Euro Trip Day 45: Nuremburg, or Nuremburg, or Nürnberg, or Nuernberg. Several spellings, one city.
I’m trying to play catch up on posts here, so bear with me. :-)
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On Monday morning, July 19th, we got up, went and availed ourselves of our free breakfast at our hotel, and got our stuff packed to head to the train station.
At this point in time, we have packing down to a science. We LONG ago dispensed with the “his and hers” bags and went to a more practical system. My backpack (the big orange one) contains everything we don’t really use on a regular basis. This includes our cooler weather clothes (since I still haven’t convinced John to get ditch the TWO pairs of jeans and TWO hooded sweatshirts he brought with him), souvenirs, the small food bag we have, and the small toolkit we have. One of his bags contains all of the clothes we typically wear and the toiletries bag, and his smaller backpack has our laptops. When we pack, I’m responsible for packing my clothes and everything that lives in the big orange pack, and he’s responsible for his clothes and everything that lives in his packs. It works out really well, and there’s none of the usual scrambling of “did you remember to check the shower” or something like that.
Anyway, so we got on our train, which wasn’t one of the ICE trains (Germany’s high-speed network), just a little regional one. So I was expecting it to behave like a little regional train, puttering along at around 55mph. Then about 10 minutes into our trip, I glanced at the GPS readout on my phone, and about fell over. We were puttering along at the quite glorious speed of 102 miles per hour. OMG SWEET.
I’m SO all over this high-speed travel kind of thing. I love trains so much.
The other nice thing? Because I’m (sigh) over 26 and John and I are traveling on a saver pass (two or more people) we were required to buy a first-class pass. We haven’t had much opportunity to use it until now, as most trains we’ve been on have been second-class only. But German trains always seem to have both classes–SWEET. Heck, yesterday a… train attendant? (like a flight attendant, I guess?) came around and offered us newspapers and snacks!! Oh yeah!! First class also usually means air conditioning, bigger tables, and more seat room and leg room. I’m all over that.
So yeah, it’s nice to actually use the first-class passes we paid for. Why can’t air travel be that comfortable and comparatively inexpensive?
When we got to Nuremberg, it was only about 11:30 AM, but, continuing with the good luck we’ve had so far this trip, our hotel let us check in and leave our stuff in our room. I LOVE the feeling of taking off my backpack and leaving it somewhere so I can go explore — sooooo nice! We headed back to the metro from whence we’d come to go into the Old Town part of the city. When I got there I realized I’d somehow managed to leave my camera in the room. I’m thinking my shoulder was tring to sabotage me or something — it’s tired of lugging that camera around. But at least I had my phone camera, as always.
On our way into town, we stopped at a McDonald’s to see what their local offerings were (since the only other German town we were in, Neusorg, was too small to have a McDonald’s, or any sort of fast food place, for that matter.)
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All hail the pun. I had to smile when I saw this. :-) Although, if you think about it, we have the hamburger, and Hamburg is a city in Germany... so why not the Nuremburger?
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Old Town Nuremberg is really pretty — it’s its old European feel that is one of the reasons Hitler chose to hold the Nuremberg rallies there. He was apparently all for the traditional feel. The old town itself is centered around a large market square (Hauptmarkt) and a number of neat churches. I think we went into almost all of them. ;-)
My favorite church was St. Sebaldus, the only Lutheran Gothic church I’ve been in this entire trip. It started out as a Catholic church when it was constructed in the mid-1200s, but when the Reformation happened, it converted to a Lutheran church. However, with an eye toward preserving the “medieval piety” (according to the brochure I picked up at the church) they saved the icons, wall paintings, and shrine to to St. Sebald. I looked him up, and had to laugh. First, apparently no one’s really sure who St. Sebald actually was, or when he even lived. He was some hermit who came out of the forest somewhere between the 8th and 11th centuries to evangelize to some townspeople, and then died. Second, they built the church and the shrine to him before he’d officially been canonized by the Catholic church (which didn’t happen until 1425.) Heck of a risk there. I can just imagine it now — “O hai, we know you built a church for this dude, but FOOLED YA! we’re not actually going to make him a saint.” Heh.
