The Director's Cut

After four months on the road there's a chunk of pictures that didn't really fit into any particular blog post but I believe need to be shared.  Enjoy.

So beautiful

Roses and sunshine in Bamberg

#buttheyrenotmycigarettesMum

Despite the tough exterior,
she really is just a little girl at heart

A picture perfect street in Schiltach with
the Black Forest looming in the background

My favourite shot of the trip.  We caught it walking home,
beer in hand, very content after our day driving in Belgium

Brotherly love

Beagles make everything better

Nix's reaction to Matt snorting too much snuff

A wet Gent

Brussels cool guys

The Grote Dorst aftermath

More brotherly love

More quintessentially Dutch than
weed, hookers and clogs

You think we look gay,
check out the guys in the background

Ricky Punting

Roar

Making Nix a yellow snowcone

Meep

The Recap - Eastern Europe (and around)

Eastern Europe.  The region where at times you feel as though a Western European city has been gifted to a South East Asian government, which as you can imagine can sometimes be very trying but at the same time very interesting and very different to what we're used to.

Over our month and a bit in the region we met some beautiful and very generous people, ate some great food, drank copious quantities of spirits distilled from everything you can think of and have left wanting more and cannot wait to get back to the region in summer to delve deeper.

The Ticks

• Beer snacks and food in general in Czech.  We had no idea how much we were going to grow to love this nation's food.  Just brilliant. 
• Dogs EVERYWHERE in Romania, every train station that you stop at has its own welcoming and farewelling dog pack. 
• Zdiar actually gave us snow! 
• Christmas markets. 
• The Octogon in Budapest for NYE is mental. 
• Viennese coffeehouses.  So fancy, so traditional, so cool, so good. 
• The salamanders at Home Made Hostel. 
• Rail and bus services in Czech actually do work like clockwork.  They were even more reliable than Germany's.  Gasp. 
• The Budapest coffee scene.  Something that again took us by surprise and gave us a much needed taste of home. 
• Romanian "boobies" 

The Crosses

• The speed of trains in Serbia and Romania.  Whilst they actually allow you to enjoy the countryside as it slowly drifts by, sometimes you just want to get there and not take an hour to do 20 kilometres. 
• The hype behind Bratislava.  Sorry but it was lost on us. 
• Water that gives you the shits in Serbia and Romania.
• Not being able to find traditional Hungarian food in Budapest. 
• ATMs that eat your card in Bratislava. 
• Unfortunately every place that we visited we found ourselves saying, "wouldn't this place be great in summer". 
• Where is the snow? 

The Food 

Christmas Markets - the "tradelink" in Brno, hands down.  We've tried about five or six others throughout the region now and none of them have come close.

The Rest - Czech garlic soup and pickled trout from U Černého Vola .  This was a tough one and there are about five other things that we ate in Czech that could've taken this.  Czech food wins, that's the moral of the story.

The Booze

Christmas Markets - the wine punč at Český Budějovice that was packed full of sultanas and macerated strawberries.  So good when the temperature is hovering around zero and your fingers feel like icey poles.

The Rest - rakia/palinca/fire water/slivovitz/slivovica/brandy.  Call it what you will, this drink is now synonymous with Eastern Europe for us and it will feel like we're catching up with an old friend anytime that we have it again throughout our lives.  This drink is quite possibly the most memorable thing about our time in Eastern Europe.

We would've already been in Morocco for a week once you read this so look forward to sheep's heads, goat's testicles and year old preserved camel meat.  The regularity of those posts will depend on us getting decent internet connections. 

There's one more post on its way before the Morocco ones begin to (hopefully) roll though, it's a goodie.  At least I think it is anyway... 

Vampire Hunting Across Transylvania - Sighişoara and Braşov

Vlad Țepeș Dracula v Bram Stoker's Dracula.  Bran Castle v the castle referred to in Bram Stoker's book.  Reality v myth.  Fact v fiction.  Certainty v possibility.  What you choose to believe and accept along the Vampire trail in Romania will shape your journey.

The "facts" are that Vlad Țepeș Dracula was born to Vlad Dracul and he rose to prominence as somewhat of a hero in the region for his role in freeing the Romanian people from the Ottoman rule.  He, maybe erroneously so, has since been regarded as somewhat of a villain under the moniker of 'Vlad the Impaler' due to his predilection of impaling his victims' heads on stakes.

