La granadina It's the spring semester of my junior year, so I am celebrating with un gran viaje filled with classes (unfortunately) and crazy foreign fun.

So Vienna was really just warm ups. Bratislava’s where Slovakia Fest truly begins! We had absolutely no clue what to expect, aside from debatable Hollywood sources “Euro Trip” and “Hostel,” but Bratislava is quite the lovely little city! Nice and walkable, like Granada, but thankfully sooo much cleaner. We hit the jackpot with Slovak Pub, a restaurant-bar aimed at students, which roughly translates from Slovak to both tasty and cheap. We were pretty pumped to go out in Slovakia, but apparently no one else was feeling the Monday night thing like we Granadinos. Nothing was even open, save the empty discoteque on the Danube. And as Bratislava is apparently a popular homosexual tourist destination (??), the males that were out were more interested in my guy friends than me. Shoot. Tuesday went better, though, with delicious cheese-meat-egg bagel sandwiches and fresh-squeezed orange juice to start off our day. The castle turned out to be a mere photo-op, the accompanying museum being a long, boring snore-fest about coins and a composer. And not even kidding, I actually fell asleep (I had caught a pretty bad cold at this point). The palace wasn’t too impressive either, but it was free, so no one really minded. We had a bunch of 10¢ ice cream for lunch (Bratislava is cheap!), and tried for Slovakian opera, but the performance wasn’t until the following night. Back at the hostel, we found Hil and Lianne had arrived, and along with our new friend Canadian Will, got steak dinners and beer! Canadian Will actually turned out to have quite the wallet (or maybe his rich Vancouver parents did?) and kept buying everyone drinks for the rest of the night. Needless to say, the Danube disco was a little more fun this time around. But the next morning was an early one, so we fondly farewelled and proceeded to rock the train southward.