This is another very walkable city. Yesterday, we headed up the hill behind our house.

First to the huge Slavin war memorial that is visible for miles around. It commemorates the Red Army's victory over German forces here in April 1945, and it serves as a cemetery for the almost 7,000 Soviet soldiers who died fighting for control of the city and surrounding region:







From there we walked on to Horsky Park, which was full of birdsong on this quite mild morning:



After dipping back into the city to tick off a couple of jobs (changing the last of our HUF into EUR, at the usual really horrible rate, and printing out our next lot of rail tickets, for reasons we can't quite fathom, but that's what we were told to do), we headed for Bratislava's very extensive Transport Museum.

What I will probably remember most clearly about this museum is that it was incredibly COLD. Remember I said it was quite mild outside? Well, these former goods sheds felt as though they had been kitted out for storing frozen meat.

Nevertheless, it is a very photogenic place:





The car below has a really extraordinary story:


A film-maker named Jaro Rihak was making a feature about a liner called the Pentcho. On board when it left Bratislava for Haifa in 1940 was a man called Zoltan Schalk, whose man-about-town way of life was a cover for a more important activity: enabling young Jews to migrate to Palestine. Looking for a Skoda to use in one of the scenes (Zoltan was a Skoda representative), the film team spotted the car in the museum (it's a Skoda Popular model, dating from 1938). Extraordinarily, a few phone calls revealed that the car had belonged to Zoltan Schalk himself... He too had migrated to Palestine in 1940. So, 77 years later, the actor playing Zoltan would be sitting in the real Zoltan's car... Five hundred people from the Pentcho, says Rihak, survived because of the courage of people like Zoltan. (See here for the rest of the story.)

Outside (where it's MUCH WARMER), a number of trains are rowed up:





Today, following the heads-up of Emily Lush, we set off across the river to Petrzalka. This southerly bit of Bratislava is "the most densely populated residential district anywhere in Central Europe [and] the home of the highest concentration of panelaky apartment blocks anywhere in the region". Panelaky? Well, they're the kind of pre-fab concrete apartment blocks that were erected wholesale during the communist era in eastern Europe. Petrzalka's panelaky started to go up in 1977.

A concentration such as we have here could easily look really, really dismal, but it doesn't -- because someone came up with the idea of painting them. Such a simple step... According to the comments from insiders responding to Lush's post, the form the painting eventually took followed the initiative of each individual block (ie, there was no "master" vision), and part of the motivation was insulation (after the coating was applied to the concrete facades, they were repainted in line with what the residents wanted).

The results are impressive:







There's a railway station over here, too (from which you can catch a train to Vienna, although our train to Vienna goes from our local hub):


Inside the station, there are toilets (everyone needs to know these things...). They are quite a bargain (EUR 0.20), although we both got more than we bargained for in terms of cubicle neighbours...

Opposite, there's a really nice baker's, where you can buy good coffee and awesome sandwiches.

From there, we walked back across the river, provisioning en route for tomorrow's journey (via Vienna to Ljubljana).

One little coda. Here's the Neolog Synagogue memorial, which we photographed on Sunday:


The synagogue stood on this site until 1969. So it survived World War II, but was demolished to make way for the bridge...

The Jewish community had a tough time here before and during World War II, just as they did in Bucharest and Budapest.

Today we literally stumbled across one of the "Stolpersteine" (stumbling blocks) that I'd read about. These are small brass plaques, inserted in pavements in front of houses from which Jews disappeared during the Nazi period. I'd read about them in Hungary. Today's was the first I'd actually seen:


Friedrich Weinwurm was "a key figure of Slovak modernist architecture". He died in mysterious circumstances, probably while attempting to escape Slovakia in 1942. How tragic, how mind-numbingly tragic...