For some reason, St. Sebaldus's shrine is held up by large snails. I have no idea why, but I grinned and had to force myself to walk (instead of run) over there to check it out when I saw it. :-)
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Anyway, you all know by now that I’m a huge sucker for the Gothic churches, but even by normal Gothic church standards, this one was one of my favorites because it still had a lot of its original paint job inside, and hadn’t been Baroqued almost at all. I don’t know why, but seeing the original medieval paint job is one of my favorite things about Gothic churches. A lot of places would paint almost the whole inside with not just religious art, but different designs and patterns almost like wallpaper. They’d go straight up the pillars and over the archways with really vivid colors. I would LOVE to see a Gothic church that’s been completely restored to what it would have looked like in the 14th century — not just by removing any design elements from later time periods, but with the original paint job restored to new.
I am so lucky that John is as patient with me as he is about seeing pretty much every single church we’ve come across on this trip. :-)
The door of the church had that kind of scary looking guy hanging above it, and it was supposed to represent a soul descending into hell. The top of the door handle is actually a skull. Kinda creepy, kinda cool.
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Sorry about only having cameraphone pics on here. I did go back right the day we left Nuremberg and take pictures with my real camera, but those will have to wait until later when I get around to posting them. :-)
Original medieval statue with original pattern painted on the wall around it.
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After we finished checking out the churches, we wandered up through the old castle and down around the other side, then headed back home in search of someplace to eat dinner before crashing for the evening. It was a nice, relaxing day. :-)
There is a statue of a rabid, deranged rabbit at Nuremberg Castle. Apparently it's a modern artist's tribute to German Renaissance painter Albrecht Dürer, who lived right next to the castle and who painted a painting called "Young Hare". The rabbit in his painting didn't look happy, but it wasn't nearly this deranged. It was quite amusing.
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Me at Nuremberg Castle.
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I long ago gave up on trying to get him to shave.
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Euro Trip Day 40: Getting to indulge my love of Gothic cathedrals AND geology, all in the same day!
AKA, Why I’m the biggest nerd EVER. :-)
On Wednesday we headed up to Prague Castle to check out St. Vitus Cathedral, a HUGE Gothic cathedral. Now, I’ve known since my freshman year of high school in Spanish class, when we learned about Santiago de Compostela in Spain, that I’ve been fascinated by cathedral architecture. But if I’ve learned one thing about the dozens of churches I’ve seen in the past three years since I got my last passport, it’s that not only do I have a thing for Gothic architecture, but I don’t really care all that much about Renaissance, I like Romanesque, and I can’t stand Baroque. Sorry, but there it is. As I commented to John a couple of days ago, if it ain’t Baroque… DON’T. Just don’t. Unfortunately, some really really neat churches got Baroqued over time. Fortunately, in the late 19th century there was a huge classical architecture revival all over Europe, and so some dilapidated and Baroqued churches got restored to their Gothic glory (and in some cases, completed. Heh.)
Ok, so back in an entry about Budapest, I mentioned that Matyas Church (on Buda Castle hill) is one of my all-time favorite churches. Well, I’ve decided that St. Vitus Cathedral is now in my top five. It’s absolutely flipping AMAZING. I honestly think that, no matter how many Gothic churches I’m fortunate to see in my lifetime, I’ll never get sick of them. Ever.
Cathedral from the outside. This thing is at the absolute tip of the hill that Prague Castle is on, so an already huge church looks even bigger. It's just AMAZING.
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Be still, my Gothic-architecture-loving heart...
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St. Albrecht!
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St. Wenceslas chapel in St. Vitus Cathedral. The walls are inlaid with semiprecious stones, and the whole thing dates back to the mid-1300s. It's INCREDIBLE.
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The rose window.
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Front of the cathedral.
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John, being the wonderful man that he is, didn’t drag me out of the cathedral, but after almost an hour, he started strongly hinting that maybe we should let the other tourists enjoy it too, so we left, but not until after I’d found out when the daily church service times were so that I could come back and go to a service here. :-)
On our way out of the castle hill area, we decided to walk through the castle gardens. This was a GREAT idea, because we got to see BIRDS! LARGE ONES! And we got to HOLD THEM!!
