Vacation 2013: It Came From The Cookie Jar

 

The view of Casco Antiguo, Panama City, Panama, from the Amador Causeway. At dusk.

Vacation 2013. Literally, it did come from the cookie jar. Or, to be more accurate, it was what was left over after 29 other vacations were pulled from the cookie jar. From Capadoccia, Turkey, to Sarajevo, Bosnia, to the Loop Road around Iceland, to, finally, Nashville, Tennessee USA, the survivor in the Cookie Jar o' Potential Vacation Destinations was:
Montevideo, Uruguay.

So what am I doing sitting in my room in a Country Inn & Suites in Panama City? (The real one.  The one in Panama.  Not Florida.)

Country Inn & Suites in Panama City. It looks just like the Country Inns in Wisconsin!

Because the Country Inn & Suites in Panama City doesn't just look like the Country Inns & Suites in Wisconsin.  The Panama City Country Inn & Suites is right alongside the world-famous (you may have heard of it) Panama Canal.  That's the view from my room.  Like it?

Puente de las Americas: the Bridge Over The Pacific Entrance Into the Panama Canal

Here's the same view, from the same room, now with ships!

Same Puente de las Americas: Now with Ships!

Anyway, I decided to stop in Panama to break up the long long flight down to Montevideo.  I'm flying Copa, the Panamanian national carrier, which hubs out of Panama City.  I would've had to change planes here, and I will on the return leg, so I figured why not see the canal that everyone's been talking about.

The flight was uneventful.  Which, to me, in the modern air of jet transportation is just about "best case scenario."  The flight left at 5:00AM.  Which meant that I had to be at the airport at 3:00AM.  Which meant that it was easier to just stay up all night until boarding time and try to catch some winks of the flight.  (Or at least it seemed like a good idea when I committed to it the evening before.)  (It got less good as ideas go when the clock got to 1:00AM.)  (It seemed like a very very bad idea by about 2:00AM.)

The good thing about flying out of the new Terminal 3 at 3:00AM is: absolutely no security line.  I could leisurely take off my shoes and belt without anyone huffing behind me.  I didn't even feel nervous about sending my money supply through the X-ray machine.

I slept some.  But when morning light broke, the flight crew did something I've never seen a flight crew do early in the morning.  They broke out the booze and toddled down the center aisle serving up free cocktails at the breakfast hour.  I needed some coffee to prevent a major caffeine headache from brewing and, weirdly enough, they had no coffee.  Whiskey?  Yes.  Rum?  De claro.  Coffee?  Nada.

Just an old tree I thought looked cool on the grounds of the Country Inn

Bratislava: Walking to the Castle

The afternoon plan was to walk up to Bratislava Castle, Bratislavský hrad for those following along in the Slovak. And when I say up, I mean up. It was a steep uphill walk!

I first had to walk under the highway with that UFO bridge:

Then around it:

Past St. Martin's Cathedral, where, as I said, the Communists built the dang highway right next to the church (and apparently razed the old Jewish Quarter, too, as part of the process):

I walked up the long hill to the castle and thought about Bratislava. Bratislava is definitely a more manageably sized city than Prague. Prague is huge with a massive tourist quarter. Bratislava is more like a mid-sized state capital, like Boise or Madison, in that there is a nice walkable core where a visitor can easily get to anything he or she wants to see. The Madison comparison is apt for another reason. Slovakia is a lot like the Wisconsin of Central Europe. They love their dairy products in Slovakia. Cheese. And the ice cream is very good. Much better than in Prague. Prague is a terrible ice cream town. Wretched. The ice cream there is all grainy, like a tub of cheap supermarket ice cream that's been left in the fridge too long. Awesome hoppy beer in Prague. But nasty ice cream. And that's important in a town. In Bratislava, the ice cream is smooth and rich and tasty, just as you would expect from the Dairyland of the Old Warsaw Pact.

Maybe I was getting oxygen-deprivation on this long high climb. Maybe that's the reason why my brain went off on that tangent as I climbed the hill. Finally, I reached the gates of the castle:

Impressive gates. The King of Slovakia does not live in Bratislava Castle (presuming there even ever was a King of Slovkia and they didn't just have Hungarians and Habsburgs crammed down their throats for several hundred years). However, the Parliament Building is right next door:

I was somewhat disappointed that the Slovakian Parliament meets in such a boring modern building. Even though Slovakia is very young as an independent nation, couldn't they have found some 700-year-old building to seat their government in? By the way, they have a nice little memorial to Alexander Dubček, an actual good and honorable Communist. Dubček was a Slovak native who was responsible for the "Prague Spring" in Czechoslovakia in 1968, which crushed by the Soviets.

The castle actually is somewhat gutted, although there are exhibits from the Slovak National Museum on site.


The best thing about the castle grounds are the views, it being situated high above the city and all.

It's the UFO bridge again!

See those windmills on the other side of the Danube, just right of the center of the picture, on the horizon line? That's Austria. The Austrian frontier is quite close to downtown Bratislava.

And now, before I talk about supper, some pictures of trams:


Apropos of nothing. I just like taking pictures of trolleys. I think they're the most photogenic of transportation means. Except for this, of course:

That's my car! On the walk up (and again on the walk back down) from the castle, I saw my car. It's an Audi A3 TDI in Meteor Gray.

Anyway, speaking of trams, I forgot to mention something about the Prague subway. They're trolleys! I don't know if you can see it in this picture I took inside one of the metro stations, but if you look closely, above the tracks, are guide wires:

I never noticed that in any other subway I've ridden. It's not like I've ridden in all that many (Washington, New York, Atlanta, San Francisco, Madrid, and Budapest are the only others I can recall. Boston maybe, too.) Well, I found it interesting.

Anyway, I had supper tonight -- my final supper in the Slavic half of my trip -- it's all Magyar from this point forward -- at a nice place called the 1 Slovak Pub. I did not take my camera to take pictures of my meal because I appear to have a 4GB brain in a terabyte world. I ordered the Bryndzové halušky s klobásou. You don't need to depend on me for a picture of it. Here's a picture from someone else's Bratislava travel blog: http://www.travelblog.org/Photos/577299

As I said, the Slovakians love their cheese. These are potato dumplings (gnocchi or spaetzle equivalent) drowning in smoked sheep's cheese, topped with fried sausage that tasted like a Polish kielbasa. Supposedly there was cabbage / sauerkraut in there, but I couldn't taste it. Best meal of the trip so far. Best dish of 2011 anywhere so far, I believe. Definitely best dish of 2011 anywhere but the M Buffet. Wash down he halusky with a couple of dark Zlatý Bažants and a good time was had by all. And to think I was thinking of skipping the Slovak food for tonight.

One last photo before I turn in for the night. These statues commemorate the Slovak National Uprising, which may have put them on the side of the really really bad guys in WWII.

I do like the statues, even though they are a somewhat on the side of socialist realism.