Tag Archives: summer

Prague

September 15, 2016Czech Republicairbnb, apartment, campground, camping, czech, history, prague, sightseeing, summer, travelJudy

So, the tent is now drying in stages on the airer in the spare room, we’re slowly emptying the car of everything we’ve accumulated over the past 5+ weeks and I’m watching far too many bread baking videos on Youtube, which is probably the surest sign that I’m ready to go home.

We visited Cesky Krumlow on Monday. Described by our Lonely Planet Guide as Czech’s only other world class sight and ‘must-see’ outside Prague, 180kms south and close to the Austrian border. I’m not sure about that, I’m really enjoying travelling here, but Cesky Krumlow was well worth visiting. Beautiful old town with a huge Renaissance Castle overlooking it. As we looked over the old town from the castle, it felt as though the view had probably not changed in centuries, there were no modern buildings and only a few advertising signs on old buildings to suggest that we were actually in the 21st Century. Located on the Vltava River, which also runs through Prague and flows out into the North Sea. We camped beside the river on Monday night at Camp Paradijs, our last night of camping on this trip. The river’s gentle sounds just a few metres from our campsite were a nice ending to the 14 nights we’ve spent in our much-loved tent on this trip.

On our way into Prague, we stopped at the Sedlac Ossuary to look at the ‘Bone Church’. I’m not even sure how to describe it – strange, weird, creative, ghoulish. The small church in Sedlac monastery has been decorated almost exclusively with bones – 4 huge piles of them, plus garlands, crosses and other shapes, all made out of human bones. Interesting but weird.

We’re spending 4 nights in an Airbnb apartment right on the edge of the old town, above Prague Castle. Parking is only a minor problem here – we can’t park right outside the apartment because it’s for residents only, or we have to SMS something to somewhere, or some other thing that is a bit out of our range of expertise; however it’s possible to park about 5 – 10 minutes walk from here, on the other side of the freeway. Just a short walk over a pedestrian bridge and on a few quiet streets. Greg has done this walk numerous times, I’ve done it once!

Yesterday we walked down to, and across, the Charles Bridge. I’m sure there were more tourists there and around the Old Square than we’ve seen anywhere this trip! Even Dubrovnik wasn’t as crowded. Gorgeous place, though – the bridges, the buildings, the squares. We just happened to be at the Astronomical Clock as it was about to strike on the hour – well, the huge crowd of people gathered expectantly nearby gave us a clue that something was about to happen, so we waited to see. And we’ve extended our Trdelnik Chimney Cake experience by adding an Apple strudel ice cream cone one and a pizza one to the range we’ve eaten!

We caught up with our Czech friend Peter last night. We met him when he was cycling in Tassie a couple of years ago, then he came and stayed in ADL with us for a few days and we’ve kept in touch ever since. He encouraged us to come to Prague on this trip and I’m really glad that we did. So anyway after tossing around a few ideas of when and where to meet, we decided to have dinner here at the apartment, which was an excellent plan until I realised about 45 minutes after putting the chicken and potatoes in the oven that the oven wasn’t working due to operator error! There is a beautiful terracotta Schlemmer Topf roasting dish here and I was keen to use it, but messed up the oven settings, so dinner was a bit later than we had intended. It tasted good, though and I’m going to keep an eye out for a terracotta dish at the op shops I haunt in my never-ending search for Women’s Weekly cookbooks. Then we had Medovnik Honey Cake for dessert. I’m definitely going to have a go at making one of those when we get home – layers of honey cake with buttercream icing in between, and caramel & walnuts on top. It was good, but very filling.

Peter has given us great tips on where to go and what to see, and we’re getting together again tonight to eat Czech food in a restaurant. Good times!

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA — Cesky Krumlow Castle

Sunday in Krakow, Poland

September 5, 2016Polandkrakow, pizza, poland, sightseeing, street food, summer, tourists, travelJudy

Yesterday was a day of minor irritations and more great food. From the old guy who rode his bike into the back of my foot, to the grumpy woman who charged me for 2 baguette pizza thingys but only supplied one, but it was a gorgeous sunny day and we have ticked a few more items off our Polish must-eat food list.

We decided to go to Old Town, to look at Rynek Glowny, the largest medieval town square in Europe, and maybe visit St Mary’s Basilica & Wawel Castle. As we crossed the first main road between Kazimierz and Old Town, it felt like something had changed … we were hitting tourist-ville. Lots more signs in English, lots more currency exchanges, and lots more people! Part of Old Town was blocked off because there was a corporate fun run happening, & we couldn’t get to the castle entrance, so we headed to the main square. A new Polish friend who lives in Sydney recommened that I try a papieska kremowka Papal cream cake – a vanilla slice-type pastry that Pope John Paul II liked to eat. He grew up in Wadowice, west of Krakow. We found a lovely cake shop that sold kremowka and bought one for me, and a sort of chocolate-filled iced berliner for Greg. Delicious!