The fiction is provided though Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' where a young lawyer travels to Transylvania to assist Count Dracula in a real estate acquisition and stays with Dracula within his castle.  He soon suspects that Dracula is not all as he seems and upon waking up to two females, fangs exposed, ready to go at his neck and having previously noted Dracula's lust for blood, quickly flees.

It's the crossover and mishmash of the fact and fiction that has generated a tourism industry around a bevy of what ifs, maybes and possibilities.  So, like everyone here before us, we're in Romania on the hunt for Vampires.

Sighişoara

We'd come to Sighişoara to begin our journey along the Vampire trail as it's alleged that this is the city where Vlad was born.  However, with the positives of travelling in the low season come the negatives.  Whilst it feels like you're cheating the system when you pay for two beds in a ten bed dorm and no one else is in it, you also run the risk that things may be closed.

In this case, the house where Vlad is supposed to have been born in was closed for renovations.  There's now a restaurant in the building and we'd even prepared ourselves to go and indulge some guilty pleasures and drink Dracula's blood and Dracula's blood soup, which are really just red wine and tomato soup.

The best we could do was a picture of Nix out the front of his house, one of the "official" plaque and photographic evidence of a potential attack.  Coincidence?  I think not.

In saying that, the rest of Sighişoara did not disappoint and confirmed for us again why UNESCO heads around doffing its cap to cities and other various landmarks.  I'll let the photos do the talking here.

Brașov

Being the intrepid travellers that we are, paying $45 each (an entire day's full budget) to go on a tour to see a castle that the castle in Bram Stoker's may have been based on didn't really appeal to us.  So instead we payed $9 to go there and back on local transport.

You arrive in Bran surrounded by more tat than you've ever seen in your life.  You then pay the equivalent of $8 to enter Bran Castle.

To use Nix's words, "I'm not sure what I expected but I expected more".  That statement hits the nail on head.

You wander through what is a pretty plain castle with plaques pointing out rooms that the Queen used as a toilet, a candlestick that was used in a movie about Dracula and a "secret passageway" that had a very obvious door leading to it.  Finally, after what seemed like a thousand steps, you reach two rooms with some token information regarding Vlad and Dracula and...  that's it!

You then exit through aforementioned tat, are half heartedly convinced into entering a "haunted house" by some strange werewolf/vampire guy and then leave Bran wondering, is that it?  Is that Transylvania?  Is that Romania?  Maybe it is...

The most exciting part of the trip for me was trying to throw rocks through the frozen lakes next to the castle.

Other highlights of Brașov were servings of brains in preparation for our next destination and finally trying the "boobies" (delicious doughnut things made with some sort of curd in them) that I shouldn't have left until our last day in Romania!

Barrie-ometer of "Feel" - Click Me!

Vampire Hunting Across Transylvania - Timişoara and Sibiu

Sibiu

Sibiu was the first Transylvanian city that we hit and, whilst it doesn't have any well known historical links to Dracula, it did provide us one of the great experiences of our travels and lives so far.

We arrived at our hostel mid afternoon and as is the norm in Romania it was palinca time.  Padre, the hunting man, said he'd give us an hour while he had something to eat and he'd come back and get us.

An hour later he came back and brought us into his kitchen where we started off with his cherry liqueur that had none of the normal, fake cherry flavour that you come to expect from drinks like this and was extremely drinkable.  The cherry liqueur is "for the woman" though and next we were onto his plum palinca.  This is so packed full of genuine plummy goodness it's not funny but this was only the beginning of the show.

Before we knew it we were down in his "cave" drinking, among other things, his second last bottle bottle of six year old plum palinca.  You can't get your hands on this stuff in the shops and it was a serious honour to share this with Padre.

Down in Padre's cave, which exists underneath the house that he was born in and was the house of his grandparents, not only is he fermenting various palincas, but he also has a range of wines on the go, pickled veggies, pickled cabbages in huge vats, the world's tastiest tomato juice, etc. etc. etc.  Padre is a man of refined taste and exceptional ability.

So the night continued on and as we worked our way through the bottle we all proceeded to get merrier and merrier, us in particular given our entire day's food intake was two bread rolls and a couple of mandarins.  Padre even told me at one point that he felt like I was "a man of the wild" (hence me with the hunting hat below).  I think the palinca had hold of him too at that point.

And I think the palinca had hold of us all by this point.  Nix has no idea what she was doing here.

Everything we consumed that night was made by Padre and he only uses natural ingredients.  This man hasn't been to the doctor in more than thirty years and believes palinca is the only medicine that he needs.