If I thought the church was going to be the highlight of my day, I was sorely mistaken. I think this was the highlight of my WEEK. Can you tell by the grin on my face? That's a peregrine falcon, by the way. And why the heck am I wearing the same shirt in every picture?
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John holding an eagle owl. He really was thrilled about this, we were just having a hard time getting Mr. E. Owl to look at the camera. :-)
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Apparently it’s a tradition at Czech castles to keep birds of prey, so Prague Castle has turned theirs into a demonstration kind of thing. For about $5, you get to hold the bird of your choice. AWESOME.
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After John pulled me off the ceiling, we headed down to the National Museum of Natural History to see what there was to see.
Main hall at the museum.
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Being the nerd that I am, I made a beeline for their geology exhibit when I saw the sign. I can’t help it — I like rocks. Maybe it’s because I have plenty in my head. Anyway, since I’m a bit of a geology nerd, I generally judge a museum’s geology exhibit (however fair/unfair this may be) by if they have a sample of benitoite, California’s state gemstone, which is found only in San Benito County in central California. Picky, I know. Usually when a museum has a sample of benitoite, it’s a very small sample, and it’s usually polished to look like the lovely blue gemstone it is. Prague’s Natural History Museum didn’t have a very pretty, polished sample, but darned if it isn’t the LARGEST sample I’ve seen… it’s just a trip to see it all the way over here. So cool!!! And to be fair, they did have quite a nice display of other rocks too, including some really neat meteors.
California's state gemstone.
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We closed down the museum and headed across the street to McDonald’s for dinner. I know I know… McDonald’s. I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this here on my blog or just on Facebook, but we’ve been going to McDonald’s on this trip for several reasons. #1, McDonald’s in Europe almost ALWAYS have free wifi and free bathrooms. If we have time to kill while waiting for a train, it sure as heck beats waiting at the train station, and there’s almost always a McDonald’s near a train station. Second, their local menu is somewhat interesting. In Krakow, I had a chicken curry burger, and I swear I’m starting a petition to bring these to the US. Who’s in? I promise they’re really good! I mean, it’s not like having real chicken curry, but to me it was quite an acceptable substitute!
So anyway, I’d been seeing ads in the metro stations for a tzatziki beef burger. I had no idea what this was, but the picture looked interesting, so I figured I’d give it a whirl. And it had these really interesting seasoned potatoes that I haven’t seen anywhere else.
The potatoes were good, but the burger… not so much. The burger had feta cheese and fresh cucumbers in it, as well as some sort of pinkish sauce that wasn’t Thousand Island, and I think that’s dried dill as the seasoning on the bun. I kind of liked the feta and the sauce, but the cucumbers and the dill… notsomuch. To be fair, I’m not a cucumber fan anyway, but even after I took them off the burger, it was still really cucumber-y. I couldn’t finish it, and neither could John. Oh well, I tried. I’m now 1 for 3 in liking foreign McD’s burgers (the chicken curry was great, but I had a McCountry in Zagreb that I couldn’t finish either. Oh well — you win some, you lose some. Even at McDonald’s.)
Seriously. Fresh cucumbers. The fries in the background are John's, by the way. He's not quite as adventurous when it comes to McDonald's as I am... which makes sense given that he's always been happy with and able to finish his meal. :-)
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After dinner, we headed to a DVD store to amuse ourselves with the cheap Czech offerings (I still think they’re pirated, but John doesn’t think so) and then we headed home. It was the perfect relaxed day. :-)
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Where we are now:
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Euro Trip Day 29: Art is long, life is brief.
I’m writing this post quickly because I need to get ready so we can head up to Buda Castle Hill to Matyas Church, where I’m going to a Latin high mass at 10AM. Neat! (I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned it here before, but one of my goals this trip is to go to church in every country. I missed Bosnia, but I’ve gotten every other country so far. Sweet.)
Sign on our train from Pecs to Budapest.
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The train ride through the Hungarian countryside was amazingly beautiful. This video quality is kind of lousy just because we were on the train and the windows were tinted and dirty, but you get the general idea. They had massive flooding in June, and it was still clearly evident as we passed through flooded fields, roads, and in one place, houses. Sad.
Train station in Budapest.
