Slovakia has, apparently, a very special relationship with UFOs. Have they been visited by aliens more often than the average Central European country? No way to tell, that information has been redacted. But the signs are clear. For one, there’s a huge flying saucer in the middle of a park that’s crouched down between the rings of drab Soviet-era apartment buildings in a nondescript part of the city, without explanation or seemingly even notice from the locals.

I’d heard about all of this from my weird shit sources and was wandering around looking for this particular weird shit, having taken two long buses to get to this forgotten corner of the Slovak world. I felt like I couldn’t possibly be in the right place, when a pained graffiti face tried to warn me to turn back.

I rounded a corner and OH! There it is. Like it just crash-landed in the middle of trying to film a hologram of somebody undressing in one of the apartment towers.

Well that’s strange.

I climbed the hill just as a woman was doing the same with her small daughter and dog. The little girl was hyperventilating, so afraid of approaching the downed saucer she was mostly just making weird noises and trying to tug her mom back the opposite way. The dog barked at me nervously, less of a threat and more of a “Hey buddy? You know what’s going on here? Should I be worried??”

Reaching the saucer, the first thing I noticed was the graffiti. Huh. I knocked on the side of the craft and a hollow DONK echoed through the stainless steel shell.

Hmmm. Hollow. The aliens must have moved on. Maybe they’re at that Tesco Express down the street.

Apparently the life-sized UFO sculpture was built back in the 70’s by a sculptor who was living in these squat towers. I heard that children originally were allowed to climb inside the UFO so they could pretend to fly it. I walked around the saucer in a loop and there were neither openings nor signs that there had ever been any openings. Huh. Are the kids still in there? I knocked again.

This lovely neighborhood is known as Medzijarky, which translates poetically to “between the ditches.” It was built in the 1970s and not touched again since. It was a bit rough around the edges but I appreciated seeing a different side of Bratislava, since I was staying right in the middle of the Old Town, which was very nice and tourist-friendly but also not how most people here live.

Believe it or not, this was not the only or even the most famous UFO in Bratislava. That would be the one on top of the bridge.

Looking like one of the Martian walkers from War of the Worlds out to jack up a helpless bridge that was just out minding its own business, the Most SNP is the longest bridge in the world with only one pylon and set of cables. The tower is capped with a UFO-shaped restaurant because Slovakia’s got to do something with all these UFOs that are always crashing everywhere, littering up the damned place.

I knew you could go up to the restaurant and some kind of observation deck, but it wasn’t clear exactly how. The tower has one leg on each side, both of them diagonal. Are there stairs? On which side? I crossed the bridge on the pedestrian walkway below the traffic lanes and eventually found an extremely nondescript booth on the ground level by the river, near the East leg.

This seemed rather doubtful, but was in fact where you paid to go up top. After the turnstile I wandered into a pressboard hallway that seemed to have been put up on the fly, yesterday, when nobody was looking. I turned the corner and then there was, disturbingly, a pressboard elevator. Huh?

I spent the entire elevator ride up trying to sense if we were somehow going up diagonally, since the leg of the tower wasn’t straight and didn’t seem wide enough for us to go up in a straight line. Results were inconclusive, but we did eventually make it up to the restaurant level. Mysteries of science. We were gestured through a set of doors and up some stairs that didn’t exactly seem built for use by the general public, up through a hatch and then suddenly we were on top of the saucer restaurant, looking out across the river and all of Bratislava beyond.

Hey! Dang, that’s a nice view. Off in the distance I caught a glimpse of the funky optical illusion building I had noticed from the bus. Weird stuff.

The UFO was kind enough not to start spinning or zoom off to Venus while we were on top, which was appreciated by all assembled. So. Why does Slovakia have so much UFO stuff going on?

Oh, you’re waiting for me to answer? I thought maybe you knew.

Slovakia seems to have far more than its share of insane street people who have no compunction about accosting you for money or government secrets when you’re trying to take a photo of a pretty building. I quickly discovered that’s it’s hard to argue that you 1) Don’t have any money or 2) Are very busy, in fact far too busy to be bothered by insane street people, when you’ve obviously spent very much money to come to this faraway land to dick around and take photos of pretty buildings.

At one point I walked past a store called Le Karen and I had to fight the urge to go inside and demand to speak to their manager.

Among the other amusingly-named stores I didn’t think to get a photo of was a pet store that somehow thought it was a good idea to call itself Barf Dog. I was too afraid to go inside.

Bratislava has a charming Old Town.

But none of that matters at all because I’m here to tell you about the gyozas. I got into Bratislava by bus and train from Ljubljana, by way of Vienna. It was 9:30pm when I arrived, and I hadn’t had a chance to eat thanks to the all-day journey and a very late departing bus. Everything in town was about to close in 30 minutes. I chose my restaurant entirely because it was only a four minute walk away from the apartment I was renting. On the walk there I noticed how dark and menacing the clouds were overhead. Man, it’s really gonna rain. That’s okay, as long as it waits ten minutes I’ll be back safe and dry in my apartment with some take-out.

It waited until I was about to leave the restaurant with my take-out bag to unleash the biblical torrent. The girl in the gyoza shop suggested I stay and wait out the storm, but I knew they were about to close and didn’t want cold food, so I figured “How wet can you get on a four minute walk?” I was about to find out.

