Fin

OK, the trip is all over. Boo. Although it's certainly nice to be back home and sleeping in my own bed. After an entire month of staying in budget accommodations with cardboard towels and limp, flat little pillows, I was rather shocked last evening when I started drying myself off. The internal dialog was "Oh, so this is what a fluffy towel feels like". I guess this wouldn't be a problem if I wasn't such a tight wad and spent some more money on accommodations, but alas, I am.

Dubrovnik was absolutely fantastic. It's a walled medieval town right on the Adriatic coast. Being able to walk the town walls and take pictures of the town and the coastline has been one the highlights of the trip. Dubrovnik also provided a unique opportunity to talk to some people that have experienced war first-hand. The city was besieged for over a year during Croatia's war with Serbia in the early nineties. I was able to speak to my kind lady whose home I was sleeping in while I was there, and having her explain the kinds of depredations experienced by everyone in the town, not to mention the loss of life, was rather moving. It's also rather profound to be speaking to someone and be told that within recent memory an artillery shell had crashed through their front door (which at the time I was currently sitting 5 ft. away from) and completely destroyed the stairwell and first floor of the building you are sleeping in. She actually pointed out some patches in her bookshelves and wall with were repairs from shrapnel impacts from the shell. Her father wanted too keep the shelves with the visible patches rather than replace them because he thought it was important to be reminded about what happened. They also still had their nameplate from the front door as well as a portion of the artillery shell mounted on the wall.

Like Split, Dubrovnik had great seafood. It seems that due to the mass of tourism the locals have been priced out of the market by wealthy westerners with superior means for fish, so the locals eat a lot of mussels, oysters, shellfish, squid, cuttlefish, and octopus. Tasty. The two restaurants I was hitting a lot which my hostess said they were the best places to get the local flavor (it's nearly impossible to get a purely local flavor as the town isn't that big and there are so many damn tourists there) didn't even have anything with fins on the menu. Well that's not entirely true. One had marinated sardines (badass), and they both had something translated as "fried little fish". That's basically a huge plate piled with fried minnows. So neither really had a fried/grilled/sauteed/roasted fish fillet or whole fish. Because I felt obliged to at least try some fish while I was there, I asked her and another local for a recommendation on the best place to get fish at a place a local would actually go to (not a tourist trap). They both recommended the same place so I gave it a shot, got the fish, and was a little disappointed. I guess I should have gotten the fried minnows instead. Or my favorite, the black cuttlefish risotto. That's risotto made with cuttlefish (think a cross between a squid and an octopus) with it's ink in the risotto (hence it's literally black). Yum!

The second day I was staying in Dubrovnik I took a bus tour to Mostar in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It's a town with a large Bosnian, i.e. Yugoslav Muslim, population. It also was a sight of a lot of the fighting in the Balkans during the nineties, albeit in a separate conflict from that which occured in Dubrovnik. It's a quaint little town with some nice mosques and a few bridges over the river running through the middle of town. Also ate some yummy Balkan cuisine while I was there. Got some great photos during the trip there, as well. They will be posted very, very soon!

Now that I'm back I just need to work off my post-vacation funk. I was so out of it this morning I forgot to bring my cell phone and wallet with me while running errands. I also hit the gym today, and let's say it was a less than impressive showing. I hit the scale after excercising, and it appears that I lost 7 lbs on my trip. Not in a good way. Yes, I'm now a flaccid and disguisting pukesack. I guess I should have done pushups and crunches once in a while in the morning when I got up. I can't believe I lost that much weight in just 4 weeks considering how much I was eating. I guess I need to double up on the squid my next trip.

Slovenia is Good Stuff

Slovenia was good times. Spent 4 nights and 3 days in Ljubljana and surroundings. The scenery around there is really amazing. I spent the entire first day tooling around the Julian Alps with my rental car. That part of the county was also one of the major spots of conflict on the eastern front of WWI. There was a really intersting museum and some other related sights to hit. In some spots you can actually still see some old military fortifications at the very top of some of the mountain peaks.

The one thing that was a bit of a drag is that I hit a rock about the size of a volleyball on the way back to Ljubljana and got a flat tire. Luckily the car had a full size spare, so I was able to get it changed out without too much difficulty (although the first time I jacked up the car I didn't have the parking break on--oops). The bigger problem is that I'm insured by my credit card, so know I'm going to have a big administive hastle to deal with when I get home.

Went and checked out a cave in the area the next day. It looked like something straight out of 'The Lord of the Rings'. One of the caverns was over 100 meters tall, and about 2oo meters long.

