Bratislava

Hallo!

On Sunday afternoon around 1 pm we arrived to the last stop of our trip, Bratislava, Slovakia! At this point everyone was already a bit tired from the trip, so we were hoping just to spend couple of hours getting to know Bratislava. But actually for our surprise it turned out that we need to stay in Bratislava for 9 hour, since the bus drivers need to rest.....Nobody was happy about this and we all wanted to leave earlier, but apparently it is in the German law, so we had to spent the 9 hours in Bratislava.

Our day began with a sightseeing tour. The guide of the tour was really nice and she knew a lot of stuff about the history, only downside was that it was really cold there, only +8°C and really windy...(haha not really cold for Finnish people, but we are used to the German weather!) The tour lasted only about an hour and that was actually enough, since the city was quite small. And now some pictures of the city!

Danube river

St. Martin Cathedral

St. Martin Cathedral

Holocaust Memorial

Embassy of the United States 

Advertising Nokia Lumia in Bratislava :D

Bratislava Opera

The oldest hotel in Bratislava, Carlton

Our group for the sightseeing tour!

At the end of the tour the guide recommended us a good buffet restaurant in the city center, so after the tour we decided to go there! It was a nice place and the food was okay too. The buffet cost 6€ and did not include drinks.

After eating we all just spent some time there, because they had free wifi :D At some point we decided to continue our way. We wanted to go shopping, because we had already basically seen the whole city. The guide recommended us a new shopping mall just a 10 minutes walk away from the restaurant! Also during the tour she only recommended us different shopping malls, apparently there is nothing else to do in Bratislava :D We found the shopping center and spent the evening there.

The mall closed at 9 pm and our bus was scheduled to leave at 10.45, so we needed to find a warm place to pass the time...surprisingly we ended up in a McDonald's where also all the others from our bus were :D:D

The bus didn't leave on time, surprise! And there were also some troubles at the border between Slovakia and Czech Republic. We had a presentation on Monday afternoon at 4 pm, so we started to worry if we are going to make it at all since the journey was going to last about 16 hours. We got closer and closer to Köln but not nearly on time so in Bochum we decided to take train in order to arrive in Köln on time. Luckily we made it to the presentation but not thanks to the bus!

Originally we were supposed to arrive back to Köln already at 9 am. Nobody informed us that the schedule is going to change, They only told us about this on Monday morning..and they never apologized to us about the delay. This trip didn't leave that good impression of the organizers. Despite the difficulties the cities were really beautiful and we had a great time! We think this might have been our last trip :(

The next post is going to be a comparison between the two student trip organizations we have used: pm2am student trips and Studifahrten.

Bis bald!
Jenna&Maiju