Globetrotting is series is all about my adventures in travel. They include my tips, takeaways, and realizations about travel, as well as recommendations for food, culture, and nightlife.
After all the traveling I have done and all the photos I have taken, I am so backlogged with images and my brain is bursting from all the posts I still need to draft up. So why don’t we just start off with the most recent place I have been – Bratislava.
I recently took a road trip with my friends in Vienna to Bratislava – because, dear readers, as I have learned, Vienna and Bratislava are the two closest capitals in the whole goddamned world. Now for someone from the US who is pretty much used to driving, oh say, 7 hours in one day to get from one state to the next, the idea of traveling from one country’s capital to another in under an hour was pretty insane.
I didn’t really have any expectations entering Bratislava, as to be perfectly honest, I didn’t know that much about Bratislava, let alone Slovakia, aside from the one crazy foreign exchange student I knew who almost got us arrested and taken away kicking and screaming when we and a few other friends arrived at the Canadian border. The beginning of our trip started out like the scene from some shitty holywood horror movie full of cliches about eastern Europe. But after a taxi ride 5x as expensive as it should have been (okay, I am exaggerating a little here…) we arrived at this awesome wine festival and met up with some friends of friends so it ended up being a pretty rad time because I am all about seeing how people actually live and not just ending up in tourist traps. Unfortunately, the night ended kind of nasty when my friend got her purse stolen, but the next day was absolutely beautiful and besides that one downer, our experience of the city was incredible.
On our walk around the old town the next day, Jamal popped into this cafe to grab an coffee. We had previously passed it the night before, and needless to say I was kind of immediately in love. I mean look at the place, the design is fucking incredible. Which is even more insane when I tell you that Urban House is apparently a chain. Now I’m thinking this because a few streets down there was another one. I am just so used to being confronted with places like Starbucks which all look the same inside. Now, as a foreigner living in Europe, there is some comfort in this kind of familiarity and the fact that you basically know what kind of service you are going to get when entering when you enter Starbucks. Still, of course, I prefer to support local businesses and smaller places, but I would gladly spend hours in Urban House.
One of the really nice features here is that they have this giant leave-one-take one book wall, which I am completely in support of. I myself didn’t pick up any drinks or food there so I can’t really tell you guys what the drinks or pastries taste like, but if it’s anything like the place itself I would venture it’s pretty damned good. So if any of you are planning on visiting the city, if you need some time to relax, sip a coffee (or tea) and catch up with work or friends, I would definitely suggest checking out this place. We were only in and out but I still managed to snap a few pictures to give you guys a good idea of this incredible space. Enjoy.
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