Hopefully this isn't the last we see of Padre as he's invited us back to go hunting and camping with him once summer hits.

The following day in Sibiu we checked out the old town and had a pretty good meal but everything pales in comparison to that previous night in Padre's cave.

Timişoara

This is actually where we started our Romanian journey and we mainly just took it easy for a couple of days seeing as Nix wasn't feeling too flash.  Women hey, it's always something.

Highlights of Timişoara were beers at the Bierhaus, an OK meal at Casa Bunecii, Catedrala Mitropolitană and a nutty sort of coffee cake from a local bakery.

Pug Sightings - 22

Making the (Bel)grade

As the day we arrived in Belgrade was Orthodox Catholics' Christmas our food and drink options were limited.  We managed to find a little bar doing $2 Cuba Libres and cheap beer so settled in for a while and dribbled shit for a few increasingly intoxicated hours.  Dinner was from a little hole in the wall pizza shop that we'd found earlier in the day.

The next morning we stopped into a traditional little bakery that the guy at our hostel had told us about and went for more burek.  We tried it with meat this time and if was bloody delicious, if a bit oily.

Once again, fog played a part in completely changing the feel of the place.

Over this ledge is a main road and the Danube.  Apparently.

That night we guiltily returned for pizza after a few beers at The Black Turtle, a local microbrewery, followed by stumbling upon a hookah bar and settling in with cups of tea and cherry mint shishah.

The following morning began with more burek and Nicola's interpretation of the classic Serb breakfast.  I headed off to get the burek and Nix the "drinking yoghurt", because she'd advised me that it's drinking yoghurt that you have burek with.   I delivered on my part of the arrangement but Nix did not.

The classic Serb breakfast is actually with set yoghurt (there was no "drinking yoghurt" in the supermarket).  So instead of not worrying about yoghurt Nix came back with two pots of 20% fat yoghurt and we had to fashion a spoon out of the aluminium lid.  We ended up covered in yoghurt and received more than just one strange look from people walking past.

After cleaning ourselves off we headed to the zoo for a rare occasion where we actually paid to enter somewhere.

It was fun.  Unfortunately it's a bit of a concrete jungle and some animals looked a bit sad but you can see they're doing all they can with the resources available to them.  A quite successful breeding program indicates that they're doing a fairly good job.

Things of note were:

• the zoo had the greatest collection of albino and white animals, that you have ever seen.  White lions, tigers, peacocks, wallabies, the list goes on
• Wednesday isn't hump day at Belgrade Zoo, it's Thursday.  No lie, we saw more animal copulation here in a few hours than we'd seen over our lives.  Everything was going at it
• They have some strange, mutant turkey/pigeon/dove thing that was so weird I couldn't bare to take a photo of it
• Way too many kids fed the animals chips.  Although according to our hostel owner that's OK because kids in Eastern Europe kids don't have much to make themselves happy
• Between you and most animals is just a standard wire fence.  It would take no effort for you to poke your hands through the wire and have them chomped off by a tiger, lion, cheetah etc etc.  And we secretly hoped it would happen to more than a few people there!

A couple of funny little anecdotes that the hostel owner told us once he'd got over the fact that we'd gone to the zoo.

 1. The city's favourite resident used to be a gorilla who on multiple occasions managed to escape from the zoo and at one point was being hidden away in the grounds of his school.  Apparently all Belgrade residents were more than happy to keep his secret as one stint lasted three weeks.

 2. A tiger also managed to escape at one point but was, fortunately, caught quickly.

 3. And my favourite.  The zoo is actually located in the grounds of the fortress and each year Belgrade's annual beer festival is held in a different part of the fortress.  One year two guys got so wasted that they managed to climb one of the walls of the zoo and fell into the bear pit.  Not much of them was left when they were discovered.

After an enjoyable few hours at the zoo we stopped by Sta Je Tu Je for lunch.  We went for sarme (cabbage leaves stuffed with pork mince), smoked pork strip with potatoes and a side of pickled veggies, starting and finished with quince and plum rakija.  The first shot prepares you for your meal and the second cleanses following the meal.

Lunch was followed by vanilla and gingerbread icecreams from Moritz Eis and Serb coffee from ? (that's actually the cafes name).  All v good.

Given we didn't need dinner we had an earlyish night before we were up again at the crack of dawn to set off for Vampire country.  Silver bullets, garlic, holy water, the Twilight Trilogy and stakes at hand.

50th post!  WOO!