Yesterday was kind of a leisurely day for us as we slowed the pace to adjust to the heat wave. Bratislava is a charming town, but we didn’t feel pressured by a big checklist of sights so we started the day with one key goal: Do laundry.

Laundromats have been frustratingly hard to find throughout Eastern Europe. They barely seem to exist, and those that do really fly beneath the radar of the Internet. But here in Bratislava I found a laundromat with a good web page — with English! — though it was a bit of a hike outside the center of town.

No way we were going to do a marathon walk in the heat wave, so I decided to go online and master the local mass transit system, which I generally have a knack for. There was a lot of info, but it was really hard to piece together exactly which combo of things to do. So we set out and tried to just make it work. After some initial frustration just finding the local stop we were soon on a tram, then connecting to a bus, then walking the last few blocks to our suburban laundromat. The system was pretty impressive for a hot Sunday morning. Strangely, I find doing laundry in exotic laundromats kind of fun. It’s just an adventure.

In the afternoon we wandered slowly around a couple key sites of Bratislava, including Bratislava Castle and St. Martin’s Cathedral. Under the Austro-Hungarian empire, this city was known as Pressburg and served as the capital of Hungary after the Turks overran Budapest in 1526. Empress Maria Theresa and 10 other monarchs were crowned as Kings of Hungary in lovely St. Martin’s.

This morning we’ll pack up and catch a 3-hour train to Budapest, a city I visited just last year with my dad and truly loved.

Mountain ranges have long served as major separators of people and cultures. But I never quite ‘got’ that until skirting around the Tatras Friday from Poland to Slovakia. Our bus ride was less than two hours, taking us up to an overpass from Zakopane, Poland and back down into the valleys of Slovakia.

We were stunned when we arrived at the bus station in Poprad, Slovakia, where we had to wait an hour to catch a more local bus to Levoča. People looked completely different! After two months in Russia, Poland, and the Baltic states, we were used to seeing an overwhelming majority of blond, fair people. Suddenly there was far more diversity, including a lot of very dark complected people, who are virtually non-existent in Baltic Europe. It truly felt like we had arrived someplace much more exotic, almost Middle Eastern.

We had unknowingly crossed the threshold between Northern and Southern Europe. And the difference was not just in the faces. In the Northern countries — Russia, the Baltics, Poland — buses and trains were extremely punctual. We’ve already taken several bus and train journeys in Slovakia now, and not one has been on time.

Once we arrived at Levoča, we checked into our nice little hotel and then headed to catch the third bus of the day to the town dominated by the massive ruins of Spiš Castle. Here we climbed the hill to visit this 12th century stronghold, once occupied by the kings of Hungary. The views were spectacular, and the castle had some interesting exhibits about the people who lived here and what it was like. As I was expressing my fascination with medieval times and what it would be like to see these castles in operation, Jim looked concerned and made me promise not to start going to Renaissance festivals.

And yes, there really were flying ants, but only at the top of the tallest tower in the castle. This notice was posted as you entered the skinny little stone staircase to climb to the top. We got up there and started to enjoy the view, but within seconds these highly annoying bugs were landing all over us. They won the day, because we climbed down again fast.

After spending the night in the quiet but pretty town of Levoča, we grabbed another bus to a train station in the next town to catch a supposedly four-hour train to the capital of Bratislava. To emphasize the fact that we are no longer in the cool, efficient north, our train left several minutes late and lost time throughout the journey, arriving in Bratislava 35 minutes late. And the 99 degree heat in the non-air conditioned train certainly helped foster the exotic atmosphere. Yup, we’re back in a heat wave with highs predicted in the high 90s and low 100s for a full week throughout the region. Yikes. Those Mediterranean beaches in Croatia are beckoning.