Ljubljana was really nice. It has lots of great little riverside cafes and a really pleasant old town. The last night I was there I met a couple German girls who were friends of a DJ that was spinning outside along the river. Afterwards we all checked out a nightlife zone a bit out of the center. It was interesting, but a little too bohemian for my tastes. A tad too much weed, dread locks, and vomit on the sidewalk to suite me.

After Ljubljana, I hit Plitvice Lakes National Park in Croatia. Good stuff. I'll post snaps ASAP. After that I blew through Zagreb (the capital of Croatia), and got to Split yesterday afternoon. This place is now in the pole position for the 'best food' award. The seafood here is fantastic. The chicks are pretty nice, too, assuming you're into sexy, 6 ft tall Amazon women. It's also got a very nice, mellow Mediterranean vibe. Great for relaxing in a small cafe with a long meal and a good bottle of Croatian wine.

The one thing that has been a hassle here is the accomodations. Rooms are actually very expensive in Split. I was unable to find a hostel with a single room, so I decided to give a shared room a try and see if the social aspect would make up for the hassle for sharing a room with somebody. However, it looks like I picked the wrong place to try sharing a room. The place I ended up with had 4 rooms of 6 people, all packed cheek to jowl, with only 2 bathrooms for everyone. It also is lacking some basic items that could make it a little more livable like a hook to hang your towel on (you have to drap it over you bed headboard instead) or some minimal closet, drawer, or table space (you have to keep absolutely everything in your bags, which you have to shove under your bed). Despite having the 2 days already paid for and being past the cancellation deadline, I walked down to the bus stop and found somebody hawking rooms and grabbed one of them. It ain't exactly the Four Seasons either, but the location is good, it's relatively inexpensive, and I'm not living like an animial with a bunch of smelly college students.

I'm off to my final stop, Dubrovnik, tomorrow morning. So it looks like I'll be able to post pictures with weekend when I get back to Chicago.

Holy Cow!

Two blog entries in two days! What a treat! Actually I've just got some time to kill before my train tomorrow afternoon to Ljubljana. It's going to be a nine hour ride that will basically crowd up both lunch and dinner (gasp!), so I hit the the Great Market Hall today and put together some provisions. I've got some crusty bread, some spicy Hungarian paprika sausage and other charcuterie, some grapes, figs, candied fruits for dessert, and of course a bottle of wine. All said and told it cost me around 3000 Forints, which is roughly 15 bucks. What a wonderful place. The best part was the fast food meal, Hungarian style, that I had after my shopping. In addition to all the produce, meats, veggies, spices and crap they sell in the hall, they've also got some food vendors. I got a roasted chicken leg stuffed with some kind of unidentifiable tasty gunk, a cabbage leaf filled with meat and sausage, and a stuffed Hungarian Pepper with a spicy tomato sauce. And of course everthing cost about 7 bucks. McDonalds is bullshit.

I also spent some time today at the 'House of Hungarian Wines'. It's a setup where you can plop down the equivalent of about 18 bucks, and then taste you way through the various wine regions in Hungary. I was able to taste 50 different pours, most all of which were good. However, none of them had serious wow factor. I'm kind of surprized--based on everything I've drank, I think I would actually have to give the Czech republic the nod for the best wine so far.

Went on a pub crawl tonight. Being Monday, I figured it would be slow and I'd need an arranged tour were I to have any hope of finding a good social scene. Unfortunately, I was the only person that showed up for the pub crawl and it was cancelled. The organizer gave me some tips on places to check out. I'm just down the street from one right now. I popped in earlier and it was fairly busy, but it seemed to be mostly a bunch of college aged kids sitting and chatting at tables. When I'm done on the computer here, I'll maybe pop back in to see if there's someone I can get into a conversation with on a topic other than what thier favorite class is or what the cool new ringtone they got thier thier phone is like. If that doesn't pan out, I'll maybe just head home and see what Maria and Istvan (my hosts) are up to. There's also Fred--the new guy from Kansas that moved into thier other room over the weekend. A very nice guy, if not the most charismatic person I've ever met.

Budapest

OK. I think I'm getting the hang of this. Through trial and error, I've been able to figure out that "Új bejegyzés" means "add new post" in Hungarian. I suppose that's all I need to know.

Budapest is good times. It's charms are definitely more subtle than Prague or Krakow, but it's still very nice. It's got some very lovely buildings, and one nice little pockets of town, but it's not like Prague in that you can't be plopped down in the old town and end up with a picture-postcard-perfect snapshot view in every direction. Being so large, though, there are interesting things everywhere. You can pop into just about any area of town and find some nice historical monuments or buildings.

