I leave the country for a week and a half and all hell breaks loose. A swine flu is unleashed, friends get laid off, Chrysler declares bankruptcy and Bea Arthur dies. Please accept my apologies. I am back, so everything ought to start getting back to normal now. Right. Right?
What with doing mounds of laundry, catching up at work, and struggling against what I am pretty sure was simple jet-lag and not the onset of aforementioned formerly pork-monikered illness, I have not updated this page in quite some time. So allow me to rectify that. To kick off what I’m sure will be many, many vacation-themed posts, what follows is a simple, non-comprehensive, unordered list, made on the airplane, of personal highlights from the trip to Eastern Europe.
- walking across the wide, bustling, beautiful (if not quite blue) Danube river
- making the trek up Gellert Hill and enjoying the panoramic views of Budapest below
- driving through the rolling hills of rural Slovenia
- enjoying the slow food (Gostlina AS) and cognac (at Cafe Romeo) in Ljubljana
- photographing the war-damaged buildings in Croatia and Bosnia
- being treated like millionaires in Tucepi
- strolling beside the clearest, cleanest water I have ever seen on spotless pebble beaches in absolutely perfect weather
- getting a dose of reality in Sarajevo and at Dubrovnik’s war photo exhibition
- slowly circling the city atop Dubrovnik’s ancient walls
- exploring and photographing the ruined castle at Mali Ston
- the six-course straight-from-sea-to-kitchen-to-plate all-oyster dinner on night 1, and
- the freshest red snapper I’ve ever eaten on night 2 in a little Croatian fishing village
- dining on baby-lobster-sized shrimp all down the Balkan coastline
- the red wines of the Peljesac peninsula (Dignac, Postup and Plavac varietals)
- the top-notch customer service on Lufthansa Airlines
- the late-night conversation with a Croatian bartender regarding cigarette politics, football graffiti, tourism and olive farming
- every hotel we stayed in, from the simple to the luxurious
- stumbling upon a local folk art festival in Pest
- lying on our backs in the middle of Budapest’s city park
- sipping espresso at Cafe Gerbeaud and watching the corny street-saxophonist entertain children
- the people-watching… everywhere
- getting lost in the Budapest post-communist ghettos trying to find our hotel
- getting lost (and staying lost for 2 hours) along the Croatian/Slovenian border
- eating great ice cream every day in Dubrovnik
- google-maps sending us down a one-car-wide dirt road in the middle of a Slovenian forest, us turning around, and then discovering that the dirt road was, indeed, the correct path… awesome.
A wonderful experience. I cannot recommend Slovenia and Croatia highly enough. Please go before all the tourists figure out what a great vacation this is. Like I said, more to come. Watch the ol’ fotoblog for pictures. Ta-ta.