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 - 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!

Life Ain't Hard in Novi Sad

We headed off before the crack of dawn from Southern Hungary to ensure that we made the cheaper, earlier connection from Subotica in the top of Serbia to Novi Sad.  We negotiated an interesting border control situation OK and arrived in Subotica with enough time to spare that we could quickly buy our ticket to Novi Sad and jump on the train.

However the time that the Serbian rail website had given us didn't actually exist and instead of heading for Novi Sad we were stuck with a four and a half hour stopover in Subotica.  Whilst Subotica did look as though it would be a decent way to spend a few hours, sightseeing with a pack on our back didn't really appeal to us so we were holed up in a coffee shop for a few hours, watching time tick by slowly.

Anyway, we boarded for Novi Sad and before we knew it were sat in a carriage, in a train that was going at about 20 kilometres an hour, talking and drinking plum rakija with a local while he chained smoked his way through a packet of cigarettes.  Smoking laws aren't only liberal in Serbia, they're pretty much non existent.

We hit Novi Sad and on recommendation from the guy at our hostel headed out for dinner at Zlatiborsko Prozorče. Welcome to a whole new level of language barriers!

When you're presented with a menu that reads like this

and you end up with a meal that looks like this, I think you've done quite well.

We later learned that what we had was pljeskavica, uvijaci and pasulj (a massive hamburger like pattie, chicken wrapped in bacon and smokey baked beans).  All delicious and traditionally Serbian.  They were however a touch on the salty side.  Maybe that's to encourage more beer consumption.  We indulged them.

The next morning we set off for a walk up to the fortress but not before stopping in for coffee at a pastry shop on the way.  For the measly sum of $2 we had a Serb coffee (similar to Turkish coffee) each and discovered krempite.  Wowzers!  This version of krempite was made with silky smooth cream cheese like custard, topped and bottomed with a thin layer of pastry and had a layer of cherries.

We also returned the following day and had an Italijanski krempite and a Serb styled croissant that was filled with a big chunk of ham and cheese.  The krempite was essentially a slab of Italian meringue and whilst it was good it was just too much.  The croissant was more bready than a French style croissant and was v good.

Back to the fortress.  This is the place where the world famous EXIT Festival is held each year.  It would be the most brilliant setting for a festival.

The fortress itself was fairly cool but the most interesting part of the walk was heading back to a river crossing that's well out of the city centre and took us through an interesting little neighbourhood where we think we saw Novak Djokovic's house.  Well it was big, on the river and had a tennis court and a swimming pool.  Surely it must be his.

Getting up to the bridge to cross it was easier said than done and involved us sneaking through an undeveloped patch of dirt under the bridge that was filled with gypsy huts.

On the way over the bridge we saw "the Danube's best beach" .  Maybe it looks a little more appealing in summer.

Along the walk we tucked into our first burek (fried layers of filo pastry filled with meat, cheese etc.) of Serbia which whilst not actually being a Serbian dish originally is very Serbian.  Burek with Yoghurt is the classic Serbian breakfast.

For dinner that night we took another tip from the guy at our hostel and dropped into Plava Frajla.  Nix had a pot of "spicy Serbian stew" which was packed with beef, pork, mushrooms, capsicum and onion and she devoured it in no time.  I was lucky to get a taste.  I went for ćevapčići with exceptionally more-ish potatoes.  Om nom nom.

We didn't get up to much on our final day in Novi Sad as it was the Orthodox  Catholic Christmas Eve and not a lot was open.  Orthodox Catholics celebrate Christmas on 7 January.

We were able to find Lipa open for dinner where we revisited ćevapčići and tried crumbed chicken stuffed with kajmak.  Both v average.  So that was a bit of a lowlight to end on but our few days in Novi Sad were enjoyable nonetheless.

Barrie-ometer of "Feel" - brave bulging buoyant clairvoyants