From Football Ultras to Mozart: Budapest, Bratislava & Vienna by Train

“Dude, we gotta go. It’s not safe here.”

A guide had come back to find me in a bar underneath a coach station in Bratislava. I’d started the evening on a Halloween pub crawl, but somewhere along the way I’d stopped doing the crawl part and stayed behind drinking shots of something vaguely like gin with a group of Slovak men. They spoke no English, I spoke no Slovak, and neither side seemed particularly bothered by this arrangement. I was enjoying myself enough that I hadn't even noticed the rest of the pub crawl had left.

It wasn't quite how I'd planned the trip. Then again, I'd planned the trip mainly because I'd worked out an easy way of visiting three countries in one go.

Three countries by train

I've always enjoyed counting the countries I've visited. I know the number doesn't tell you how well you know a place, and spending a night somewhere clearly isn't the same as travelling around it for a month, but I still enjoy seeing how much of the world I've managed to experience.

That was partly how this trip came about. I'd been playing around with Skyscanner's multi-city search and realised I could fly into Budapest, travel overland through Bratislava and Vienna, then fly home from Austria rather than returning to Hungary. It was cheap, straightforward and gave me three capitals in three countries without having to backtrack.

Budapest. Bratislava. Vienna.

The route looked almost suspiciously easy on a map. What I hadn't accounted for was that the parts I'd remember years later would have very little to do with the route I'd planned.

One night in Budapest

I only gave myself one night in Budapest, which I now know wasn't remotely enough. I did at least manage one cultural activity before the drinking started: a GuruWalk through the city. I've done their walking tours in several places now and they've rarely let me down.

What stayed with me wasn't one particular monument but the architecture and the amount of history sitting behind it. Budapest suffered enormous destruction during the Second World War and was again the scene of fighting during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, when Soviet forces entered the city to crush the uprising. Walking past these enormous, elaborate buildings while hearing about what Budapest had been through made their condition more impressive. I wasn't looking at a city that had somehow passed untouched through the twentieth century; people had restored much of what war, occupation and neglect had damaged.

That was essentially the end of my cultural education in Budapest because I went back to the hostel and started drinking. At the bar I met Arjo, a Dutch traveller, alongside a large group of young Americans. Arjo and I quickly joined forces to take the piss out of them over the cultural differences between Americans and Europeans, which apparently was enough of a foundation for a friendship.

We headed out into Budapest together and discovered that we'd independently planned to travel to Bratislava the following morning. We agreed to meet for breakfast and carry on together, despite having known each other for only a few hours.

At breakfast we found €200 on the floor. We didn't know whose it was, and eventually decided we'd split it and use it towards our Halloween night out in Bratislava. At the time this seemed like an excellent development.

An Englishman, a Dutchman and a Slovak get on a train

It sounds like the start of a joke.

The Englishman and the Dutchman couldn't work out how to buy a train ticket.

We were standing at the station in Budapest struggling with what should have been the fairly simple task of getting ourselves to Bratislava when, as if he worked for the Slovakian tourist board, a Slovak guy appeared and showed us where to buy one. He was heading the same way and ended up travelling with us.

The train itself looked like something left over from the Cold War. I couldn't tell you what model it was, when it had been built or whether there was actually anything remotely Communist about it. That was simply what it looked like to me at the time: an old train rattling east through a part of Europe whose twentieth-century history I'd only really encountered through films, books and museums.

So an Englishman, a Dutchman and a Slovak really did get on a train.

There isn't a punchline yet.

Halloween in Bratislava

We checked into the Elephant's Nest, a party hostel in Bratislava, and were almost immediately invited on a Halloween pub crawl. We barely had time to do anything beyond dropping our bags before heading back out, and naturally we dragged our Slovak from the railway station along with us.

The pub crawl had been sold on taking us to places tourists wouldn't normally visit. That's a claim I've heard plenty of times while travelling, usually shortly before being taken to a bar full of other tourists wearing the same wristband. This one actually delivered.

One of the stops was a bar at the coach station beneath Bratislava's UFO bridge. There wasn't anything polished about it and nobody seemed particularly concerned with whether foreigners would like it. I ended up drinking shots of something vaguely like gin with some locals who spoke no English, and whatever communication we were managing seemed perfectly adequate once alcohol became involved.

I liked it enough that I didn't notice the tour had moved on.

Eventually one of the guides came back looking for me.