Our Couchsurfing host lives RIGHT in the center of the city, near some pretty famous stuff. He wasn’t home when our train got in, so we walked across the street from his apartment to the Museum of Fine Arts and Heroes’ Square.
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Heroes' Square
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Inside the Museum of Fine Arts. What a beautiful museum!
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"Art is long, life is brief." (Ars lonca/ Vita brevis.) At least I'm pretty sure that's what it says, based on my almost non-existent Latin ability.
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Museum of Fine Arts from Hosok Tere (Heroes' Square) at sunset.
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I do realize we're going to tourist hell for this, but we did have Mexican food for dinner. Their horchata was basically milk with sugar and cinnamon. I was like, "Dude, you forgot the rice!!" On the other hand, though, I had a 20 ounce glass of absolutely excellent fresh-squeezed OJ that cost me about $3.50. Can't beat that. OMG GOOD. (In Amsterdam, they'd sell 0.2 ml glasses of fresh-squeezed OJ for 3 or 4 Euro... expensive!)
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We both got a kick out of the wall display teaching Hungarians the finer points of Mexican cuisine. :-)
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Euro Trip Day 26: Last stamp day of the trip :-(
Today was our last stamp day of the trip, and I’m oddly sad about it. Honestly, I should have realized it’d be when we crossed into Hungary, but I just wasn’t thinking about it.
What’s a stamp day? It’s any day I get a new stamp in my passport. Technically, this isn’t even a NEW stamp, since I already have one from Hungary from three summers ago. But it’s new to my passport, and a new port of entry, anyway.
Why no more stamps, you’re wondering? Don’t we have several more countries to visit still? Yeah, we do. But most of continental Europe, including everywhere we’ll be from here on out, is party to what’s called the Schengen Agreement, which abolishes border controls (and therefore the need for passports) within the member countries. All of the countries we’ll visit from here on out (Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Austria, Germany, and Belgium) are all Schengen countries. So no more stamps. Sigh. It’s a tough life, I know.
Today is also a bit bittersweet because my paycheck went into my bank account, and that means that now I have to buy my plane ticket home. I haven’t bought it yet, but it’s a pretty sure bet that, barring volcanoes and other unforeseen circumstances, we’ll be flying home on USAir on Wednesday, June 28th. In other words, we passed the halfway point of this trip without realizing it. Wow. It doesn’t seem like it at all. We’ll have been gone for 54 days total–sounds like a long time, doesn’t it? Maybe I’ll be ready to head home by then (especially since the last few stops on our itinerary are short ones relative to the beginning of the trip.) But I’m not ready now, and so it’s kind of a depressing thought for me.
In any case, I’m happy to be here, and I’m enjoying it now and I’m not going to think about things like heading home or the fact that my next stamp will be a re-entry one to the US. This trip is too much fun to dwell on its inevitable end. :-) And I am, for some odd reason, SO HAPPY to be back in Hungary!! I really really loved it last time I was here three years ago, and I’m excited to have more time here!
Today was, as many of these days have been, a bit of a learning experience. When I looked online at the Rail Europe website (with which I have a love-hate relationship) there were two trains that would take us from Zagreb, Croatia to Pecs, Hungary (where we are now.) One train left at 9AM, the other one left at 10AM. As the 9AM train had only one connection and got into Pecs an hour earlier, I opted for that one. Only I didn’t write the route and connection information down. Stupid me.
We got to the train station, which took longer than I’d planned, and so we only had 15 minutes to activate our passes (this is our first day traveling on them, and they have to be activated the first time they’re used) and make our train. I left John with the backpacks, went to activate the passes, went back to the waiting room to look at the departures board, and realized I had no clue which train we needed, since I didn’t know where the connection was. So I went back to the ticket window. The guy behind the counter looked at me like I had two heads and told me there was no 9AM train, that there was only one and it left at 10. I KNEW there was a 9AM one and I wanted to catch it, but he wouldn’t even check his computer, and he was the only one at the international ticket window.
Now, there was only one train at 9AM that was heading north, so I guess we could have taken it, but as I would have had no idea where to disembark, that seemed like a bad idea at the time.
