We were visiting Bratislava city in the month of March back in 2019. We had kept only a night's stay in our itinerary.
Bratislava is situated at an interesting location. It is right at the border of Slovakia and Austria. It’s almost equidistant from Budapest and Vienna. It has direct connectivity with Prague by Train and Bus. We thought of travelling by bus as we were not carrying EuroRail pass and had booked all our inter-city travel bookings in advance. Bus gives you that flexibility of making last minutes plans, hop on to a bus and pay on the go.
After finishing our brunch in the morning, we started walking towards Panska streets; following the map given to us by receptionist to find most famous statues in Bratislava, ‘Cumil – man at work’. Legend says that if you touch the head of statue and make a wish then it comes true if you keep it secret forever. By the way, Europe is full of such statues where people (rather tourists) come and touch their hands on random body parts of the statues. We reached at the spot where you can see this Cumil status picking outside of his sewage drainage and tourists getting crazy to take a picture with it. In the same area we found few more such statues (paparazzi statue, Schone naci, Napolean soldier, etc.) and spend almost whole morning time there.
My hands were literally frozen and started hurting as I was carrying a camera without my hand gloves. We quickly bought ourselves pair of winter gloves and head to the main square area. I fell in love with the main square area as soon as we reached there. I setup the tripod stand at the centre of the square to do some video shooting.
Right when we were busy in our own activities; suddenly from nowhere 4-5 limousines came to the main square area and stopped! Right next to the big main square there was a statue of some local guy who was famous. A well dressed man stepped outside from one of the limousines; quickly escorted by 10-15 big body guards all wearing back suits. He went towards the statue. Close to the statue there was a troop of ~50 army officers.
Quickly people started crowding the area around him. Some people started shouting his name. First this guy made prayers to the statue, performed few local traditional rituals and then came back and stood in front of the troops. Troops put together 10 min. salutary performance for him followed by big applaud by the crowd.
Someone started shouting, “Mr. President, here. Mr. President please look here.” It was a media reporter. We couldn’t believe that we were standing 10 feet away from Slovakian President, Mr. Andrej Kiska (serving as president at the time). My camera was recording the whole incidence. We were standing in the front line of the crowd waiting for president to shake hands. President first went towards media and answered few of their questions and then head back to us. One lady was constantly dragging me, as she couldn’t get his glimpses from my back. I was so annoyed with her. He briefly spoke to some locals ignoring the lady standing closer to us.
In few seconds, Mr. Andrej Kiska inside Limousine and was on his way back to somewhere else. We were amazed to realise what had just happened. It was indeed one of the most unexpected things happened during our trip across Europe. Let me know if you had such similar unexpected incidents while travelling. Do share it in comments. Happy travelling!
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