“Dude, we gotta go. It's not safe here.”

I still don't know exactly what he thought was going to happen to me. The men I'd been drinking with seemed perfectly happy to have me there, but I reluctantly left them and followed him to the next stop.

That turned out to be another fairly shit bar beside a thrift shop. By this point our group had expanded to include more Brits, Australians and whoever else we'd collected during the evening. Several people drunkenly ran into the thrift shop looking for something to wear for Halloween, which presented a particular problem for me because I'm 6'4" and spontaneous fancy dress generally assumes you're considerably smaller.

The closest thing I could find to fitting me was a Mrs Claus dress and hat.

So that's what I wore.

I spent the rest of Halloween wandering around Bratislava dressed as a very tall, bearded Mrs Claus with a Dutchman I'd met the previous night, the Slovak we'd picked up at the railway station and an expanding group of travellers we'd accumulated along the way. The dress slowly disintegrated as the night went on. By the following morning, most of us weren't doing much better.

Drinking ourselves sober with the Slovan ultras

Despite the hangover, the following day our increasingly international group went to watch Slovan Bratislava play at home. Our solution to feeling horrendous was to continue drinking in the hope that we could somehow drink ourselves sober. I can't recommend the science behind it.

Without intending to, we ended up sitting amongst the Slovan ultras. It was freezing, yet the supporters around us sang through virtually the entire match, banging drums and letting off flares. There weren't even any away supporters there, which somehow made it more impressive. They weren't responding to another set of fans or putting on a performance for anyone else; this was simply what they did.

Slovan were playing MFK Zemplín Michalovce and absolutely battered them 5–1. My memory hadn't exaggerated that part: the match was on 1 November 2023 and finished exactly as violently one-sided as I remembered it.

At some point during the game I lit a cigarette and a steward came over to tell me off. Fair enough. Before the conversation could go much further, an enormous shirtless Slovan supporter noticed what was happening. I should emphasise again that it was freezing.

He started shouting at the steward until the steward left us alone. Then he came over to me and explained the stadium rules as he understood them.

“This is our stadium. You smoke.”

Apparently the matter was settled.

Being aggressively defended for smoking should probably have made me feel vindicated. Instead, watching a large half-naked Slovak man argue for my right to have a cigarette made me think that perhaps quitting wasn't such a bad idea.

The thing from Bratislava I actually brought home

That evening was considerably quieter. We went to Bratislava Flagship to try traditional Slovak food, although quite a lot of what arrived was creamy and heavy, which isn't really my thing. Then I tried bryndzové halušky: small potato dumplings with bryndza sheep's cheese, traditionally topped with bacon.

I loved it.

After everything Bratislava had thrown at me in roughly 48 hours, it was a plate of potato dumplings that became the thing I deliberately took home. I still make halušky now, which is probably a better souvenir than anything I could have bought in a gift shop.

There is one Bratislava conversation that happened much later. On another trip, while travelling through Tallinn, I met a Slovak-British guy and mentioned that I'd visited Bratislava. His response wasn't to ask what I'd thought of it or where I'd been.

“Why?”

By then, I had plenty of answers.

Going on alone

The following morning Arjo and I parted ways. He stayed in Bratislava while I continued to Vienna, and I was genuinely sad to be doing the next part without him. We'd known each other for only a few days, but we'd already gone from meeting over drinks in Budapest to travelling between countries together, finding €200, surviving Halloween and sitting amongst Slovak football ultras.

Travel does strange things to the speed at which you get to know people. At home, someone you've known for three days is still essentially a stranger. When you've crossed a border together and seen each other catastrophically hungover in a deteriorating Mrs Claus dress, some of the usual stages of friendship have already been skipped.

There was also part of me that needed the change of pace. Budapest and Bratislava had involved a lot of drinking, and I was beginning to feel as though I hadn't done enough of the tourist stuff to justify the booze. Vienna became my attempt to restore the balance.

Hangxiety with Freud

I spent the next two nights alone, walking around Vienna, visiting galleries and finally slowing down enough to properly look at the city. One of my stops was Sigmund Freud's former home and practice at Berggasse 19, where he lived and worked for 47 years before being forced to flee Nazi-controlled Austria in 1938.

The house itself didn't massively impress me. What I enjoyed was what it made me think about.