Now, if you’ve traveled with me before, you know that being rushed close to a departure time stresses me out just a bit. John and Joel!, quit laughing. Ok, so “a bit” might be an understatement. Whenever I fly, I’m ALWAYS at the airport at least a hour before boarding (not departure, boarding) and for trains I prefer to be at least a half hour early. At this point, the train was supposed to leave in about 8 minutes, and I didn’t know which one it was, and the ticket guy was totally unhelpful. Fortunately, we knew there was free wifi about two blocks away outside a hotel, so we headed over to check. Alas, it wasn’t enough time — by the time we got connected and on the Rail Europe site and found the 9AM route, it was 9AM exactly. No way we’d make it back and onto the train in time. Oh well.
As it turned out, the reason the guy may have said that there was no 9AM train was that I went to the international window, since my destination was international. The first train’s connection was within Croatia, so I should have gone to the domestic window. But the guy could have at least checked his computer. Oh well, lesson learned — always write down your train numbers and connections when looking up routes!!
Ok, here are some pics from the train ride (since that’s really what we did all day — riding the local train? Really kind of a bummer!)
This is a pretty typical lunch for us--trail mix, bread rolls with mustard and cheese, and chocolate pudding. We don't alway shave dessert, and we generally have fruit (there are dried cherries in the trail mix, so I counted that this time) but it's generally some variation of the above. Yum!
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I'm still trying to figure out what this sign means. I was thinking it was "no throwing trash out the window", but there's no / through the circle to make it "no". Weird.
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Reading while we're at a stop. After we made our first train transfer, the train was almost entirely empty, so we got the entire back of the car to ourselves. SWEET. :-)
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OH! Something else I learned today… or rather, John learned and shared with me, since he’s nice like that. Apparently the train toilets (or at least the ones on the local second class train we took today) empty right onto the tracks. I’ve heard of that, of course, but I had no idea that any modern European trains still did this. Crazy!! And ummm, kinda gross!
(I was going to make a joke about how European in Hungarian train bathrooms, but I decided not to. Feel free to thank me.)
ANYWAY. Here in Pecs we’re staying someplace a bit different than we have thus far — a college dorm. When school is out for the summer, a lot of universities in Europe open their dorms for travelers like us — excellent! We get a private room and bathroom with two twin beds, sheets and blankets (no towels, though) and a fridge, laundry facilities, internet access, and access to the school’s swimming pool. And it’s about $20/night cheaper than the cheapest hostel we found. Sweet. :-) It’s not in the center of town, but who cares? Not like we’re adverse to walking!
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Euro Trip Day 24: In which we ponder why the Balkans only has two kinds of breakfast cereal
You know it was a REALLY slow day if I’m talking about breakfast cereal.
As much as I like Zagreb so far, today we ran into a problem that we encountered in Dublin. Namely, that virtually NO museums are open on Mondays. They open on Sundays for a whopping THREE HOURS, but Mondays? Closed. The only one that was open today was the Croatian History Museum, which is in the process of moving, and as such, had one exhibit on some historical dude who freed Croatia from the feudal system in the 19th century. It was interesting… to a point. I hate to say it, but it’s not my history, and the ENTIRE exhibit was just on him.
Anyway. So I guess that was good though, for two reasons. First, John felt lousy again this morning (he likes to travel, but his stomach often has other opinions.) Second, I had a whole heap of planning to do. I was so happy last night about having reliable internet… and then it died on us and didn’t resurrect itself until after 10 this morning. I had planning to do, darn it! There are Couchsurfers to email, hostels to book in case no Couchsurfers come through, train sleeping car reservations to make, plane tickets home to price and consider, a budget to rebuild since the old one died with my phone (yeah, I have the Google Docs one, but I had a separate one I was working with that tracked just debit card purchases.) I had a lot to do, darn it!
So I got some stuff done this morning before we left for downtown, and then I kept working when I came back. This turned out to be immensely more time-consuming than I thought. First, our train passes only cover 10 days of travel, but I nailed down the rest of our itinerary, and we had 12-13 days of travel. So I priced out EVERY SINGLE TRAIN ROUTE to see which would be the two cheapest that we shouldn’t use our passes on.
This wouldn’t and SHOULDN’T have taken so long, but the raileurope.com website is hideously, painfully, immensely slow and kludgy. It should NOT have taken as long as it did. I was ready to throw my laptop after a couple of hours of searching.
