Audi Factory Tour

So why Győr as a vacation destination? Because I wanted to take the Audi factory tour!

My TT was built here. It's the only Hungarian-made car I've ever owned. And since this city was one of the very options for me to pick up a rental car for the drive to Eger, it seemed like it would be fun to take the factory tour. Tours are limited to 20 participants and they only offer the English language tour once a week, Wednesdays at noon. So, way back in April, I went onto the Audi Hungarian website (audi.hu) to register for the Wednesday that I'd be in Hungary and could pass through Győr.

It was booked.

Five months in advance. I asked the General Manager at Audi Henderson if he could pull some strings all the way to Hungary. Last week, he forwarded me an email from some official-sounding women in the Audi marketing department in Germany. She said a spot was reserved for me and she reminded the GM to tell me that the tour would start at 12:30 p.m., not 12:00 noon. Sounds good! So I drive up to the very well-marked Audi factory on the outskirts of Győr.

I park the Mercedes. I get there at about 11:55 a.m. because I didn't know how long it would take to drive there from where I picked up the rental car (answer: about three minutes). I go to the front security desk where they direct me to the souvenir shop down a corridor. I tell them that I'm there for the 12:30 p.m. tour. I get stares.

Turns out, there was no 12:30 tour, only the 12:00 tour, which was going to be in German becaue it was booked by a group. There is no English language tour scheduled for this week. They have no record of me having a reservation. It does not look good for me. But, thankfully, I must have looked pathetic because the girls at the Audi plant look pity on me. Whatever works! They told me to be back at 2:00 p.m. for a private factory tour. The only problem was that they were not assembling cars today and that only the engine assembly area would be functioning.

I returned at 2:00 p.m. and got my two-hour tour after all. We were joined by two Hungarian speakers, but the tour was conducted in English. It was a fun tour. No photos because of intellectual property and industrial espionage and all that. What struck me the most is just how clean the factory was. Sparkly even. I told the girls after the tour that that was what most surprised me and they said, "It's the Germans." It wasn't the traditional assembly line. It was a series of work stations, with an under-construction engine pausing at each work station for about 90 seconds at a time in some areas, longer in others. There were some robots at work, but a lot of people operating high-tech equipment. It was not what I expected a car factory to look like.

The reason that car assembly was down is that the Győr plant assembles only two vehicles: the TT and the A3 Cabrio. Yes, in Europe, Audi sells the A3 as a convertible. I saw one in the parking lot at the hotel in Győr where I picked up the Mercedes:

I want one! I saw a few more in the factory parking lot. No surprise there.

There were a few nearly finished vehicles on the production floor of the assembly area. Just no work going on. They also were assembling Audis in some wacky colors that we don't see stateside, like Orange. Not the tasteful Burnt Orange you see on occasion, but Tennessee Volunteer Orange.

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.