The main square was full of cafes with large umbrellas for shade, and loads of people. We went to have a look at the Basilica, but there was a mass in progress, so we might go back another day. Then walking up one of the main streets in Old Town, an old guy rammed his pushbike into the back of my foot and let forth with a string of abuse in Polish. It must be hard for locals to have their space invaded by tourists, but really, riding down a busy street on a Sunday seems like a dumb idea to me. We got out of the touristy part fairly quickly and walked around the Planty, a green belt around the outside of the city walls. Much nicer.

We tried to get a table at Cafe Zazie, the Michelin-starred cafe just a couple of blocks down the street we’re staying on, but they were full so we made a booking for dinner there tonight. Then went to a traditional Polish restaurant a few blocks from here – we found it when we first got here and I’d liked the look of their menu, then our host recommended it. We got a table, then got menus, but after 30 minutes of being ignored by the busy waitstaff, we decided to try somewhere else. Found a little place that sells pierogi dumplings that were delicious – much better than any we’d eaten in Russia.

And then dinner – it just had to be zapiekanka ‘Polish pizza’ – half a baguette topped with melted cheese and other fillings – from one of the dozen or so sellers at Plac Nowy, with a side order of Belgian fries. Greg went to order the fries and I ordered and paid for 2 zapiekanka but only got one . The very grumpy woman serving refused to admit she’d made an error, so we had quite the bi-lingual argument, Greg came and we refused to budge from their ordering area ( so no more orders could be placed), Mrs Grumpy got someone to come and translate for us and then finally agreed to make us another one. Being mindful of what cooks can do to food when they are annoyed with customers, we decided to leave before we got the 2nd ‘pizza’, and in fact one pizza between the 2 of us was plenty. I wonder if Mrs Grumpy thinks nostalgically of the good old days when concepts like ‘customer service’ and ‘consumer rights’ only happened in other places.

IMG_20160904_172240 (Medium) — our car parking on Sunday morning. In most roads you park half on the footpath.

Krakow, Poland

September 4, 2016Polandairbnb, apartment svilokos, krakow, poland, road trip, sightseeing, summer, tourists, travelJudy

In the early 1980s, I studied Polish History at uni for 3 years. I don’t remember much now, that space in my brain has been replaced with html, seo and other online selling stuff, but as we walk around this beautiful old history-filled city, bits and pieces come back to me. Somehow, pronunciation of Polish words has stayed with me, so while I probably don’t know what it means, I do know how to pronouce it!

We’re staying in an Airbnb apartment in Kazimierz, the Old Jewish Quarter, for 4 nights – here. Gorgeous old building, huge 2nd floor apartment with parquetry floors and high ceilings. There are 2 bars on the ground floor. The bars each have a ‘beer garden’ in the courtyard below our apartment, but they close at 10pm, so it’s not noisy. A couple of streets away it’s much more lively with the bars and eating places staying open until 3am.

The food choices here are amazing – from street food and a couple of empty corner blocks with 6 or 8 food trucks permanently parked there (and a handy Bankomat ATM at each site too!) to traditional Polish restaurants to a Michelin-starred French cafe just a couple of blocks down the street from where we’re staying. Between us so far we’ve eaten Belgian fries, kielbasa (Polish sausage) with sauerkraut & rye bread, French crepes, pulled pork rolls, Krakow pretzel with salami, tomato & cheese and rhubarb & apple crumble. I was initially a bit disappointed that there is no oven in the apartment, although there is a washing machine, and after the mess I made of the pulled pork roll, I think our Airbnb host has the right priorities!

We spent yesterday afternoon at Podgorsz, across the Vistula River from Kazimierz, visiting the Schindler Factory, the Pharmacy Under the Eagle and a short remaining stretch of the Ghetto Wall.

A bit more about Budapest, Hungary

August 31, 2016Hungaryairbnb, apartment svilokos, buda, budapest, history, hungary, sightseeing, summer, travelJudy

There is as much interesting stuff to see on the Buda side of the city as there is on Pest. Yesterday we caught the metro across to Deli Pu, the last stop on the red line. The Deli train station is also there, and it’s a short but steep wall up to Castle Hill. Getting on the metro was a bit tricky – most of the smaller stations don’t have ticket sellers any more, just a machine. The first 2 we tried would not accept coins, only card payments, and of the 4 machines at the 3rd station we tried, only 2 accepted coins. We made sure we bought enough tickets to do us for the rest of the day.

