Bratislava's main square was already busy by mid morning, market stalls ringed around the Maximilian Fountain, a Roland figure standing guard on top of it in full armor, the Old Town Hall's clock tower going about its business behind a Christmas tree strung with white lights. I hadn't expected the sky to be this clean after two days of Budapest rain, blue enough that every building looked freshly painted.
The Slovak National Theatre sat a few streets over, a dome and a sculpted frieze over the entrance spelling its name out in gold letters, a bronze eagle-topped fountain guarding the front steps like it had been asked to. I climbed up to the castle after that, through a gate flanked by a pair of baroque soldiers holding flags at attention, snow still sitting in the cracks of the cobblestones underfoot. From the terrace the whole city opened up hazy and flat under the winter light, a bronze king on horseback, sword raised, standing between me and the skyline like he had been posing for tourists for a very long time. A cluster of other visitors leaned on the same railing, phones up, and for a minute none of us said anything, which felt like the correct response to a view that size.
Back down at the market I found a tent set up as a medieval workshop, a man in a red robe hand carving something at a bench behind a sign advertising medieval wax candles, string lights tangled through the wooden frame of his own tent in a way that felt slightly unfair to the century he was supposed to be representing. I caught a tram back to Hlavna stanica with just enough time to make the 13:37 to Vienna, an hour and seven minutes that somehow felt like more of a border crossing than it should have.
I rested first once I got there, which after three cities in four days had stopped feeling like a concession and started feeling like strategy. Wombat's The City Hostel Vienna Naschmarkt put me close enough to walk into the evening rather than plan for it, so an hour or two later I did, straight to the Wiener Christkindlmarkt, stalls and lights and the particular noise of a lot of people deciding to be outside on a cold night on purpose. From there I let Karntner Strasse pull me along with everyone else, the city's main shopping street doing its best impression of a river at rush hour, shopfronts lit up on both sides, nobody in a hurry and everybody moving anyway.