Bratislava & Vienna

20 December 2021

I didn’t know what expectations to have for Bratislava when I booked the flights – it’s not somewhere that everyone seems to go and it doesn’t feature prominently in any travel pages or guidebooks, nor are there thousands of iconic or recognisable images slapped all over Instagram. We travelled at the end of November in 2016, so we knew that at the very least there would be a Christmas market to peruse.

We landed at the international airport at caught the no. 61 bus into the city – it took about 20 minutes and cost barely anything. You can’t buy tickets on the bus, instead you have to purchase your ticket from a machine at the bus stop – it’s useful to arrive into Slovakia with Euro coins as these machines didn’t accept notes. The route travelled through industrial zones and then past blocks of Soviet-style high-rises in the suburbs, to reach the main train station, Hlavná Stanica, just north of the Old Town. We stayed in the Mercure, which virtually overlooks the station.

You can catch a tram from here to take you right down through the centre and to the banks of the mighty Danube, or you can take an easy 20-minute walk downhill past the Presidential Gardens to reach the narrow, winding streets of the medieval Old Town.

We were greeted with literally hundreds of market stalls – all adorned with fairly lights – and Christmas trees in both main squares. Christmas carols played out all over and the smells of freshly cooked festive foods oozed from stalls in every direction – it really was magical and everything you’d expect from a European Christmas Market destination.

We spent the afternoon tasting all manner of mulled wines and hot chocolates, and I first tried ‘chimney cake’ – a spiral of dough rolled in sugar and baked, then powdered with cinnamon or drizzled with chocolate sauce! We bought decorations for our Christmas tree and then found a homey little Slovakian restaurant on TripAdvisor, tucked away on a little back street, where we ate the most enormous chicken schnitzels for dinner – honestly, they were bigger than our plates.

The next day we decided to take a stroll along the riverbank – we tried to visit the ‘UFO’ lookout tower but discovered we should have booked a ticket in advance. Instead, we spiralled up the streets to Bratislava Castle to gain a vantage point and take in the views over the city. From here you can look south across the Danube to the Petrzalka district, a vast Communist-era housing complex with concrete tower blocks stretching endlessly into the distance.

Back in the centre we paid a visit to Čumil – Bratislava’s bronze statue of a sewer-worker peeping from a manhole. We also visited a handmade candy shop to watch the mesmerising process of making boiled sweets – you can now watch videos of this on TikTok etc, but this was the first time we had seen it!

For dinner this evening we had made a reservation at Fabrika @ LOFT – a pub-style restaurant with its own brewery. My husband still raves about the amazing pork fillet he had here, even 5 years later.

On our last full day we were up and ready early to catch the train to neighbouring Vienna. Bratislava is perfectly situated in central Europe to make a twin or even multi-city trip appealing – you can reach Prague in 3-4 hours by car or bus, Budapest in 2-3 hours, and Vienna in only 45 minutes by rail. Bratislava and Vienna are the closest capital cities in Europe (if you overlook Rome and Vatican City), so it seems a shame to see one without the other!

The trains are basic, but clean and comfortable – which is more than can be said about some of the services in the UK – and when we travelled, they were not overcrowded either, despite our journeys being around 9am and 6pm! We crawled north-west over the countryside with views over farmland and vineyards for miles. You can see in the distance the foothills of the Little Carpathians, which offer some great hiking if you like a daytrip out into rural Slovakia.

The train pulls into Wien Hauptbanhof, a large modern station serving the city of Vienna, and a 30-minute walk brings you down into Innere Stadt, the main ‘old town’, encircled by the Ringstrasse Boulevard. This is the area where you’ll discover Gothic St. Stephen’s Cathedral and Stephanplatz, where I found a stall serving steaming hot goulash, ladled into a hollowed out crusty bread roll.

We spent a few hours wandering up and down Kärntner Strasse and Graben, historic pedestrianised shopping streets lined with fancy shops and cafes and Baroque architecture, then stumbled over to the City Hall, where the biggest Christmas market in Vienna is held annually in the gardens it overlooks, with over 150 stalls selling handicrafts, festive foods and wooden toys.

Not only did we find an abundance of Christmas stalls, we found one of the best ice-skating rinks I’ve ever seen, with tracks and paths meandering around the gardens, offering an endless number of routes beneath the trees – it was almost enough to inspire me to put on a pair of skates, maybe a few mulled wines would have swayed the decision, but the thought of spending several hours the next day on a budget airline seat with a bruised bum was forefront in my mind!

We caught the train back across the border into Slovakia, our Euros definitely depleted after a day in the pricey Austrian capital. To say that only thirty-something miles covers the distance between these two cities, the contrasts were plain to see. Regal Vienna with its designer boutiques, swanky wine bars and fancy cafes serving perfectly-polished Sachertorte, versus its understated little sister Bratislava, with it’s cosy pubs and quaint cobbled streets. It’s like spending all day dressed up in your best outfit before coming home and putting on your comfy slippers by the fire!