Hungary in Budapest

I expected paprika to be featured in every dish while we were in Hungary.  It certainly was popular, but Hungarian cuisine, at least in Budapest, extends past paprika.  Although I did read that while you can find almost every type of cuisine in Budapest, good Hungarian restaurants are few and far between.  Budapest seemed to have lots of restaurants that have a Hungarian flair without only serving traditional dishes.  One of our favorites was M Restaurant, a little bistro with a small but varied menu.  The walls are covered with brown paper with drawings of the inside of a house.  We both had a tasty spiced chicken.  Very creamy and rich, but delicious.

Then there was Menza, located on a busy street lined with restaurants.  Once you go inside, Menza stands out due to its stylish retro décor and its way of making ordinary dishes seem fancier.

We tried the ubiquitous goulash there (served in the form of a soup) and a spicy beef stew like dish – both very tasty and flavorful.

We ate at the Hummus Bar, which serves giant Israeli pitas (which, obviously, was not Hungarian).  We also liked Klassz, a slightly more upscale but unpretentious restaurant with an extensive wine list on Andrassy Boulevard.

And, I would be remiss not to mention my favorite ice cream place.  The people in Budapest must love ice cream, because you could find it on almost every street.  I was partial to the place down the street from us.  I’m not sure of its name, so a lot of good it does anyone who visits Budapest, but it deserves a mention considering I ate ice cream there 5 out of the 6 nights we were in Budapest.  It was slightly embarrassing to go in there night after night, but when the ice cream is good, you do what you have to do.

As you probably guessed by now, all of these except the Hummus Bar and the ice cream place were spotted by Budapest locals. (Sidenote: serious foodies might also want to check out chew.hu for in-depth coverage of the Budapest food scene).

One treat we were not fond of are the Hungarian langos.  I had heard rave reviews about langos, which are savory fried doughnut like things.  The basic langos appears to be topped with garlic.  We tried one with garlic and cheese on top.

The first couple of bites were tasty, but the grease quickly overpowers anything else and you wish you hadn’t eaten as much as you did.

Our Two Croatian Lipa

There is a lot of advice on the Internet about the perfect Croatian itinerary.  Croatia is a very long, narrow country, which makes it hard to get around.  The train system is not extensive, and renting cars are expensive due to an Eastern European surcharge.  The eleven hour bus rides we took twice were brutal (once from Pula to Split; once from Dubrovnik to Zagreb).  The buses careened around every inch of Croatia’s long coastline.  Scenic, yes, but not comfortable.  So if you only have a short time in Croatia, it would be best to focus upon one region of the country.

Also, there is no getting around it: Croatia, especially in late June/early July, is full of tourists.  For the most part, we didn’t find that spoiled our experience in Croatia, but it like most of Europe, it may be better visited in the spring or fall.

I’ve already told you about our good experiences at Plitvice National Park and on the islands. Here’s our two cents on the other places we have visited:

Rovinj

We only stayed one night in Rovinj, but we would have loved to have tacked on a second night.  Rovinj has a church towering high above its old town, with views of the sea below.  The old town is filled with narrow alleys with laundry lines criss-crossing above.  Steep steps creep between old stone buildings.  But most importantly, Rovinj seemed to be much more full of life than our previous coastal stop in Piran, Slovenia.  Rovinj’s cafes and restaurants were full, and its steep lanes were dotted with artists’ shops.  If your travels bring you to the Istria portion of Croatia, Rovinj is worth a stop.

Pula

Something about Pula never clicked with us.  Its claim to fame is one of the largest Roman amphitheatres still standing.   Seeing the amphitheatre was neat, but it took less than an hour.  We personally think Pula didn’t stack up with the other places we visited in Croatia.

Split

Split is probably a necessity in any Croatian itinerary that includes a visit to the Dalmatian Islands from a logistics standpoint, but we found the city to be somewhat bland.  At this point in our trip, it takes more than historic old stuff to impress us, and we didn’t find Split to have much of a personality.  We did like its outdoor fruit market.  Its promenade is fun (albeit with strange talent shows).  It is full of hundreds of people, especially at night, even if they probably are all tourists.

