Trifter

Usually arriving in a new city gives me an awesome buzz like no other, the excitement I get from being in a completely new place that I know very little about is comparable to the excitement a dog gets when he gets a new squeaky toy! and I personally love getting my teeth around a brand new toy, chewing all the cultural fun I can out of it!  However it wasn’t like that for me with Bratislava, we had just come from Krakow in Poland, which was in my mind a near perfect city, the mixture of culture and nightlife was perfect for me, I was able to see the sites, read about the history in the day time, and then go and party on down in the evening. Maybe I was just expecting every new city to live up to the high standards that Krakow had set, In my mind, now every city had to leave me near enough completely satisfied or it wasn’t a worthwhile trip there! We were dropped off just outside on the old town in Bratislava, I remember looking to my left, then to my right, then in front and then behind and quite prune-like of me I thought:

“humph! Not exactly Krakow is it?”

 …20 minutes later and we had wandered into the old town centre and I’m thinking.

“Oh! What an absolute boob I was 20 minutes ago, this place is amazing!”

The old town was fantastic! it reminded me of some crazy little village ripped right out of a fairy tale, and I suddenly realised, ok, maybe this isn’t Krakow, but its still amazing, every new city has its own character and charm that you become fond of, you should never judge the city based on first impressions. It was in this Fairy Tale village that me and my friends would find ourselves in a battle of epic proportions! …really…we did.

Old Town

We were staying at a pleasant Hostel called Hostel Patio, as per usual we pretty much instantly made friends with a few of the fellow travellers, meeting and trading your travel stories gives you instant rapport with any traveller, one in particular stood out to us, a chippy Australian guy called Dave, he seemed to have hundreds of little stories that were made to get everyone laughing, the strange thing about Dave was, after every single can of lager he drank, his stories seemed to get cruder and cruder, after about 8 cans he was on such a level of crudeness that I didn’t think possible, eventually, Dave decided that he was going to take us out to some of the clubs, which we all agreed would be a rather good idea.
…2 hours or so later and we were absolutely exhausted, a mixture of the heat, lack of food, alcohol and lack of sleep had taken its toll on us, we needed to stop and get some kind of refreshments soon, we’d been following Dave to this club for so long that we were willing to walk into anything as long as it served drinks.

Well as luck would have it, we did stumble across a pub, it seemed quite a small place with the entrance being up a small flight of stairs, at the top of the stairs, a couple of guys were having some sort of heated discussion, so heated I’m sure I could see sweat patch’s on one of the guys lower backs (to be fair to him though, it was quite a hot day). At the time I wasn’t really in the mood to land myself in the middle of a sweaty battle of brawn’s, but I wasn’t about to let these two stop me getting my well deserved drink!
I remember as we walked passed the two guys and into the bar area they didn‘t even seem to notice us pass. Once we were inside there was definitely a strange atmosphere, there was roughly fifteen people on one side of the pub and a different fifteen on the other, a very worried looking bartender was looking on from behind his little fort, I didn’t think much of it at the time because I had just realised that I suddenly really needed to use the toilet, so as I scampered off to relieve myself, my friends went to the bar to get the drinks in.
Just as I was about to leave the toilet I reached out my hand to the door handle and just as my fingers touched the door handle.

BOOM, SMASH, SCARY NOISE, FIGHTING, GROWLING, UGGH, OIIII!!, OOOOHH, UMPH!

Now I don’t know what you guys would have thought after hearing that, but I quickly recoiled my hand from the toilet door handle and thought:

“should I go out there? I can probably just wait it out, that’s what a sensible man would do”

WAIT! My friends are at the bar! I can’t just leave them stranded in the middle of what sounded like a scene from “Green Street”, so I took my chances and whisked the door open, what laid before my eyes could only be described as a Wild West Saloon free-for-all, there were tables upside down, chunks of glass all over the floor, one guy even picked up a chair to use as a weapon, fortunately someone grabbed it off him before he was able to cause any serious chair related injuries, the only thing that could have made it more wild west was if a guy was swinging on the lights on the ceiling and some other guy was about to get himself slid across the bar, breaking a row of pint glasses with his face as he went.
There was something inside me at first that thought, Cool, I’m in a crazy bar fight in Slovakia, but before long I realised I could soon get dragged into all of this, and that wont exactly be very cool now would it?

There! My friends are over at the bar, looking rather scared as the fight whirls around them, the fight now seems to be gathered in a small area and moving around the pub, it reminded me of those old cartoons where the fights were just balls of dust and occasionally fists and legs fly out of it, I saw my opening and ran over to them, the fight had began to filter through the door now, leaving a few battered and bruised people inside, the cloud of pain was now out in the streets and dissipating quite rapidly.

 Pain Cloud 

We eventually get to leave the bar after the barmen has calmed himself down. Everyone we ask had a different opinion on why the fight started and who was involved, We all decided that we should probably get our walk on back to the Hostel and review exactly what the hell happened, as we walked we got to hear some more of Dave’s crude stories and I couldn’t help but think:

“ we didn’t even get that bloody drink!”

 …drinkless