Welcome to Bratislava!

I arrived in Bratislava, Slovakia on Tuesday at 12:30 pm local time.  Two of the lawyers at the Human Rights League were nice enough to pick me up, drive me straight to my dorm, then navigate all the administrative tasks / paperwork I needed to be a resident there for 2 months.  The accommodations are really inexpensive, but it's quite an experience.

I live in what I could best describe as a post-post-communist housing project.  That is, it's a dorm that was built rather recently but still has its fair share of drab architecture and small spaces.  My first night here was really, really hard.  I realized just how disconnected I was from the world (I didn't have internet yet), and it didn't help that I was in a really depressing place.  2 days later, I'm still very much working on feeling comfortable in this room.  

The city is beautiful.  I am going to have to spend as much time as possible in the city before it gets dark. This is a picture of the cathedral in Bratislava, with a building right next to it that the local art students apparently like to decorate.  I'll include a picture of that, too.

The post-communist theme runs through a lot of my experiences.  Well really, the post-WWII theme.  I took a 4-hour walk (with a break for dinner at the very, very western-looking mall) with a law professor from Trnava today.  She taught most of the lawyers who work at the Human Rights League.  She was so kind--she showed me all around the city, and one of the things she told me was that back in the 1920's, Bratislava was truly a multi-cultural city.

There were Slovak residents, but there were also plenty of Germans and Hungarians.  Before the war, there was a thriving Jewish population.  This statue is a memorial to that population.  Bratislava still has a Jewish community, but it is much smaller than it used to be.

The picture below really struck me.  It's an engraving of a synagogue on a wall right next to that statue, with a reflection of the present-day town.

It was really refreshing to walk around, especially with a new friend.  Here are some pictures of the city.

The river Danube

Lots of underpasses and overpasses

Here's me at the Presidential Palace.  When the flags are down, the President is away!  When foreign flags are up, they have visitors!  This is apparently "just like the White House."  The difference?  Security here is a fence plus two guys in funny outfits.

This is the pathway down to the building that functions as city hall (the pink building in the center).  Official guests to the city can meet here, and so can patrons of the concerts held here on occasion.

That's all for now.  Exciting plans include: hanging out this weekend with some French students I met at the office, and planning for a trip to Vienna next weekend as well as a trip to Prague the weekend after that.  I'm posting these plans in part to hold myself accountable for actually carrying them out.