Dubrovnik

Everything you read calls Dubrovnik the Gem of the Adriatic.  This is probably an accurate description, so you are probably going to find what I’m going to say next to be completely crazy.  Contrary to what all of the guidebooks say, I don’t think Dubrovnik is a must see and could be skipped.  Now, I know no one is going to listen to me anyway, and that’s fine, because you should decide for yourself.  I’m not saying don’t go there, I’m just saying if you don’t have the time, don’t beat yourself up trying to get there is it is fairly far south and there are other areas of Croatia that are just as worthy to visit.  The old town is definitely scenic.  It is enclosed by walls which you can walk upon.  Steep stairs in narrow alleys lead down to a wide, bustling promenade.  The city is very clean and well-preserved, especially considering it experienced bombing during Croatia’s war in the 1990s.  What I didn’t like about Dubrovnik is that it is hard to find restaurants that do not have inflated prices and food better than mediocre.

Zagreb

We hardly saw any other tourists while we checked out Zagreb.  After spending time in coastal Croatia in pretty much the high season, it was refreshing to be in a town where everyone is going about the business of living their daily lives.  But if you want a city that is not touristy, you have to take the bad with the good.  Zagreb will never win any awards for beauty.  Out of all of the cities in the former communist countries we have toured, Zagreb had the most drab, utilitarian communist housing remaining.  Other than the central old town area, the neighborhoods are full of huge, high rise buildings, all aging metal and steel.  Graffiti is scrawled on the sides.  At home, we’d wonder if we were in a ghetto.  Here, it is just par for the course.  And what can they do?  They can’t tear it all down and rebuild solely for aesthetic reasons.  But what we noticed the people who live there do make the best of it.  Meticulously maintained flowers lined many yards.  Hydrangeas are everywhere (making me wonder how my hydrangeas are doing at our old house).  Window boxes perched on top of balconies, giving everyone bright spots to focus upon.  We enjoyed our time in the city.  We ate delicious Croatian chocolate at the Kras bonbonierre (reminiscent of Sarris, for you Pittsburgh folks); we rode Europe’s shortest funicular; we ate a delicious meal at a place using local produce on a lively pedestrian only street; we walked through the city’s green parks; and we visited a funky shop.

Slovenia continued, continued.

Part three: Bovec/Soca River Valley

As magical as Bled was, I was rather drawn to Bovec and the Soca River Valley.  To get there, we drove the Vrsic pass through the Julian Alps: a road built mainly by Russian WWI POWs with 50 hairpin turns rising up and then down again through the mountains.

When you land on the other side of the mountains, you are greeted by the Soca River, a river with clear pale turquoise waters.

There are a lot of little towns in the valley, but we especially liked Bovec, a town with less than 2,000 people that is surrounded by mountains on all sides.  More on our adventures in Bovec to come.

Part four: Piran

It is hard to ignore the call of the sea, so we headed south to Piran, a quaint town smushed onto a peninsula jutting out into the Adriatic Sea.  Very close to Italy, we heard just as much Italian as we did Slovenian.  The rain did not let up for most of the time we were there, confining us mostly to our room or a coffee shop, but when it did shine, Piran woke up out of its slumber.  We were befuddled by everyone’s proclivity to lay out on rocks or concrete.  All seemed very uncomfortable, but I suppose if there is no beach, you make own of your own.

We liked Piran, but it didn’t seem to have a lot of things to do.  There were not many shops, and most sold touristy junk.  Most of the restaurants served the same types of food, including sea bass upwards of $40.  Fish may cost $40 in places like Pittsburgh when it is flown in fresh from far flung places daily, but I couldn’t understand how fish could cost that much in a town next to the sea.  I later read that the Adriatic Sea has been overfished, forcing fishers to go further and further away.  Piran may be worth a visit if you have lots of time, but we think out of the places we saw, the best parts of Slovenia lie north.

