Vienna; Tuesday, 22 November, 2005

Sadly, I hadn’t packed spare limbs (I'm getting so forgetful these days - I blame the booze!) so with slightly aching legs I treated them to a nice hours rest as I caught the train out of Vienna, in fact out of Austria all together and into country 11 of the year - Slovakia. The capital Bratislava is just over 60Km from Vienna - it's so close in fact that most of the cheap airlines fly here and offer onwards shuttle links to Vienna rather than land in the city itself - and has only really been a capital in it's own sense since the split of Czechoslovakia in the early 1990's. Before then it was joined with the Czech Republic, and before that part of the Austrian and Holy Roman empires since Charlemagne (see Aachen, Cologne). Now it’s the vibrant capital of an independent Slovakia, and advertising itself as cheaper and better than it's more famous rival Prague.

Unfortunately, the similarities with Prague are limited. True it has a castle on a hill that overlooks a river (the Danube no less), but the castle looks as all the guidebooks describe it 'Like an upturned bed' and the views across the river are not of a Bohemian old town with church spires and city gate houses. Instead, it is of a Soviet era housing estate with all the aesthetic charm that several billion tonnes of concrete can muster.

Whilst the castle is not the most beautiful of objects from the outside, inside there is lots to see with a museum that covers two floors of the five floors of the massive complex. The museum is a strange collection of exhibitions, showing the best of the art from the nations collection, a collection of the state silver, war and weaponry and an exhibition on "Becoming a woman" in Slovak tradition. All of the exhibitions are displayed in both Slovak and English so it is easy to work out what is what.

In the cloister off the courtyard of the main building is another museum, which shows the best from the state collection of treasures from the pre-historic through to the early middle ages.

Around the back of the castle is another museum, which tells the history and importance of music within Slovak culture and life and of their most famous recent musical son Jan Albrecht.

Looking round all this took nearly 4 hours in the end and cost the grand total of 140Sk (£2.80, €4.20) and I had changed up €40 just in case!! I walked down the steps from the castle and into the town to have a look around.

The town itself is very compact, not suffers from a massive bypass and major crossing of the Danube running right past the historic centre.

I spent a while wandering around the town, including having a look inside the very dark and dingy cathedral, and trying to find ways of spending €35 worth of a currency that only one country uses. In the end, after spending about an hour walking around I decided to head back to the station to catch the train home, and change my money back in the same exchange shop I had used a few hours earlier!

After arriving back in Vienna I went back to the Christmas market by the Rathaus to do some more Christmas shopping (and have some more Glühwein - honest this was a shopping trip rather than an alcoholics cover story) before having a wander around the back streets behind the Hofburg and the Opera looking for a restaurant.

With another Wiener Schnitzel inside me, and with my feet threatening all out industrial action I headed back to the hotel to pack and get some serious sleep.