a good day

So we had made some tentative plans to go to Vienna sometime this weekend or next, and we woke up on Saturday, and just decided to go. The weather was mostly nice, and we still had time to catch the train. So we got all our stuff ready and left. After a few miscommunications by the bus schedule and some frantic bus catching, we finally made it to the train station with about 5 minutes to spare. We boarded the train and were off for another country.

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Billa

This should be on the Slovak flag.

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Billa is a grocery store and you see every other person walking down the street holding at least one of these at all times. One, because people are always at the grocery store. Two, because you have to buy them when you check out, so no one wants to pay for them. Three, because these bags are made of titanium and could hold 5 pointy gallons of milk, I have no doubt. They are worth every penny, er, euro.

SK update

Wow, I can’t believe it’s already been 2 months since we’ve arrived!  Time is cruising by but December still seems like a long way away.

We’re slowly moving outside of our bubble, although our day to day routine keeps us within it most of the time (which is why we don’t have many new pics).  The process of applying for our visa’s has broadened our scope a bit though. Today we all went to get the required physical exams necessary for temporary stay permit/visa. My colleague had a terrible experience with this, so I was expecting scenes from the movie Hostel;  dirty medical equipment in a dark office in the basement of a rundown building. Maybe it was my low expectations, but it wasn’t bad at all. He must have paved the way for us, or maybe having Skye with us forced a more proper establishment from the lady taking us around.

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random pictures

Here are a few pictures I’ve taken recently.

The first set is from Slavín, a war memorial and cemetery on the hillside that commemorates the liberation of Bratislava from the Germans in WWII. It’s crazy to think that the history of the war that you hear about on TV and read about in books actually happened here. It also has a really good view of the city (I have more pics, but I want to make a panorama of them before posting them all).

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The first image is of the memorial itself. It really is fairly tall, more so than I had imagined. The second image is a view of Bratislava looking east across the city. The third image is a view of Bratislava Castle, and if you look closely on the left, you can see the top of St. Martin’s Cathedral (not taken from Slavín, but from a break in the houses on the walk back home. On a side note, there are some amazing houses up here.)

And the second set is, of course, pics of our little one who is just too cute not to photograph every second. In the set is her first bump on the noggin that she got the other day. She likes to stand next to the shelves we have on the ground here, and pull out everything she can and throw it on the floor. She was doing that, and was standing on a book, which slipped out from under her, and she fell and began to cry. We consoled her from the couch, because she often falls and doesn’t hit anything, just scares herself, and that’s what we thought happened. When we looked over a few moments later, she looked at us and smiled with a bruise on her head.

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The first image shows her little bump on the noggin, not bad, but it was her first one. The second image shows her new thing lately, where she tilts her head to one side and looks at you in a shy, cute kinda way. The third image is her in the tub with bubbles, which she wasn’t sure of at first, but is starting to enjoy more and more each time.

Well… that’s all for now, more to come, I’m sure.