Everything's up to date in ... Sofia

After our experience with hairstyles in Plovdiv and our guidebook's lukewarm recommendation of Sofia relative to Plovdiv, I went to Sofia with decidedly low expectations. Boy did Sofia deliver. First of all, we stayed in a bizarre room decorated with animal print, Tahitian wood carvings, and lots of mirrors, but equipped with satellite tv, and all for 40 leva a night!

Then, while looking for new headphones, we saw a 16 gb flash drive for the first time and declared Sofia thoroughly modernized. The verdict was confirmed a night later with the best meal of the trip. An honest-to-goodness salad, followed by browned chicken tenders in a honey, orange, and rosemary sauce with grilled zucchini in a Roquefort-based cream sauce. Cost, including fresh peach juice: 10 leva. Aaron ate more traditional fair - potato soup and wine-soaked veal with local beer - for even less.

Not everything was so thoroughly advanced. Aaron had read that the per-capita income in Bulgaria was 150 Euros per month, a staggeringly low sum and impossible seeming in the city center where residents wore designer clothes and drove luxury automobiles (we heard that the police drove confiscated Porches but we never saw them). On our way out of town we had a sobering realization when we saw the city's slums. Built within the city garbage dumps, and populated with large families, this housing made other most dire areas I've seen on Skid Row and in Cambodia and Peru seem relatively hospitable.

We didn't do a lot of traditional sight-seeing in Sofia, so instead you get pictures of random things I noticed just walking around. First, really nice terra cotta tile work at the bath house:


Also , these basement-level tobacco and convenience shops:

Bulgaria is predominantly Greek Orthodox, which provided a change of pace, architecturally and culturally:

Finally, there was a significant language barrier. Bulgarians use a Cyrillic alphabet, they do not speak English, and they shake their heads from side to side when we would nod and vice versa. So we were lost a fair bit, but signs like these made up for it:


Chinese style Cyrillic - it never would have occurred to me!

xoxo Jessie

Plovidv: Fashion's Bermuda triangle

I arrived in Plovdiv with a nasty head cold. Though I did make it out of our guest room occasionally it was never for very long and my memories are vague at best. I know our neighborhood in the Old Town was quaint:

I know the food was delicious and unbelievably cheap (5 leva, or about $2 for this assortment):

And I know the hair was fug.

No joke, I saw a woman with multi-colored extensions AND crimped bangs wearing white leather boots and leggings! You know Bulgaria tried to join the USSR and was turned away. I'm thinking I know why...

xoxo Jessie

A Rude Awakening

So I've been battling Google for a while now. First, Google Maps didn't have any coverage in Sarajevo. Next, Google Maps lead us on a two-day-long wild goose chase around Athens in search of addresses that were no where near where the application placed them. Now Blogger won't allow me to post text with an embedded map. So my snarky explanation of "The Odyssey" just disappeared into cyberspace. I feel like I've been pulled from my cozy corner of the Matrix into a cold and inhospitable world in which Google is not infallible, efficient, and the embodiment of all that is right, but just another website in need of an update. Oh cruel world!

So, as the previous post was meant to indicate, we were forced to take a circuitous route from Croatia to Greece despite their geographic proximity. There are no direct flights from Croatia or Bosnia to Athens. Apparently for security reasons, there are no trains or buses through Albania (there's a saying in the Balkans: "Come visit Albania, your car is already here!"), Macedonia, or Kosovo. What's more the friction between the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republik of Srpska runs so high you can't travel directly through all of Bosnia, but have to go through Croatia in order to get from one side of the country to the other. Oh and there is no train service in and out of Dubrovnik.


So in order to get from Dubrovnik to Athens we took a five hour bus ride to Sarajevo where we caught an eight hour long overnight train (through Croatia and then Srpska) to Belgrade. There we caught another train for the thirteen hour long trip to Sofia.

Travel time so far: 26 hours. And it seemed a lot longer because we spent the trip from Sarajevo to Belgrade in an ash tray of a compartment with a grumpy old Serbian who chose, instead of sleeping, to explain how all members of the former Yugoslavia are really Serbian and how Bill Clinton ruined his country by "intervening." Awesome.

From Sofia we took a commuter train to Plovdiv, where we arrived just in time to find a hotel with cable tv and catch the election results live. After a few more days in Bulgaria we caught one more overnight train from Sofia to Athens via Thessaloníki.

So total travel time from Dubrovnik to Athens excluding the detour to Plovdiv: 38 hours!

In the end our time in Bulgaria justified the journey, because there we found some of the strangest sights and best food of the trip.

xoxo Jessie

The Odyssey

View Larger Map

Dubrovnik

The small old town within Dubrovnik's massive white stone walls is graced with the dramatic contrast of blue ocean, steep green hills, and deep red terra cotta tiled roofs.


What's not to like? Well actually the food if you must know, but we'd been eating more than our fair share in Bosnia, so we were due for a little famished beauty.