I’m not entirely sure, but I think this is the first time I’ve ever been in rain that was falling so hard it physically hurt. Not while riding a bike or sticking your face out a car window, rather just walking down the street. I began to- OW OW OW- I began to run up the street, trying to turn the four minute walk into a two minute run. Splashing through the ankle-deep rivers flowing through the cobblestone streets, the rain came down in sheets and salvos so hard that I got turned around and couldn’t even tell which direction I was running. Seeing the screen of my phone was impossible in the onslaught of water. Eventually I caught a watery glimpse of the clock tower and figured out where I was, completing my dash through the aerial swimming pool and ducking into the doorway of my apartment.

Inside, I realized I was so wet I not only needed to change every item of clothing I was wearing, but also towel off like I had just got out of the shower. My paper take-out bag had somehow not completely disintegrated, but my glass bottle of lemonade was sticking most of the way out of the side of the bag, having stabbed through the wet paper and somehow miraculously not fallen out completely. The bread from my order was completely soaked through, but thankfully the gyozas had been protected in their little clamshell container.

And this was good, because they were the most wonderful gyozas in the world. Better than Japan and China or anywhere else, even lukewarm and having survived Noah’s flood.

Bratislava. Who knew?

I proceeded to have these gyozas six times in 48 hours. They were fried perfectly crispy and crunchy on the outside, but the center melted in your mouth, and the little dumplings were glazed in a delicious tangy soy/teriyaki sauce. They were perhaps the most addictive food I’ve ever eaten. Each time I returned to the restaurant to get more, I was relieved to find a different person working the counter, since I was slightly embarrassed by the relentless pace of my gyoza consumption. I thought I had pulled off the perfect crime, when upon my final visit before I left town I placed my order and the girl behind the counter didn’t ask for a name for my order.

“Sean, right?”

Oh. Yes. Guilty as charged. Just give me the gyozas so I can eat them behind the dumpster outside please.

Bratislava had a few other things that attempted to compete with the gyozas for your attention. One of the most successful was the Radio and Television of Slovakia building, which for reasons known only to the UFO crews was built in the shape of an upside-down pyramid.

Figuring this wasn’t bizarre enough to tear people away from Japanese dumpling heaven, they also built a concert hall inside that exists within a steel cage suspended on springs, to isolate it from outside noise. I don’t have photos of this because I couldn’t pass the retinal scanner to get inside.

Also pretty successful was the Hotel Galéria Spirit, a funky-assed hotel on the outskirts of town that looked like something out of Pee Wee’s Playhouse.

And what the hell, I’ll also throw in Cumil the Sewer Worker, a statue in the old town of some weird guy emerging up out of the skewers to sneak a peek up the ladies’ dresses, or the gents’ pant legs, I don’t presume to know Cumil’s orientation.

A “Man at Work” sign was added after a driver turned that corner too sharply and clipped off poor Cumil’s head. People were also frequently tripping over the artwork which I suppose is at least slightly preferable to falling into an open, statue-less manhole.

And also fun was The Church or St Elizabeth, also known as The Blue Church because they’re playing sad jazz music all the time.

How about the Communist-era Fountain of Union, except we’re not going to add any water and there’s just a guy driving a remote-controlled car around it? Sure, whatever Bratislava.

Less successful in making me forget I’d rather be eating gyozas right now was the Biatec Monument, a massive Celtic coin that is the symbol of Bratislava because who gives a shit let’s go get some more gyozas.

My biggest excursion was out to the Bratislava Castle, which looks out over the town from a bluff and houses both a Versailles-style garden and a museum detailing the history of Slovakia.

If you’re like me you might be a little fuzzy on where the hell Slovakia came from since it wasn’t in the Geography textbooks when you were a kid. Having a lifetime that overlapped with the Soviet Union is somewhat inconvenient from a current country-knowledge standpoint, because not only did the USSR break up into a whole boatload of countries, around the same time so did Yugoslavia and Czechosolvakia, the last of which broke up into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. How did all that happen?

After WWI, which the more I travel the more I realize what a stupid disaster it was for Austria-Hungary, the Czech and Slovak people from Hungary lobbied the powers that be on the winning side for a chance to break away and form their own little country. It seems like neither was confident in their individual case for statehood, but figured by combining forces they’d have a stronger argument, so some nonsense about the shared history and similarities between the Czech and Slovak peoples were ginned up. And it worked, as the Allies responded with a resounding “Whatever” and then even defended the new state when Hungary said “Wait, what, you assholes-” and tried to invade them again.

Czechoslovakia was born, and was a democratic country until WWII, then came out the other end as a Communist state tied to the Soviet Union. This lasted until 1989, when Czechoslovakia jumped on the bandwagon of all of the countries that were ditching their Communist government because it sucked eggs and all their friends were doing it too, mom. This was called the Velvet Revolution because people in Czechoslovakia really dug the Velvet Underground.

The good vibes lasted for about 20 minutes until the Czechs and Slovaks realized they couldn’t stand each other and by 1993, the country had split into The Czech Republic and Slovakia, which in tourist terms means the country with Prague and the country you’ve never heard of. This peaceful breakup became known as the Velvet Divorce, because only one of the countries involved really dug the Velvet Underground. The divorce has been better for The Czech Republic than it has been for Slovakia, the poorer of the two countries, but it remains notable for the peaceful nature of the dissolution, much like how Czechoslovakia was the only country to peacefully transition away from Communism in 1989.

The Castle seemed to think this history lesson wasn’t enough, so they crammed in a chapel…

And a huge exhibit dedicated to Slovakian theater, which primarily involved extremely creepy puppets…

And, of course, Batman.

Congrats, Slovakia. That is the worst Batman I have ever seen, including overweight men wearing Batman tee-shirts to theme parks, and I love you for it. Thank you for that and I’ll take these gyozas to go.