Slovenia and Slovakia are two different countries.

Before we went on this trip, I must confess that I really knew absolutely nothing about Slovenia.  For some unknown reason, I just assumed it was some provincial country in Eastern Europe and I never could keep it straight with Slovakia.

Apparently I am not the only one.  We’re from the United States, I told the very friendly and chatty receptionist at one of our hotels.  This is our first time in Slovenia.  We didn’t know much about it before we came, but we really like it. She smiled and said, Oh, I am so glad you like it.  Most people from the United States do not know the difference between Slovenia and Slovakia. Um, guilty, as charged.  I guess it is all good though because when we told her we were from Pennsylvania, she asked if that was where Dracula was from.

Most of you are probably smarter than me, but in the off chance you have not kept up with your world geography since elementary school, let me introduce you to Slovenia.  It became a country when it dissolved from Yugoslavia in 1991.  I am not sure where I got the provincial idea from, especially considering Slovenia had the strongest economy in Yugoslavia, obtained membership in the E.U. in 2004, and in 2007, was the first former communist country to adopt the the euro.  Slovenia borders Austria, Italy, and Croatia.  Its landscape includes mountains (the Julian Alps in the northeast), lakes, caves, and a small coastline on the Adriatic Sea.  Slovenia is a tiny country – most destinations can be reached from the capital, Ljubjlana, in a couple of hours.  Yet even though we spent a week there, we didn’t see any of the eastern part of the country.  For such a small country, Slovenia has a lot to offer.

Part One: Ljubjlana

For starters, the capital, Ljubjlana, is an adorable city made all the more easy to enjoy because of its big, yet small, size.  It is by far the biggest city in Slovenia, but it only has about 300,000 people.  (By the way, best we can tell, it is pronounced something like Lube-blahn-ya.  Locals seemed to differ.  It took us the better part of the week to figure out how to say it, which made it interesting when we were trying to ask if we were at the right train station.  Is this Lub…um, where are we?)  Lively bars and cafes lined the river.  In the center of town, a trio of bridges crossed the river.  There was some sort of festival going on when we were there, so every night you could take in a free outdoor ballet performance of Madame Butterfly.  It has a large fruit market, which we heard expands on Saturdays.  There are still some relics of communist buildings (such as the hotel in which we stayed our second night), but for the most part, Ljubjlana is an attractive city that definitely warrants a visit.

If you go, do check out Compa, which serves homemade beer and a mean platter of grilled meat, vegetables and cheese.  Don’t check out Hostel Most until their renovations are finished.  For some crazy reason, we took a room there and we even saw it first.  Located along the river, it will be very nice when it is finished.  They are actually renting out unfinished rooms.  And people are actually stupid enough to pay for them (albeit getting a discount).  I guess it didn’t occur to us to keep looking because prior to the trip, we grew accustomed to living in a state of disarray.  It didn’t take long to start having flashbacks to our four years of renovations, most of which were spent living much like Hostel Most: dirty floors, no baseboard or casing, wires sticking out of walls, plastic sheeting hanging from the walls, and drywall dust everywhere.  Sean says I was starry eyed over the magic words: private bath, free wifi, and discount.  When we realized we had no place to hang our laundry to dry in fear that it would touch the floors, and that we were constantly wearing shoes in the room, we moved to a drab, communist looking hotel.  We sold our house for a reason, after all.

Whirlwind Weekend in Munich

Even though I had only seen her once since we graduated from college, my friend Abbie generously hosted us at her apartment for a weekend in Munich.  Thanks to the wonders of Facebook, I knew that Abbie moved to Munich a year ago to work as a scientist. (Isn’t it fun to say that someone is a scientist?  And she really is).  I thought it would be fun to see her and to take a little foray into Germany en route from the Czech Republic to Slovenia.  The whole weekend was a whirlwind, starting with us blowing into Munich Friday afternoon and ending with us blowing out of Munich Monday morning, complete with a mad dash to jump on the train only seconds before it started moving.

