full size / buy print    

In the morning it was raining. I walked into town and sat in a cafe for a while, enjoying a spectacularly large espresso. When it began to ease off, I went up to the castle to see what the views were like.

Bratislava is not much of a beauty. The old town is nice, but it’s small, and the rest of the city is an ugly sprawl. Nowhere is it uglier and more sprawling than Petržalka, across the river from the main part of town. From the castle, I could see a terrifying expanse of concrete blocks, stretching away into the distance. Built in the communist era, the blocks looked the very epitome of housing in an authoritarian state.