And then came a painful realization… it covers five countries of travel, and we have six planned, and the one country it doesn’t cover is Poland, which, because of the night trains we’d planned to take in and out, would be the most expensive trains to take.
I spent a while berating myself for my stupid oversight, and then I went back to the pass website and realized that, for some reason, Poland wasn’t an option on the five-country pass anyway. So at least the mistake wasn’t mine, but I was still really upset to realize this.
Now we may have to cut Krakow off the list entirely, and I’m quite sad. We’re under budget right now, so I’m trying to convince John that it’s worth paying for the tickets to go in and out, even if we’d have to take a second-class sleeper car instead of the first class one that our passes SHOULD cover. But second or first, we’d still get an actual bed, and NOT get woken up in the middle of the flipping night for ticket and passport checks, which is what happened on our way to Zagreb (when we were trying to sleep on seats.)
So who knows. I really, REALLY don’t want to cut Krakow off the list, but it’d cost $500 to take the train there (Budapest–>Krakow–>Prague.) We could take a daytime train, but it’s honestly not that much cheaper, and then we’d lose an entire day of doing and seeing things, AND we’d have to pay for a hostel. So really, in my opinion the night train is a win-win situation, if we can swing it.
We should have that nailed down by the end of the week… or sooner if anyone wants to give me $500. No? Well, it was worth a try. :-) We’ll also have our flight home nailed down by the end of the week, but it’s looking like we’ll fly out of Brussels on Wed. July 28th, which makes our trip exactly 54 days long, and incidentally, means we’ll leave in a month. *sob* Honestly, it doesn’t seem like this should be Day 24, and a month just doesn’t seem like enough time to do and see what I want to do and see!! Oh well, I’m not going to focus on the countdown, I’m just going to enjoy what I have left.
So breakfast cereal… yeah. As I’ve mentioned before, we’re on a pretty tight budget. I know we’re under budget, but we’ve been keeping it under budget with the knowledge that Germany, Belgium, Austria, and Prague (I know, city not country) are going to be a lot more expensive than the Balkans have been (and Hungary and Poland will be, assuming we make it to Poland!) So we’ve been eating a lot of bread, and more recently, breakfast cereal. Which kind of cracks me up, given that we’ve eaten a lot of breakfast cereal in the past year to be able to afford this trip in the first place.
Anyway, honestly, the Balkans have had some of the best and cheapest bread I’ve ever eaten, and I’m a sucker for a good fresh loaf of bread. It doesn’t keep very long — after a day, it’s so stale as to be almost inedible — but given that the average unsliced loaf has been somewhere in the neighborhood of $0.80 regardless of where we’ve been, we can afford to get a new one every day, for pete’s sake. So we’re acquiring quite the condiment collection. We started off with margarine and jam in Ireland, then added in basalmic vinegar in Korcula, then mustard in Sveti Stefan, and I picked up a bottle of honey in Sarajevo. Anything to make it less boring, because while it’s good bread, it still gets boring after 2-3 meals a day of it. And cheese, always the cheese. We’ve currently got three kinds of cheese–two local ones and a soft cheese from Dublin that we’ve been stashing (along with the margarine and jam) in any fridge we’ve been able to find along the way. Yum.
Sarajevo we decided we wanted something different for breakfast other than bread and the occasional bottle of yogurt, and we both were craving milk, so we went to the store with the intention of getting a liter of milk and a box of cereal. Only the cereal selection was extremely limited. There was a wide variety of shapes and brands, but there were (not counting museli, which is NOT the same as granola and which I like only in small quantities) two kinds of cereal: corn flakes, and chocolate cereal.
Poor John, who wanted Frosted Flakes (which he remembered seeing at a Tesco in Dublin) went to three different grocery stores, but they all had the same selection. Corn flakes, and chocolate cereal.
This was only about half of the chocolate cereal collection. I'm not kidding.
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Ok, so there’s a Cinnamon Toast Crunch knock-off in the center there, and a box of Honey Nut Cheerios on the top right, but those are the only ones of their kind. The chocolate continues to the right of the picture and turns a corner on the shelf, and then there’s more around the corner, and then the corn flakes start in.
John finally settled for corn flakes and adding honey to them. Not the same, but better than nothing. Heh.
