. That wasn’t a big deal because my bus was stopping on the street outside so it would have been completely invisible to me anyway. There weren’t any seats on the street outside, so you were forced to sit on the sidewalk or stand the whole time, since you certainly couldn’t see your bus arrive from the seating areas. There was a restroom which charged 0.50€ and didn’t take credit cards.³

This isn’t neglect. This is active hostility. It’s contempt, the kind of city planning decisions you can only get away with if you’re targeting marginalized populations. I’m traveling by choice. I’m sure some of the people on that bus weren’t. If you have to travel last-minute, maybe because a close family member is sick, and all you can afford is a bus ticket you might get stuck someplace like that, someplace grim and lifeless, someplace that communicates very clearly how little the city cares about you.

The main bus station in Bratislava is located at the base of a very modern multi-story mall. There’s a waiting area inside, with plenty of reasonably comfortable seats and doors separating the buses (and their exhaust) from inside. There’s also benches out by the buses, and enough ventilation in the underground parking that it’s not particularly unpleasant. All the seats and the benches have charging ports available. There’s lockers for your stuff. From the seating area you can count four food counters and a convenience store, and that’s not taking into account you’re in a mall and there’s both sit-down restaurants and an extensive food court three floors up. Bathrooms are nearby and clean and free of charge. And the whole thing is brightly lit and cheerful in that kind of frictionless way modern malls are.

I’m not trying to sing the praises of malls, by any means. And no, it’s not a fair comparison; I’m sure the main bus station in Vienna is far nicer, especially since it’s next to the main train station. But it’s still illustrative of a fundamental difference. In Bratislava, as a bus passenger, you’re a part of the city. On the outskirts of Vienna, you’re refuse to be hauled away.

I never had a chance to visit Czechoslovakia. I did a small tour of Europe in college after a semester abroad, but even if I had put Prague on the list it was in 1993, just after the Velvet Divorce. And even then it’s not like we would have gotten to the east.⁴ And that’s kind of been Slovakia’s problem; it’s always been overshadowed by the Czech side. That was one of the drivers of the Divorce.⁵

Ever since Slovakia seems to be struggling a bit to figure out its identity. It’s still overshadowed by Czechia. There’s been something of an attempt to promote Andy Warhol — Warhol’s family comes from Miková, in the east — so there’s a few statues scattered around the country⁶ and a museum in Medzilaborce. But Warhol’s a bad fit.⁷ Andy never even visited Slovakia.

Elizabeth Báthory is maybe a better fit. Elizabeth actually lived in and around the area, and it’s not like vampires and the macabre aren’t super popular these days. The evidence for Elizabeth’s guilt isn’t exactly rock solid — most of the testimony was hearsay — but the current historical consensus seems to be Elizabeth was torturing and killing young girls, even if it didn’t reach the hundreds.⁸ I rented a car and took a day trip to Čachtice Castle, one of Báthory’s residences and where Elizabeth was imprisoned and died, and it was a lovely way to get a little bit of time driving around the countryside.⁹

But really, walking around Bratislava, I’m not sure Slovakia needs a gimmick. The Old Town is a lovely place to meander through, although the feel is very different than Prague.¹⁰ The Old Town is quite touristy, like most of them, but it manages to avoid being especially crass or commercial. I was also impressed by the more modern city that’s grown around it; I was staying slightly to the east, a good 30 minute walk from the center, and it’s not at all the kind of soulless socialist blocks Communist governments tended to put up. The city’s crisp and clean and well-maintained with modern skyscrapers and new construction. It felt bright and promising.¹¹

The per capita GDP of Slovakia still trails Czechia, but not by all that much. I can understand the desire to boost it by finding a hook for tourists. And the economic development of Bratislava has come at a cost for the other regions of Slovakia.¹² Like everywhere else, they’re struggling to balance a flourishing urban economy with a stagnating rural one. We’ll see if they figure it out.

Right now I’m on the bus from Bratislava. It’s a sunny day and a quick 2½ hour drive to Budapest. I’ll be there through Monday, for the Portal larp convention, then spend a few days driving around the south of Hungary before flying back to the UK for the lead up to my birthday.

I really do need a bit of a break, but the monumentally slow bureaucracy of the Portuguese government¹³ means I can’t take one in the Schengen Area. I’ve had a wonderful time in the short few days I’ve had in Bratislava. I’d love to spend longer. If it weren’t in Schengen I probably would.

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Footnotes

¹ As someone who’s ridden Greyhound in the United States from time to time, this is genuinely saying something.

² Apparently it’s magically not cold during the weekends in the winter in Vienna.

³ This is a particular annoyance of mine. It’s simply inhumane to charge people to use a restroom. Being able to piss is a basic human right.

⁴ For some bizarre reason my traveling companions were incredibly hot to visit Salzburg but disinterested in Vienna. Salzburg is lovely, but I didn’t need three days of it in my 20s.

⁵ The whole dissolution was driven by political elites pursuing their own agendas, largely to the dismay of the population. Political parties in the Czech Republic weren’t well represented in Slovakia, and vice-versa, which made compromise difficult. Slovakia was agitating for greater political independence, while the Czech Republic was pushing for tighter integration. The leaders eventually decided their positions couldn’t be reconciled and both sides walked away.

At the time of the separation, only about ⅓ of the population supported it, but it happened anyway. I sometimes wonder if the anti-Brexit forces had paid more attention to how the Velvet Divorce played out if they might have learned something to help avoid it.

⁶ Including one on Ventúrska in Bratislava for at least a decade. But despite having pictures of it from 2021 and even being able to locate the specific restaurant it was outside, nobody there’s ever seen or heard of the damn thing.

⁷ It’s hard to think of an artist more committed to the irrelevance of context or history than Warhol. And Warhol was deeply ashamed of their background; they never discussed their family history and would frequently say “I am from nowhere.” It’s Warhol’s parents who came from Czechoslovakia, and Warhol’s mother who spoke Ruthenian to the point of never becoming fluent in English. Warhol was born in Pittsburgh and even that was a point of great discomfort.

⁸ The whole “bathing in blood” thing was almost certainly made up. The accusation wasn’t mentioned at the trial, and blood coagulates far too quickly to make submerging yourself in it at all practical. Or so I’m told.

⁹ Čachtice Castle is closed on Mondays, which I only discovered when I picked up the rental car on Monday morning. I went anyway, and discovered there were a bunch of school tours booked in that day. I passed one on the drive up, and brightened the day of a lot of seven-year-olds by cheerfully waving at them when they passed. Long story short, the person at the ticket desk was more than happy to let me in, since they were gonna be there all day anyway.

¹⁰ Prague’s architecture is older — the city wasn’t rebuilt during the 18^th or 19^th century, unlike most places — but there’s a very pleasant symmetry to the more recent architecture of Bratislava. And by “more recent” we’re still talking a century or two ago.

¹¹ I passed a vegan cafe on my walk to the Old Town, which felt like a sign of the times. I returned to it for dinner and had a lovely if not spectacular variant of a pulled pork sandwich.

¹² Slovakia counts as a “high-income” country in the EU, but low labor mobility and sluggish economic growth in the center and the east of the country means most of that’s going to Bratislava. It’s a weird replication of the issue with Czechoslovakia, where the economic development of Prague was seen as stealing resources from Slovakia.

¹³ I’m 7½ months into waiting for them to issue a residence permit which was supposed to only take 3.