Castle Hill is (of course!) on a hill overlooking The Danube and Pest. Impressive city walls, lots of museums, a few churches and HEAPS of touristy stuff and tourists. It was good, but after seeing the old towns in Zadar, Trogir and Dubrovnik, where real people actually live their lives, Castle Hill seemed a bit … um …. 2-dimensional, like a theatre stage with nothing behind it. The really ‘off’ moment for me was finding the Jamie’s Italian restaurant. Um, what’s a chain restaurant that doesn’t even serve regional food doing THERE? (apologies to any Jamie fans among our readers). I know, I know, it’s for the tourists.

The Royal Palace complex is also within the city walls, with more museums, the National Gallery which is currently featuring a Modigliani exhibition, statues and more great views of the river and Pest. We walked down to the river and towards the Liberty Bridge to get the metro back across the river, stopping at a cafe for lunch – the daily special for me (mushroom soup and crumbed chicken livers with rice & peas), crepes with strawberry jam and a milkshake for Greg.

Then 2 line changes on the metro to get to City Park, which is east of the city and our apartment. Originally royal hunting grounds, the park is a huge green space which was the main location for the city’s millennial celebrations in 1896. The Budapest Zoo, Municipal Great Circus, museums, the city’s largest thermal baths, an amusement park, monuments, cafes, restaurants and the list goes on. Just at the entrance to the park is Heroes’ Square with an empty coffin representing the unknown insurgents of the 1956 Uprising, with the Archangel Gabriel on top of a 36-metre high pillar, holding the Hungarian crown and a cross, and the very impressive Military Monument with 14 statues of rulers and statesmen.

We walked back to the apartment along Andrassy Utica, with its beautiful mansions and townhouses, past theatres and the Terror House which pays tribute to the victims of the Nazi and Soviet regimes. We didn’t go in, I’m still scarred by our visit to the Apartheid Museum in Jo’burg last year.

Here’s a song, suggested by Margaret

Slovenia

August 14, 2016Sloveniacamping, lubljana, slovenia, summerJudy

We were heading to Trieste yesterday, but just a few kms after we got on to the autostrade out of Venice, it looked more like a parking lot than a highway, with 3 lanes of stationary vehicles. We were lucky that we were near an exit, so we drove off and worked out what to do next. We have the Lonely Planet Slovenia guide in our travelling library, so we figured we might as well head north and have a look. Every photo I’ve seen of Slovenia has been beautiful, and it’s actually like that in real life too. Mountainous, green, picture-postcard stuff.

Triglav National Park is in the north-western corner, with a couple of lakes that have campgrounds, so we headed towards Lake Bohinj, which is a bit south of Lake Bled. The guide book says it’s slightly less glamourous and ‘touristy’ than Lake Bled, but when we went through them today, they were both packed full of people making the most of the gorgeous summer Sunday, with more and more traffic heading towards them.

We hit a couple of road closures on the way to Bohinj, and at the second one I hopped out to ask the man putting up the barriers if there was a way through … yes, further north. A camion truck had broken down or turned over or something and blocked the road from the south. So we drove on …. along very winding, very narrow roads built into the sides of mountains. Through little villages where every house seemed to have window boxes growing geraniums at every window, and a flourishing vegetable garden growing summer vegies – corn, beans, tomatoes, zucchini. It’s all so green here, a shade of green we never, ever see at home.

About 20km from Bohinj, we noticed a scattering of tents and RVs in a field. No official signs that it was actually a campground, but we went to the nearby cafe and asked – ‘yes, you can camp there, and it’s free’. Excellent! They even had wifi and gave Greg the code. We found a space for the car and tent and settled in. There were another dozen or so families spending the night there. There’s a chair lift near the cafe that goes up to a ski run in winter, and in summer walkers and mountain bikers use it to access a network of paths. It was lovely. Much nicer than the campground at Bohinj, where the tent sites all seemed to be on sloping bits of land – ie, the parts that caravans and RVs don’t want because they all want level ground.

We have spent the last week trying to find ice and having no luck at all. I got talking to some people this morning when I noticed they had an esky, and asked them how they keep stuff cold. Ice bricks. It’s not possible to buy bags of ice in Slovenia, and apparently not in Italy or Germany either. So that mystery is solved. We’ll just work around it.

Tonight we’re in Ljubljana, the Slovenian capital, population 280,000. We’re staying in a hostel that seems to be set up for students – our room has 3 of everything … beds, desks, shelves, cupboards. Apparently there’s a student population of around 50,000 in Ljubljana, but it’s summer holidays at the moment. We’re near the centre of town, and we can see the castle from our window at the hostel.

All the photos taken so far are on our photo album page here

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Free Camping!