Bratislava, Slovakia: unexpectedly lovely

Bratislava was unexpectedly beautiful— for a capitol city I had not heard of before, I was charmed. Perhaps because it’s in the shadow of the more well known Prague and Budapest, finding Bratislava seemed like finding something unexpected and hidden. My first night there, I wandered into Old Town, and found a stage set up...

Velvet Divorce: on drinking both fernet stock and borovička

Last night, I drank both the Czech Republic’s and Slovakia’s national drinks— fernet stock and borovička— and thought about both political history and my parent’s divorce. My folks split up in the early 1990s, the years the maps were changing— the time of the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the official Czechoslovakia...