Day 10: Where we're going we don't need Shower Curtains

Today I woke up fairly early and was finished with breakfast before anyone else arrived. The food was not unique, but was still nice considering I rarely eat breakfast in Ann Arbor. At 9 o’clock we left to visit the outskirts of Bratislava. First we visited a castle from the 3^rd Century, or at least what was left of it. The castle is on a mountain by the Danube river which separates Austria from Slovakia. It was great to see the entire countryside.

Next, we went into the city and toured the village. It was very similar to Budapest, but the interesting thing was the small festival that was going on. Even in the middle of the morning on a Monday, the city square was playing loud music and dance acts were performing. A 6-year-old even did some cool break dance moves.

After watching for a bit, we headed to the Bratislava University of Economics, where will be studying this week. We ate lunch, and then it was off to class. We were taught by Professor Ferencikova, who actually taught for a while as a visiting professor at Michigan. The topic was privatization following the fall of socialist governments in the late 80s. What made the class interesting were the illustrations, all of which were funny, but the last one made all of us lose it. The professor used me as an example and suggested that if she and I were married, and I was a important CEO or government official, I could use my position of power to sell public entities to her company as a form of privatization. Many people got a hoot out of the way she described it, which I would do a poor job replicating (just understand it was funny).

At the end of class we returned to the hotel before heading into town around 7pm. We were meeting up with local students from the University we are visiting, and they took us to a nice pub. I had sheep’s cheese with noodles, which tasted like Mac and Cheese, with a smoky texture. Of course we had a Slovakian beer, and learned how to properly cheers one another.

After the pub we started walking to a night club…on the way we past a familiar face, but I couldn’t remember his name or where I knew him from. Minutes later we bumped into Brain Wanglin and his friends Jay and Dan. I knew Jay from Poli Sci 300 in the fall, and I lived down the hall from Brain last summer. It was a great reunion, and we would see them again later that evening.

We continued to “Channels,” a three story night club, where we got drinks with the local students. It was a pretty good time and they played music everyone knew. Again, everything was cheap and it was even better when Brian and company joined us later in the evening. We stayed out a little later than we intended, but we got home around 12:30, and all was well.