Day 3: Monday - Bratislava

We awoke to an overcast morning.  We had both slept very soundly although Graeme did wake up in the night just as we passed through the first of the 25 locks we will pass through on this trip.  G says: "The locks are awesome, especially in the dark with what lok like owls flying round in the dark and are on a truly industrial scale! All the cruise ships seems to be Danubamax and just squeeze inside them.  Some locks further upstream on the Main-Danube Canal are 75 feet high!"

Today's morning excursion was a walking tour of Bratislava. It was just a short walk into this pretty capital of Slovakia which one of our fellow passengers described as a mini Vienna.

We were not disappointed. Bratislava (formerly Pressburg) has beautiful buildings and has all but deleted evidence of its communist past. We learned that Slovakia is suffering a 'brain drain' as wages are low compared to neighbouring Austria and also that Kia, Land Rover Jaguar (since the Brexit vote), Peugeot/Citroen and VW have factories here because labour is so cheap.

I always love their trams - smaller scale than our supertrams and more routes ....

Communist idea of art - it has to be concrete

Freedom statue. The poor Slovaks.  If they weren't being ruled by those Austrian Habsburgs, they were being controlled by the Communists. And by 1992 the Czechs didn't want them and Czechoslovakia split in two

The Bratislava Opera.  Tickets much cheaper than at the Vienna State Opera along the road!

Commemorating the visit of Hans Christian Andersen to Bratislava

The backside of H C-A with a depiction of some of this stories

Like Budapest, a city cooperating with the occupying Nazis to deport thousands of Jews to the death camps - 20,000 from Bratislava alone

St Martin's Church where the Habsburgs were crowned as kings/queens of Hungary

Road across the Danube. The Jewish holocaust memorial is down below here as it was behind the camera where the Jewish Quarter lay. The Communists then intentionally put this road through so that all traces of the Quarter would be lost.

Part of the old city walls

Uncovered on the side of a house during restoration

Part of the Imperial Walk from the castle to St Martin's Cathedral

One of the best preserved residential streets in Bratislava

The Hungarian composer and distinguished pianist Franz Liszt lived here for a time

The only surviving medieval gate from the old city walls

Look top left and you'll see one of Napoleon's cannon balls

A city of many identities

One of the few places with souvenirs not made in China!

Main square - the Greek embassy is on the left

Another cannon ball

No knives longer than the one on the left allowed on the main square

Measure to make sure merchants were not short changing customers

Courtyard where the worst local criminals met their maker

No, not a leftover from the Communist days ....

It didn't rain really hard, just a persistent drizzle for  while

The well where cheating merchants were ducked

Britain was the only place with the expertise to supply some of the ironwork inside

This was a photo question and a pointless answer on "Pointless". Nobody on the show knew it was in Bratislava

The guide said it typified the Slovak worker

Main boulevard

British embassy - stuck down a side street

St Martin's Cathedral

US embassy - behind the protective fence

Thought I was going to get arrested here! Beyond the vehicle and next to the box is a substantial lorry blocker. Behind me are rows of reinforced decorative posts in the ground. I took the photo and a security guard appeared from the left to make it clear that it was not being encouraged!

Not quite the weather for it today ....

Our temporary home