After we left Peter's in Denmark, we decided to spend a few days at Lake Bohinj in Slovenia before meeting up with our friend Steve Bergen in Budapest for a week. It took us about 24 hours by train to get from Denmark to Slovenia. We booked ourselves into a small scale hostel and the owner picked us up from the train station, which is a service we always appreciate.
The highlights of Stara Fuzina (tiny town near Lake Bohinj) were eating out at the town's only restaurant that serves food where we tried fried cheese for the first time and discovered that there is no such thing as salad dressing in Slovenia. Fried cheese is a breaded , deep fried, giant triangle of mozzarella served with fries and mayo. It's Slovenia's answer to a 4x4 (4 burgers and 4 slices of cheese) at In-N-Out Burger (a west coast thing) with respect to potential coronary. We also loved the lake itself. We walked around all 12km of it twice in the two days we were there. Slovenia is the most gorgeous country we have visited thus far. It looks like Austria, at least what we could see of it from the train window.
HUNGARY
We made endless jokes about being hungry in Hungary that I'll spare you all in this blog. We met up with our friend Steve Bergen who was in Sweden on a conference the week before. Steve managed to find us the best apartment to rent so we had kitchen facilities and laundry-yay!-for the whole week. The city was very walkable so we did a walking tour of it the first day together.
Bergen and I went to the Budapest History Museum the next day. It was the weirdest museum I have ever been in. There were 4 floors of items spanning the dinosaur age to the modern art period in the 20th century. And the exhibits were in no kind of sequential order whatsoever. The highlights were 1) wandering up and down and up and down stairs in the maze-like cave of a basement that could have been an M. C. Escher painting and 2) the fact that they actually had peep holes in the wall of one room labeled 18+ that showed nudie pictures from the early 1900s.
On our last full day there, we all went to the thermal baths. There were 20+ baths of varying temperatures as well as different temperature saunas. It was a trip. The best were the three outdoor baths because it was a beautiful, sunny day and it made for the best people watching. Without their clothes on, we discovered that Europeans are definitely a fitter group than Americans are as a whole (Los Angeles excepted).
When we said a sad farewell to Bergen and sent him back to the miserable heat and humidity of DC, we went east to Eger for a few days of wine tasting. There is a horseshoe of cellar-like wineries on the edge of the town abutting the vineyards that are numbered and rated on a grape scale of 1 to 3. We visited almost all the 3-grape wineries and some of the lesser ones just for fun. The best wine we had was a local variety called Bikaner, or Bull's Blood, a red that was like a cab with an infusion of tempranillo. And at 3.50 Euros per bottle, who wouldn't drink it for breakfast, lunch and dinner? By the way, if you bring your own plastic 1L or 2L bottle, the wineries will fill you up for a Euro or two. Can we say AWESOME?
CROATIA
From Eger, we went straight to Zagreb for a quick one day tour of the city. It is another very walkable city and we got to see all the main attractions (churches, botanical gardens and cobblestony squares) by 3 or 4 in the afternoon. Our next train to Split didn't leave until 10pm, though, which meant several more hours to fill. Thank god for movie theaters and pizza restaurants. Sad to say, there was a dearth of English language movies which means we are now qualified to tell you all to stay as far away from the movie The Last Airbender as you possibly can. It didn't help matters much that Croatians love to talk during English language movies because they don't need to hear thanks to the subtitles. If we had had popcorn handy, we would have probably gotten into a brawl with the loud hooligans in the row behind us.
Split is a beach town without the beach. It's absolutely stunning with its harbor (pictures to come) and historic stone fortress relics and cobblestone streets not large enough for vehicular traffic. The hostel we stayed at had no kitchen facilities and we couldn't afford the restaurants so we made do with two days of sandwiches, cereal and beer. Both days in Split, we went swimming in the ocean. There are no beaches. Instead, there are cement walkways with benches that people reserve by covering them over with towels. From 6am to noon, the waters are crowded with septuagenarians, octogenarians and canes. After noon, the older crowd is replaced by a passel of swarming children playing a game of hit the tiny ball to one another. As you can imagine, there were plenty of tiny balls to be found in Split.
SERBIA
After Split, we went to Belgrade and then Nis en route to Skopje, Macedonia where we intend to spend a few days with our friends Dimi and Michelle Osmanli and family who moved their from DC 3 or 4 years back. Our Eurail pass doesn't cover Serbia or Macedonia but, fortunately for us, those countries are cheap enough for us to afford the train fares sans pass.
Belgrade has a citadel with WWI era canons lining the entrance as a warning to all not to mess with Serbia's superior firepower. A few blocks from the citadel is a pedestrian street lined with restaurants and overpriced stores. The best part of our time in Belgrade was eating lunch at a Serbian restaurant just off the pedestrian strip. Our waiter spoke zero English which shouldn't have been a problem as we ordered by pointing the dishes on the menu we wanted to order. Literally three tries later, we ended up, finally, with the dishes we had actually ordered. Who knew pointing to items on a menu could end so badly? We had to involve the head waiter who spoke enough English for us to communicate to him that we still didn't have the right dishes. As a saving grace, the white beans with sausage and the grilled pork with boulangere potatoes were delicious...after we poured off a cupful of oil from the potatoes.
We weren't thrilled with our hostel in Belgrade so instead of extending our stay two days, we opted to move down the train line to Nis en route to Skopje. Nis (pronounced Neesh) is a decent sized town complete with its own citadel and cobblestoned town square. The best part about the downtown is the super cheap shopping options. We both need new sneakers, having walked the last vestige of comfort out of our current 4-year old pairs, so we'll be spending 10 Euros each for new pairs here. Yay cheap former Yugoslavia countries!
It is our 3rd year anniversary today. We will celebrate by buying anniversary sneakers and finding a lovely restaurant to have dinner at. Amir started the morning with his favorite celebratory beverage, champagne. I'm starting mine with my favorite non-popcorn food, cereal. We walked to a giant Costco-like grocery store yesterday and picked up some blackberry wine, a bottle of local red called Verac and a box of Reisling so we should have plenty of afternoon beverage options. Happy Anniversary!
Tomorrow, onward and southward to Skopje.
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