We stayed in an apartment on the old harbor, just opposite the old town. From there we could climb to the hill overlooking the city (where we're sitting in the first pic) to read and escape the crowds that came in for a few hours each morning from docking cruise ships.

Seriously, when a boat this size deposits its occupants on a city as small as Dubrovnik ... well it didn't take long for us to figure out the port-of-call itinerary and skedaddle out of the city center accordingly.

One particularly nice afternoon was spent walking along the top of the old town's wall.

In the off season there's not much in the way of nightlife, so one night we tried going to a movie. There's only one theater in town, and that theater had a single showing each day of a film called Max Payne. Worst movie ever. No joke. Even now I'm a little furious about it. But it's worth bringing up because this was our first experience outside the ArcLight with assigned seating at a cinema. Of course being self-entitled, freedom-seeking Americans, we completely ignored our tickets and sat in the middle of what passes for a movie theater in Croatia, but would look more like a middle school auditorium to anyone from the States. Oh the mayhem. Good thing we don't speak a word of Croatian or we might have felt compelled to move :0)

xoxo Jessie

Tripnip

After more than a month on the road it was time for a trim. This was Aaron's first professional haircut in more than four years!

xoxo Jessie

Do you know what that is?

That's a man crossing the street against the light!! We've been the only jaywalkers around for way too long. So thank you, sir for bucking the trend.

xoxo Jessie

I left my heart in Sarajevo

I was hesitant to travel to Sarajevo, not just because the book warned of stray land mines, but because the only thing I really knew about Sarajevo was that it was perennially war-torn and that I wouldn't be comfortable journeying there just to see what that meant. There was certainly plenty of evidence of the three solid years of Serbian bombing sustained in the mid-90s to justify my initial misgivings, and I didn't take a single picture my first day in town. There are still bombed out buildings,

Sincere requests that you leave your automatic weapons at home when you enter a mosque,

And Muslim graveyards full of those killed between 1992 and 1995, throughout the city.


But after eating some really good cheap food and meeting some incredibly sweet locals I was at ease. Some instant favorites were burek (meat or cheese filled pastry with yogurt) and cevapcici (sausages with kymak cheese and ajvar pepper sauce):

Sarajevo is famous for its sweets. We made multiple return trips to Eqipat for marzipan and baklava.


We stayed in an apartment across the street from this 5th Century church with a sweet elderly lady excitedly preparing for her first hajj to Mecca.

Another favorite sight was the men who played a giant game of chess in the main square. It appears they play all day, every day, and those not actually in the match are consumed with commentary and guidance.

Equally amusing was this cafe:

In the end Sarajevo was interesting, cheap, yummy, and beautiful. We'll be searching for burek and cevapci stateside.

xoxo Jessie

Bet you can't say Ljubljana ten times fast

We stopped in Slovenia's capital city, Ljubljana, on our way from Croatia to Bosnia. While there I caught my first view of a marathon finish line. I'm not sure what it's like in New York or Boston, but in Ljubljana everyone's a familiar face, and the whole the crowd knows each person crossing the finish line personally. It made for a fun time. I'm pretty sure I'll never run a marathon, but I'm now at least interested in scoping out the finish lines. The city's primary claims to fame involve its bridges. This "dragon bridge" became so closely associated with the city that dragons in general are now Ljubljana's mascot. And yes that's a castle in the background:)


This last picture isn't the clearest shot of Ljubljana's "three bridges," which is really one bridge with three diverging walkways, but Aaron looks cute, so whatevs.


xoxo Jessie

Poreč & Rovinj

First, Aaron suggested I call this Cruis'n the Croatian Coast - just thought you should know. Second, in Croatian, as in all the dialects spoken in the former Yugoslavia, the letter "j" is pronounced like the letter "y" is pronounced in English. So Rovinj as really Rovinny, and Jessie is really Yessie. I was Yessie in seven years' worth of Latin class - hated every minute (the Yessie not the Latin). It was worth it though because at least once Katie D. tried to see if Magistra's bun was a fake by firing rubber bands at her head. Poor Magistra. She was everything you could ever hope for in a middle school Latin instructor: endlessly patient, always more enthusiastic than my powers of translation warranted, and an ever present cheerleader at my bi-annual ballet recitals. And this is what she gets. But I digress.

Besides the typical white-stone pedestrian-only streets, Poreč boasts a gold-mosaicked Byzantine basilica. Poreč is also notable because while there we searched for and eventually found a recommended pizzeria named Nono, and at least once a week ever after Aaron adopts a cheesy Italian accent to point to an imagined pizzzeria and say, "That's a Nono!" Whaddya gonna do?


Rovinj is a slightly larger coastal town, where we enjoyed another sunny day by the water, hiking up winding cobbled paths to the church and sampling Istria's famous truffles :)

Well in the immortal words of Meg Ryan, "Beautiful, gorgeous, wish you were here...."

xoxo Jessie

Venezia!

Nothing I'm going to say here will really do Venice or our perfect day there real justice. Even in October spots like Rialto and San Marco were swarming, but just a few blocks into the maze of canals and we were on our own with glorious weather, delicious pizza, and a day free to wander.