From Munchen

In between those times, we had a lot of fun hanging out with Abbie and hearing about her new German lifestyle.  She passed on some of the insights about Germany that can only be gained from living there instead of just passing through.  It was nice to have our own personal tour guide.  She made sure that we got a proper tour of Munich, which included visiting a beer garden, walking through Englischer Gardens, seeing Munich’s may pole (a giant pole neighboring towns used to steal from each other), and rubbing the well worn noses of three lions outside a palace for good luck.  On Saturday, we hit the autobahn in Abbie’s car to visit the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site (more on that later) and a monastery with tasty beers brewed by monks.  (We learned, by the way, that there is no such thing as The Autobahn, just many autobahns).

As we walked around Friday evening, it seemed the whole city was abuzz.  The late day sun was still shining, and apparently it had been the first really nice day in ages.

Hailing from Pittsburgh, of course I love rivers.  One of my favorite things about Munich was the river was so accessible to everyone.  It ran right through Englishcher Gardens (what we would call a park) and was almost like a big stream.  Although Germans apparently have a lot of rules, we learned that they don’t always follow them, as demonstrated by the groups of teenagers frolicking in the water close to a sign forbidding swimming in the river.  (Including one group of three boys signing Take Me Home, Country Roads by John Denver, despite being a long, long way from West Virginia).

In the grassy areas next to the river banks, kids were taking advantage of Germany’s lax alcohol laws to throw a riverside party.

Further on down the river, we watched the river surfers navigate the rushing waters on their surfboards.

Bikes are prevalent everywhere in Europe, but it seemed everyone had a bike in Munich.  People sailed past us on their bicycles, dinging their bells so we would get out of their way.  No matter how many times I accidentally walk in the bike path, much to the chagrin of bikers worldwide, I always have a delayed reaction to the dinging bells.

We had visited a beer garden in Prague, but it felt more like we were crashing someone’s backyard cookout than a public gathering place.  Munich’s beer gardens are notorious places, always situated under big chestnut trees, with big crowds drinking giant 1 liter beers.  We ate pretzels, currywurst, and a cheese dip at what Abbie said was a proper beer garden: one with long benches and shared tables, covered with chestnut trees, where you could bring your own food if you choose to do so.

And of course we drank giant beers (we are both German, after all), and learned the proper way to cheers someone.

Besides the good weather, we suspected that everyone’s good moods had something to do with it being the opening weekend of the World Cup.  The soccer fever was everywhere.

Most of the cars and houses proudly displayed German flags.  We watched the United States tie England at a cookout at Abbie’s apartment with her group of friends, a fun crowd hailing everywhere from Germany to Portugal to New Zealand.  Their excitement over the World Cup was contagious.  There was a mixed group in terms of who was rooting for and against the United States, mostly due to whether a US win would benefit their fantasy soccer teams or not.

Being avid American football fans, it wasn’t hard for us to get into the World Cup, so we tried to learn as much as we could from Abbie and her friends to prepare us for the next month.  Like most Americans, we know very little about professional soccer.  I think Abbie’s friend Katrin is right: without commercial breaks, soccer will never make it big in the United States.  I will say, although the commercial breaks during football games at home border on the absurd at times, it is nice to have one now and again for a bathroom break, particularly when drinking giant beers.  (Seriously, it is easy to get quite tipsy when you are drinking beers by the half liter, as many of the German beers come.  I find it amusing that when Germans feel they have had too much to drink, they don’t stop drinking or start drinking less.  Instead, they just water down their beers with lemonade – a tasty drink known as a Radler).  The next night, we watched Germany beat Australia 4-0.  Even to our novice eyes, we could tell that the German players had much fancier footwork than the American players.

And of course I would be remiss to mention three other favorite aspects of the weekend: Abbie’s homemade chocolate chip cookies, Floyd, and Mr. Monk.

Thanks, Abbie, for giving us a window into life in Munich and for sharing your stash of imported chocolate chips and your kitties.