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Euro Trip Day 15: Another slow day, and I’m not complaining
Before I start my post, I have a question. Who the heck are all of you people? I just glanced at my site stats, and I had 185 page views yesterday. Now I know that in the grand scheme of blogs and things, that that’s not a huge amount, but considering my average page view count hovers around 40-50 on a good day, that’s quite a bit of a jump. So feel free to leave a comment and say hi! :-)
Anyway. Like the post title says, today was slow. John was feeling a bit under the weather today, so we took our time getting out the door. We headed into Budva (short but traffic-y bus ride away) and wandered around the old town for a while.
The old city of Budva, looking from the Citadel/city wall.
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While in the old city, we went to the archaeological museum, which was really more like the archaeological four smallish rooms. They did have some neat old stuff though. I think the thing I found most interesting, though, wasn’t an artifact per se… well, it was, but it wasn’t really archaeological, and it was more the little narrative blurb that went along with it that I found absolutely fascinating. I’ll link to the Wikipedia article to explain more clearly, but basically way back in the day before sailors had a more modern way to measure their speed, they used something called a chip log/ship log, which is what the museum had on display. It was a wooden board, tied to a rope that had knots tied at intervals of 47 feet, 3 inches. A sailor tossed the log over and paid out the rope, and used a 28-second hourglass to time it. 47 feet and 3 inches, and 28 seconds… I read this on the information blurb at the museum and immediately decided it had to be a Brit who invented it. Lo and behold, the very next sentence indicated that the inventor of this system was English. Color me surprised. Yaay for the English system being non-metric and really confusing! Anyway, however many knots were paid out in those 28 seconds was how fast the ship was going — how many knots! SO INTERESTING. I know, I’m a huge nerd.
Around mid-afternoon, we headed back to relax and do some planning for the next couple of days. We also had a late lunch.
This is the stationary version of a pretty typical travel lunch. We've got whatever bread the local store/bakery had (one hunk of bread for each of us) topped with cheese (in this case, a soft cheese) and balsamic vinegar. Then we have our fruit (well, in this case it's tomatoes, but it's either dried apricots from our stash or fresh fruit if we happen to pick some up.) This was it for today, but often it'll include granola bars or trail mix from the stash, and sometimes chocolate for dessert. Good stuff. :-)
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After hanging out for a bit, we went on a walk to the next beach over, then we hung out and chatted with our host for a bit, then we spent some time figuring out travel plans for our next few cities — Mostar (1 night), Sarajevo (3 nights), Baja Luka (1 night) and Zagreb (3 nights.) I don’t want to plan too far ahead, but I want to at least keep an eye on train schedules so that I can guesstimate when we need to be where we’re going next. Fun stuff.
Last but not least, meet Princess and Jester, two of my constant travel companions.
I always keep two finger puppets in my camera backpack. Initially they were in there to get a kid to smile for a photo shoot, but I never took them out, and in the past year I've used them not only to get little kids to smile for the camera, but also to distract fussy toddlers on planes, buses, and while waiting for my school's graduation to start a couple of weeks ago. Today on the bus ride from Sveti Stefan to Budva, I used them to entertain the fussy toddler in front of us who kept trying to squirm out of his mom's arms and run around the bus. It was a good distraction for both of us, I think. :-)
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Where we are now:
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Ok, so maybe we got a bit carried away with the strawberry shortcake…
- This is what happens when I don’t use a recipe and start dumping in ingredients. It tasted great… but I don’t think any of us finished our shortcakes — waaay too much food!! Such a fun evening though!! :-D
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Apricots, strawberries, cherries, and kettle corn — it doesn’t get much more summery than this
This is my haul from today's farmer's market. More than any other fruit, apricots represent summer to me. Not sure why that is, but they do. :-)
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Easter sweets
(Sis, I put these up because I was too tired to finish going through all of the Annie pics. I am *really* backlogged with stuff right now, but I WILL get to them this weekend. Honest.)
Here’s some yummy foodstuffs from Easter. :-)
Peanut M&Ms
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Pineapple cheesecake
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Ok, so they're not really sweets, but they sure are pretty!
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Peeps!! Om nom nom nom
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Chewy sugary goodness
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