Though we spent most of the day in these side streets, no blog post of mine would be complete without the other highlights. First the major landmarks, the basilica and famous shops at the Piazza San Marco:

This pair:

And last, but never least, dessert:

xoxo Jessie

Tidings

So Tripnic is behind still, though I'm getting within striking distance of reality. It's worth breaking the continuity though to comment on a few significant events in the past days. First, we were thrilled to watch the BBC report the results of the presidential election as they were announced in what were the early morning hours of November 5, 2008, in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. We fell asleep happy with news of mid- and south- western electoral wins and overwhelming turnout across the nation. In the morning though we finally got to a computer and to the news that Proposition 8 would pass in California. Now, a week later, the election results have been rendered still more bittersweet by the passing of Aaron's dear friend Phil. Aaron will be in New York this weekend for those of you also there.

On a far happier note, today is my uncle Tom's birthday. Happy six oh!!!

xoxo Jessie

Trieste

We spent one day walking around Trieste. We drank good coffee (yes I'm drinking espressos regularly now, and almost admitting I enjoy them), saw the roman ruins and medieval castle, and generally enjoyed the city's winding hillside alleyways and the grander sights along the harbor.






Also, we got to enjoy the practical joke that is Italian automotive engineering:


xoxo Jessie

Istria

We rented a car in order to see the Istrian coast. I drove a diesel-powered, manual transmission, Skoda hatchback through Croatia, Slovenia, and Italy. This in and of itself brought many adventures. First I had to find reverse. Then the klutch. Next came conversions metween miles per hour and kilometers per hour. Don't forget toll roads and choosing among the four different kinds of diesel fuel (no, I did not repeat any part of the Peage to those Kornbergs following at home). Last but not least, the traffic signs. For example, the speed limit on the freeway is 130 km/h, but only slower speeds are ever marked (so a belated apology to all those people trying to pass me that first night when I thought the speed limit was 100 km/h because that was the reduced speed on the onramp...). This sign means you have left the thing that's crossed out (in this case a coastal town in both Italian and Croatian).
This is just a basic warning sign, but it was used frequently and inexplicably. In this case it's warning of an upcoming bridge over a river, but in many cases it appeared by itself on an otherwise unchanging roadway.

I always did the sign justice but freaking out, slowing down, and creating a traffic situation worthy of the sign. I think between now and the next car rental Aaron may take it upon himself to learn how to drive stick.

xoxo Jessie

WTF?!?

One of the strangest things we've seen are what appear to be quite unabashed depictions of African slaves. They were most prominent in Austria, but we continue to come upon them in many former Austro-Hungarian territories. They defy any real explanation. First, an example from Prague:
And two more from Venice:

Retired

And so we say farewell to these old friends (Puma, California style circa 2002). And welcome in their place a comfy pair of brown Asics, on sale in Trieste. Aaron says he never wants to see them again, but thanks to Tripnic, they live on eternally.

xoxo Jessie

Update: To clarify, these were mine. Aaron wouldn't be caught dead touching them.

Maribor, or how we owe the Toplaks

In Slovenia we were the guests of Jurij Toplak and his family. Consequently, what had been envisioned as a two or three day visit, morphed into a week-long shmooz. We met the Toplaks in Maribor. From there Jurij showed us his family's vineyards in Ptuj.

Here we (Jurij and I that is) are in Jurij's cousin Marko's cellars trying, among others, an Italian Traminec, which I drank a wee bit too much of...

Jurij also took us up Maribor's ski lift (Maribor annually hosts World Cup skiing), which is outfitted with literally the oldest/sketchiest gondolas I've ever seen:)

On our last day in town Aaron and I hiked up these vineyards on the outskirts of town to a small chapel. We passed a high school gym class on the trail. What a life!

Jurij was unendingly patient with our foreign curiosity, explaining not just the legal system (he is a professor of constitutional law), but everything from why Albanians man the gelato stands, to how the transition from communism to capitalism has taken shape. Speaking of those Albanian gelaterias, in Slovenia we discovered a particularly valuable recipe: gelato (chocolate, hazelnut, vanilla - take your pick) mixed with crushed Ferrero Rocher. It's delicious and it's coming home to America with us.

xoxo Jessie

p.s. Aaron has requested photo credits. I don't know why I'm obliging the request, but (as Debs would say) F your I, Aaron took all the pictures in this post because my flash drive is on the fritz and I couldn't access mine.

You know you're totally adjusted to your perma-vacation when ...

You sit for an hour in an empty train wondering why it's running so late because you had no idea daylight savings turned clocks back a week ago.

You realize it's Halloween, not when you write 31.10.2008 on the hostel registry, not when you check in for your bus, and not when you inspect your dated stamp at the Croatian border, but when the third consecutive group of witch-hat-clad teenagers passes you on the street.

When you literally squeal with joy at the sight of a shower head with a wall attachment (as in, I can wash my hair with two hands!). Well maybe that's the sign I'm not really so adjusted afterall.

xoxo Jessie