This year YAPC::Europe was in Vi­en­na. A nice mid­week con­fer­ence with plen­ty of op­por­tu­ni­ty to see Vi­en­na be­fore and Bratisla­va af­ter it. Flights were a bit in the odd hours so I de­cid­ed to go by train, and try sleep­ing in the night­train. Sleep­ing in a sin­gle room on board the City Night Line from Duis­burg to Vi­en­na is great. Watch­ing DVDs on my iBook and cue­ing Ul­travox be­tween Wien Hüt­tel­dorf and Wien West. There was a bit of de­lay due to the crowds of the Love Pa­rade in Essen, and in the end the train ar­rived about one hour late in Vi­en­na, but that only means you get an hour ex­tra sleep. In Vi­en­na I stayed in Mer­cure City Wien, close to the beach. The con­fer­ence was as ex­pect­ed. After the con­fer­ence Vi­en­na was flood­ed by 30.000 car­di­ol­o­gists, so I went into "new eu­rope": Bratisla­va. I then learned in what coun­try it is, what lan­guage they use, what cur­ren­cy they use, how pub­lic trans­port works and that Bratisla­va is ac­tu­al­ly a nice city. Slo­vakia is prob­a­bly the poor­est coun­try I've been to, and from the 10th floor of the Hol­i­day Inn it kind of looks like that. And Do­pler is just around the cor­ner. It feels a lot fur­ther away from Vi­en­na than it ac­tu­al­ly is, which is a good thing for trips like this.