Bratislava Rehab

The next two days are spend hanging out in Bratislava. The festival has put us up in a expensive hotel, complete with a greeting when you ender your room.

I counteract the luxury by dining on a breakfast of yogurt that's been planning on becoming cheese the next day.

Given the heat and the perfectly blue skies, it’s been hard to get a proper amount of sleep -there's so much to distract you from sleeping and the sun wears on you slowly like shoes that don’t quite fit right. But the city is beautiful, and hey, they have a castle AND a UFO.

I wake up to some dream of Brittany Spears DJing in the hotel bar below. She is sitting behind the decks looking despondent, talking into her phone as if she’s really nervous about her up coming set. I’m on my way to the bathroom when I pass her, and it’s at the urinal that my brain realizes “That’s Brittany”. That’s when I wake up in a cold sweat, of course.

It decide it's time for a walk despite that fact that it's brutally hot outside. I kind of want to find a calm park, take my shirt off, sit in the sun and read, but are you allowed to do that here? Take your shirt off in public? Slovakia did just elect a woman Prime Minister, but are their laws and police as progressive? After my failed attempt to communicate with the security guards at the festival, I opt to not find out.

I wander through town and some of the new architecture vaguely interests my eye.

But right across the street from all this new, gentrified construction stands a bombed out apartment complex.

The mural at the top of the building on the left is what initially piques my interest, and as I got closer for a photo, I realized there were no doors anywhere. So I went exploring.

As I made my way deeper and higher up in the building, my mind started getting more and more creative. At first the story in my mind just involved a cop asking me the hell I thought I was doing, but by the fifth floor, my imagination was at full tilt, placing me in a Children of Men-like hovel where a meth-head or heroin-flooze was going to pop out of nowhere and stab first/pick my pockets later. And so I climbed out on the ledge, snapped my picture, and quickly scooted back down the stairs to the safety of the street unscathed.

I sauntered back to the hotel, relishing the quirky details adorning the streets. The lego man is a bit much though.

I end the night with an original amber soda that Anheiser-Busch thought it was worth stealing the name of. I’ve got to say, I prefer the regional Golden Pheasant Dark swill.