About water – let go in Bratislava

The sun did it. At the moment I reached the meadow from milky white clouds. The lake glitters behind the meadow on the outskirts. I enter a rickety changing room and walk a few meters into the water a few later over tiny pebbles, let me fall.

We are a group of football fans, the games of the U-21 European Championship visited in Slovakia. My first gear in Bratislava leads me over romantic stairs up to the Slavín, the largest war memorial in Central Europe. Everything blooms and smells, streets and squares are exceptionally maintained and planted. Nowhere a cat. The Soviet burial site with a cenotaph, Obelisk and the soldier on top forms a gigantic complex, which also felt critically becomes. The Slavín overrides the city and castle, that UFO on the Danube bridge, high -rise buildings and the inverted pyramid of the Radiogebäudes. Bratislava proliferates wide, on the next mountain the television tower protrudes into rising clouds.

Over water

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Anne Hahn is the author of novels and non -fiction and swims through the waters of the world for »ND«.

Go swimming quickly. I believed that you could swim in the Danube – I understand on the river bank. At the point where the city map promised a bathing ship, there is nothing and the river forced into walls flows tremendously. It drizzles, the sky becomes black. Time to retire to the main train station, behind which we found small apartments in a slope. There are earplugs at the reception, without it you don’t survive night. Trains constantly scream past the bed, brakes or horns.

We visit games and Stromers around, the Protestant cemetery with sinking tombstones, tunnel -like stairs, city wall, old town, Habsburg flair. Parliament, parks, tourists, beggars, people with dogs in handbag format. Rustic pubs, a Cat caféadopted the left animals from Ukraine, the National Gallery and again the river. It rains for a whole day.

I have to go into the water. With line 4 we go to the northeastern outskirts, on the old stadium with its Coca-Cola light masts Gone, a Dante food snack, on housing estates, broken industry, car dealerships. Then hotels and shopping palaces, forested mountains in the background. At the final stop Golden sands leads a curved bridge over the highway to the lake. In the direction of the city, the television tower greets over a mountain, the bridge ends in a soft arch on a meadow in front of the bathroom, coupled with a campsite.

The bathroom opens at nine o’clock, two girls lounging in the till house behind a yellow painted concrete gate, a security guard is dozed on his chair. I pay six euros, start to scare blackbirds and colorful woodpeckers, blink into the break in the break. Juicy green grass, rope, daisy. The numerous booths and cafés are closed, deck chairs are orphaned. Three boys throw ducks with stones, a lifeguard hugged on the cell phone. The temperatures rise minute, the soft water of the light green lake is warmer than the Berlin outdoor pools. I am alone in the lake and swim, a wild jewelry in my stomach.