The highlights here are definitely the food and the people. Chow is cheap, and is consistently very good. The wine is quite tastey as well, although I've yet to find any that match up with a few of the Moravian pours I had in the Czech Republic. I'll be hitting the House of Hungarian wines tomorrow, though, so that might no last. I'm also going to be taking a cooking class on Hungarian cuisine tomorrow, so maybe I can steal some more ideas for home.

The people I'm staying with have basically made me a part of the extended family. I'm actually sleeping in what I believe is thier living room during the tourist offseason. They've gone way beyond what would be considered normal friendliness or assistance for a paid guest. However, I think that's the general gist here. People in Hungary just have class.

I was able to partake of the thermal bath house scene this weekend. I went to the big public bath in the main city park, rather than the famous and touristy one in one of the ritzy hotels here. Was pretty interesting people watching. Was a nice experience, too. It wasn't as fancy, elaborite, or for that matter flesh-exposing (you wear swimsuits here) as the place I went to in Baden-Baden last year, but it's definitely less stodgy and a much more social experience. And it's just part of local culture. If you live in Budapest, a few time of month you drop into the bath, dip into a thermal mineral pool, and chit-chat and play chess in the pool with your pals. It was probably the most enjoyable thing I've done here. But of course I'm always looking for and opportunity to strut my beefcake around.

I also made a new friend this weekend. Met a gal from Australia on a tour of a couple towns further up the Danube on Friday. We ended up hanging out on Friday and Saturday nights. Was a good thing, too, as the night life scene here is surprizingly low-key. The main tourist strip was completely closed down by midnight on Saturday, and the places we knew of that were supposed to be good local hang-out neighborhoods were pretty thin. We were able to get boozed up on our own just fine, though.

About Half Way Through

Czech Republic--check. Poland--check. On to Hungary. I just got into Hungary yesterday, into a small town called Eger. It was a nice place, but a little boring. The point of going was to spend tiime hanging out in the cafes around the town square and drinking the local wine. However, the weather was really lousy, so it was pretty dead. After a couple tries I got into Budapest this afternoon. I say a couple tries because I actually got on the wrong train at one of my connections on the way here, so I had to backtrack a little bit to actually make it to Budapest. The town I had my connection in was a small little cow-town, so it's train station didn't have boards specifying the destination of each train in the window. However, I say a train pull in with a sign in it's window saying "IC - Budapest - Kaleti Pu.", which is exactly what I needed. Looked like the train was actually going in the opposite direction and they just didn't update the sign. However, I don't know this for sure as the only people I had to ask about it spoke only Hungarian. Don't know if any of you have ever heard Hundarian, but it might as well be Chinese it's so incomprehensible to an American Ear.

Budapest has been really nice so far, but apparently the lousy weather has followed me down here. It didn't rain that much, but it was extremely cold for this time of year. It's been like this for about 6 days now. I was getting rained on in Cesky Krumlov, more often then not it was rainy and cold in Poland (even by thier standards), it rained the whole day yesterday in Eger, and now it's absolutly frigid in Budapest. The weather's been bad enough that I've actually caught a cough and a sore throat. Pretty annoying considering this is the prime location for my eating and wine drinking on the trip.

Notwithstanding the weather, Poland was great. Krakow in particular had some really nice areas of town to stroll around in, and had some very interesting things to do. I spent alot of time in the historical old center (it's about the only part of Poland that wasn't completely flattened in WWII), checked out alot of the communist-era architecture in the city outskirts, visited Auschwitz, and toured a salt mine a bit outside the city. Sounds a little smaltzy, but the salt mine tour was actually really fascinating--the miners had actually carved a massive underground chapel out of pure salt. It's got the whole spiel, an alter, art (for instance, they carved a very respectable copy of "The Last Supper" out of salt), massive chandaliers made out of salt crystals, and of course, the requisite full-size statue of John Paul II added a few years ago. And it's big. The chapel is about the size of you're typical high school gymnasium. The place is actually a service industry item now. There are other large rooms also carved completely out of salt (the floor is salt too) where you can host events. And they of course have all the kitchen facilities, bathrooms, and bar setups to support that kind of thing. Our tour guide, who is from the area, actually had her graduation party in the mine, 100 meters underground. And yes, people even get married in the chapel. I'll post photos when I get an opportunity.

