Another city-hopping adventure is over and I am looking back to a great week of discovering Prague, Bratislava and Vienna. My travel buddy this time: my friend Cody from Los Angeles. Finally, he made it to Switzerland 🙂

After an easy-going week at home of discovering music spots in Lucerne, we flew to Prague for a couple of days. Great architecture, good food and an even better Gin & Tonic bar – but, please, do not order drink #39 – a decent taste of toilet cleaner; I guess that’s the potential risk of having a choice of more than 60 different Gin based drinks. 🙂

Off to Bratislava! Did you hear about Elisabeth Bathory? She was a Hungarian noblewoman and serial killer who lived in the 16th century. She has even been labelled by Guinness World Records as the most prolific female murderer. Her castle where she was imprisoned and where she died was our day-trip destination. Cody took me literally to the middle of nowhere. The castle ruins are 1 hour away from the train station. No bus, no taxi, no people on the streets – welcome to ghost-town Cachtice. After keeping our families posted on our current location (well, you never know) we “found” a friendly local man who organized a taxi to get to the ruins. Lucky us, he spoke Italian… After a short taxi ride and a little hike, we enjoyed the view from the top of the ruins. A goosebumps moment included standing in a dark and humid cave looking at some old torture instruments! The artificial bones didn’t make it any more pleasant. 🙂

Back in Bratislava we wandered around. I really liked the old town with its nice cafes and streets.

Musician Cody was looking forward to our next/last stop: Vienna! My sister joined us for the weekend and we stayed in a kitschy hotel room in “Sissi-Style”. Already back home we booked tickets for classical concerts. It was great fun to enjoy them in jeans and sneakers 🙂  The visits of the Sigmund Freud, Beethoven and Mozart Museum where on our to-do list too – absolutely worth the visit. And we had traditional Schnitzel! Not to forget about our Uber-taxi-ride in a Jaguar to urgently get some fast-food for starving Cody 😉

We had a blast! Thanks Cody for your visit and for being my travel companion.