After several days of drinking, I had that horrible post-alcohol anxiety where your brain insists on reviewing everything you've said and done as if it's conducting an internal disciplinary hearing. Wandering around Freud's former home and thinking about his theories was a surprisingly good juxtaposition to the hangxiety.

I wasn't having some profound psychoanalytic breakthrough. It just gave my brain something more interesting to pick apart than Halloween.

Better than the Louvre

The Albertina might be the best gallery I've ever visited.

I would genuinely put it above the Louvre, and not because I think it has a more important collection. I preferred being there.

Michelangelo is one of my favourite artists, and seeing his drawings was extraordinary. We're used to encountering him through enormous finished works — David, the Sistine Chapel, the Pietà — but drawings let you get much closer to the process. You can see someone searching for a form rather than simply being presented with the masterpiece at the end.

Michelangelo identified strongly as a sculptor despite also producing some of the most famous paintings in Western art, which has always fascinated me. Then you stand in front of the drawings and see how absurdly good his draughtsmanship was as well.

What I remember most, though, is walking from room to room and constantly recognising something. I'd turn a corner and there would be another masterpiece, another famous artist, another work I'd previously only encountered reproduced in a book or on a screen.

What pushed the Albertina above other major galleries for me was something much less glamorous: the audio guide. You could scan a QR code, use your own phone and listen through your headphones as you moved around the collection. It was simple, but it made the gallery much more accessible.

That's important because galleries can unintentionally make people feel stupid. You can stand in front of a supposedly important work knowing that you're expected to understand why everyone cares about it, while the person next to you is staring thoughtfully as though they've personally cracked the Renaissance.

At the Albertina, I could scan the code, listen, then look again. The technology didn't simplify the art; it simply removed some of the barriers to understanding it. As an artist and now an art teacher, that's something I've thought about a lot since.

From Classic FM to Mozart in Vienna

There was one other thing I'd wanted to do for years: hear classical music performed live.

My interest in it goes back to my grandad, who is one of my idols. He would have Classic FM playing in the car, so classical music existed in the background of my childhood before I ever made a conscious decision that I liked it.

Years later, while studying Film Production at university, I attended a lecture by Jan Harlan, Stanley Kubrick's brother-in-law and long-time executive producer. He spoke about film and classical music, and it made me start paying much more attention to how music could completely change the way an image felt. What had been something associated with journeys in my grandad's car gradually became something I listened to because I genuinely enjoyed it.

So when I reached Vienna, I went to a concert featuring Mozart.

It was one of those experiences I'd imagined doing long before I knew exactly when or where I'd eventually do it. What I couldn't have imagined was the route I'd take to get there. A few days earlier I'd been drinking with strangers underneath a Slovak coach station. I'd spent Halloween dressed as Mrs Claus, accidentally sat with football ultras and arrived in Vienna with enough hangxiety to make visiting Freud feel appropriate. Now I was sitting alone listening to classical music.

At one point I might have thought I needed Vienna to somehow compensate for the drinking, as though looking at Michelangelo and listening to Mozart would make the rest of the trip culturally respectable.

I don't think that anymore.

The men sharing their drink with me beneath the coach station were part of experiencing Slovakia. So were the football supporters, the halušky and the strangers who kept joining us. The Albertina and Mozart weren't inherently more meaningful because they came with paintings and concert halls.

They were simply different ways of meeting a place.

What the country count doesn't record

I still count countries. I enjoy looking at the map and seeing where I've been, and sometimes the desire to add another country is exactly what gets me onto a plane in the first place. What has changed is how much importance I attach to the number once I'm home.

A country count can tell me that this trip added Hungary, Slovakia and Austria. It can't record the Slovak stranger who appeared when we couldn't buy a ticket and then joined us for Halloween. It doesn't record Mrs Claus, the shirtless Slovan supporter, the taste of halušky or sitting alone in Vienna finally listening to classical music live.

And it certainly doesn't record Arjo.

After our trip, he found out he had cancer and couldn't travel for a while. I carried on, and he would message me and comment on my trips while itching to get back out there himself.

Eventually, he got better.

In 2025, we arranged to travel around Luxembourg together. When we were planning it, Arjo told me that he wanted his first trip back to be with the friend he'd done his last trip with.

So we travelled together again.

I'd planned Budapest, Bratislava and Vienna because I'd found an easy route through three countries.

I got my three ticks on the map.

They just aren't the part of the trip that matters now.

RELATED ARTICLE — My Baltic Journey Through Northern Europe