Posting to the blog here has been a bit more difficult than I expected. Most of the places I've gone are big tourist spots, but they still don't seem to cater to the travel crowd quite as much as other places I've been. In most of the towns prior to Budapest, the internet cafes has closed at 6:00 or 7:00. The last thing I want to be doing is wasting my opportunities to go do stuff during the day sitting in front of a computer. The other issue is the fact that this blog site is automatically internationalized. Then hit it, it recognizes that I'm working on a maching with a Hungarian (or Czech or Polish) locale, and renders the site appropriately. Since all these languages are pretty much inscrutable to me, I've got to work from memory as to what the different actions are on the page (like "login", "create new post", etc.). At the top of my page now I've got:

Bejegyzések - Beállítások - Sablon - Blog megtekintése
Létrehozás - Bejegyzések szerkesztése - Megjegyzések moderálása

OK. So I made out the word "Blog". Aside from that, if you've got any idea what the hell they're talking about, you're one up on me.

Anyways, I gotta run. Dinner time.

Czech Republic

OK. So it's taken me over 5 days to post my first entry. If you're inclined to whining, shut your damn cake-hole. There was so much to do in Prague, I hardly ever had any time to waste in front of a computer. I got to Cesky Krumlov yesterday, and as it's really the first opportunity where I've been able to get on a computer for an extensive time, and also do some laundry.

Prague was fantastic. I'd post pictures, but I think that's going to take too damn long. I've got to catch a tour of Krumlov Castle that I can't be late for. The pictures don't really do the place justice, anyways. Particularly at night. In the evening, the view of the Charles bridge and the castle are really stunning, and my little point-and-shoot doesn't do all that well in low light. Guess you had to be there. Oh wait, I'm sorry, you were all back in the US and had to work the next day. Sucka's!!!!!!!!! Ha!

Other hightlights of Prague were the old town, the Jewish quarter, and just the architecture in general. And the price of the food is a winner. I can have a nice 2 or 3 course meal with several glasses of wine for around $25. And I have. Many times. Twice a day, every day, without exception. (OK, I lied, one day I had 3 meals--lunch, early dinner, and late dinner.) I tried the local beer, and as far as I can tell it's very good, but since I'm a non-beer drinker it doesn't really float my boat. Any of the places I eat I'm able to get the Moravian (eastern Czech) wine, though, and that suits me just fine. I've had a few glasses that were ho-hum, but most of it is in the range of quite good to absolutely fantastic. I had one a few days ago that if I didn't know what I was drinking I would have thought it was a $80 bottle or red Burgundy, or maybe a really high-end Rioja. And it was about 2 bucks a glass. I'm blowing back through Prague today on my way to Warsaw, and I think I'll actually go back to that restaruant for a little more wine and the Czech Duck I love so much. It's a roasted 1/2 duck with braised red and white cabbage and potato dumplings. Yummy!!!!!!

I'm getting by just fine on my light packing. Basically all I brought was 6 t-shirts, 2 dress shirts (both black, maybe not the swiftest move), a couple pair of jeans, one pair of pants, and other accoutrement. Probably didn't need the pants, as nobody wears them over here, but I suppose they're good in case I ever need to look really smooth. One night I threw them on because I didn't want to wear a t-shirt where I was eating but was getting sick of the black shirt and jeans thing. Found out pretty quickly that if you ever want do draw some serious attention from the ladies in Prague, all you to do is throw on a generic pair of grey Banana Republic pants. I got the impression all the girls were saying to themselves "Hey, this guy is wearing pants! He must be some kind of millionair playboy!". Apparently, the doormen of the various cabarets had the same thought. A couple of them damn near tripped over themselves running over to me in order to give me the standard spiel: "Come in, we have the most beautiful girls in town, two drinks free". In my 4 days in Prague, I never did quite figure out if "cabaret" was a euphemism for "strip club" or "brothel". I guess I'll save that for another trip (note to my mother: In case you missed it, that was a joke).

Here's the Plan

It's the week before, and I'm just about ready. Here's the itinerary by day:

1. Arrive in Prague (Czech Republic) mid-afternoon, Prague
2. Prague
3. Kutna Hora (Czech Republic) + Prague
4. Prague
5. Cesky Krumlov (Czech Republic)
6. Cesky Krumlov + Prague
7. Warsaw (Poland)
8. Krakow (Poland)
9. Krakow
10. Krakow + Auschwitz
11. Krakow
12. Eger (Hungary)
13. Budapest (Hungary)
14. Budapest + Danube Bend
15. Budapest
16. Budapest
17. Budapest
18. Loooong day train to Ljubljana (Slovenia)
19. Ljubljana + drive around the Karst region
20. Ljubljana + drive around the Julian Alps
21. Ljubljana
22. Zagreb (Croatia)
23. Plitvice Lakes (Croatia)
24. Split (Croatia)
25. Dubrovnik (Croatia)
26. Dubrovnik
27. Mostar (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
28. Fly home :-(

Commence Blogging!

The blog is up! Start checking it out after August 24th for news and updates on my trip!