my dad came for a visit this weekend, and he said he would like to go to bratislava; and gladly we joined him. the trip to the capital city of slovakia on the "twin city liner", a jet-propelled catamaran that can go up to 60km/h downstream (and approximately 50km/h upstream), took us about one and a half hours. on our journey down the danube we saw loads of fisher lodges along the banks, and loads of gnawed-on tree trunks, but unfortunately we did not spot a single beaver. instead we saw devin castle[09-11]. my dad spent some years of his childhood in bratislava, so he was especially interested in things that have changed, and the things that still remained the same since his last visit. we chose the common tourist tour, starting at the bratislava old town[14-97], over hviezdoslav square[16-21] to the must-see sight cumil[24,26], the worker sticking out of a manhole. we entered the holy saviour church[30] and then went up st. michael's street[33-42] to get to st. michael's tower[40,42-50], which also houses a museum. we actually got free entry tickets, as it was "bratislava day" (which i overheard later, when some other tourists were talking in front of another museum). so we walked up the stairs in this narrow tower and enjoyed the view over the city. by now the streets were more crowded than they were in the morning. when we walked out the exit of the tower, there was already a queue waiting to enter the tower. next stop was at the church of st. stephen the king[53-54], from where we started our ascent to the castle. soon we had reached bratislava castle[59-80], a big castle over-looking the city below. we spotted the ufo bridge[64] and the danube. inside the castle there is also the slovak national museum[67-74], but we did not enter. instead we walked the gardens of the castle and slowly returned to the city again. my groin had hurt all day long (which it does sometimes), but by now it got really bad, so i had to take a break and sit down. thus we had a cup of hot chocolate for nina, and coffee for my dad and me at a "schokocafe" on main square. resting a bit was good and helped. we went back to the mooring to board the ship. in the morning when we arrived at bratislava we bought the tickets for our trip back to vienna. the guy selling the tickets told us that the ship was fully booked, but he could give us a special discount on the captain's cabin. as it was only a few euro more than the other ticket and we did not want to go back by train, we agreed and bought them. turned out the captain's cabin[106-117] is really right behind the captain, and was a small cabin with a small table and benches around it. and the best thing is, we had it to our own. just how awesome is that? the ride back took a little longer, as we had to sail upstream, and the closer we got to our destination the more clouds[114-117] were in the sky, and soon dark clouds were all over us; but it did not start to rain - we were really lucky with the weather today (and with the fact that it was "bratislava day"). what a nice trip to bratislava with nina and my dad. thanks to them for the lovely day - i really enjoyed it.

^C: mono (helen money), arena recoil, ignite unseen harbor kanata pure as snow halcyon where we begin ashes in the snow everlasting light

in the last few days i did some changes to the bLog script i am using, namely "blosxom". i added categories and tags, found a plugin for a nice tag cloud (indicating the importance of the tag not by font size, but rather by colour), and i also found my old comment plugin again, so comments are enabled now again (not that anyone would ever use it, but why not - for the fun of it). additionally i wrote my first plugin allowing me to change the number of entries per "flavour" (that is what blosxom calls different output formats via templates for each format), which was necessary to show a list of all entries in a category. so you get the first line of each bLog entry and a link to the full article. i hope you enjoy the new features (which you might notice only if you surf the bLog directly via a browser and not via an aggregator, or other blog reading application). i wonder who still does that nowadays...