Skopje

Skopje (pronounced scop-yeh) was by far the most interesting city we visited during October break which came as quite a surprise because neither of us knew that much about it coming in. To be honest, we visited Skopje because there was a cheap flight from there to Saint Louis. And had we visited only a couple of years earlier, it would have been a completely different experience.
This town, the capital of Macedonia, is currently undergoing a massive face lift in a project called Skopje 2014 which aims to give the city a more classical, monumental, and generally pleasing look by 2014. 80% of Skopje was destroyed in an earthquake in 1963 and the buildings where initially replaced then -- today, they hope to rebuild some of the buildings as they were before. The government has spent an estimated 80 to 500 million euros on this project. And not everyone is pleased, in a country with high unemployment and many social problems, the beautification of the capital seems wasteful.
We arrived in the early afternoon after a long bus ride (and a super long border crossing, of course). As we exited we were hounded by a taxi driver who wouldn't take "no" for an answer (our hostel was super close to the bus station begin with). One of the things we discovered in Eastern Europe is that saying "taxi" near taxi drivers is like announcing you need a ride. For example, you can say "we don't need to take a taxi" and 5 taxi drivers will emerge and say "taxi? taxi?".
Our hostel was pretty tiny, with only two rooms, a cozy living room, and tiny kitchen (and only one bathroom). But it had three puppies! They also had the mother, but I think she had been rescued from the streets and therefore was a bit skittish bout people.

Note: Australian girl on the third year of  her decade abroad. (We met a ridiculous number of Australians on ridiculously long trips on this trip. Do people not have to work in Australia? Or what?) 

Puppies!

That evening we didn't do much, because we were exhausted. However, we did take night stroll. 

Admittedly,  the new buildings look pretty cool all lit up at night. 

The architecture is mostly neoclassical which is a style I usually hate because everyone did it death in the 19th century. However, I've never seen 21st century neoclassical and I found it quite interesting.

One of the things we noticed is that they seem to want to steal the monuments of other  European cities. For example, there is a bridge much like this in Prague.

Walking around the city, I was reminded of a book that I read at the beginning of my time in France called The Devil in the White City. This book is the novelization of the building of the Chicago world fair and how that intermingled with the story of serial killer that lived in that area during that time. Skopje recalled the "white city" to me. Everyone who see the buildings of the world's fair spring up and everyone who visits it experiences it as magical. It was fascinating to see the national monuments of a country under construction. Sure, it might all fall to disrepair, and it might be a waste of money -- but it's interesting to think that these buildings could become the symbols of Macedonia in the future. Every country has build it's national buildings at some point.

They had gone completely sculpture mad... 

Particularly they like to invoke a supposedly glorious Macedonian past (particularly they like to claim Alexander the Great). This Justinian II, I think...

We spent the morning and early afternoon seeing the new monuments they have erected. These are only a fraction of them! And they are no where near finished, there is construction everywhere.

Personally, I think these benches are the greatest symbol of government waste in Skopje.  I mean, what is their purpose? There is no way you could have a performance in this Rotunda thingy. 

This is the original train station, in ruins after the earthquake. 

During the afternoon, we walked over the bridge to the old town of Skopje, which was much less epic in scale. We had burek (a greasy, delicious pastry stuffed with beef (or other things)) and cevapi (cheh-va-pee  -- type of sausage wrapped in delicious bread with onions) both Turkish/Balkan specialties for lunch. While  we ate the burek, we were stared at by a small gypsy boy, who wouldn't take our refuse to make eye contact as a refusal. It was awkward, and also sad. But giving money wouldn't help him, he surely is being used by someone to guilt people into giving money. 

After we ate, we walked up to the old fortress, but it was closed. That night we went to a Mexican food restaurant called Amigos, that was actually pretty good but played horrible music. 

The next morning we did a little more site seeing and searched for post office to send our post cards before leaving to come back to Saint Louis...

This is where the post office was. It really makes you understand the desire to tear down everything that they rebuilt in 1963.

One more gratuitous puppy picture. The puppies didn't have names, so we named them. From left to right: Boris, Constantine, and Alexander the Great. 

Stay tuned for winter break posts, which will hopefully be more timely than this one. :)

Sofia

From Veliko we took a bus to Sofia and arrived in the early afternoon. We arrived to find that a lot of work had been done on the train station since we had last been there and this work was still in motion. As we walked back to the hostel, we reminisced about our last trip to Sofia and wondered what would have changed and what would stay the same.
We stayed at the same hostel: Hostel Mostel, but in a different part of it and it was a completely different experience. Additionally, we were both still getting over our cold so we couldn't experience it the same. Of course, nothing's the same the second time around but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. You can't recreate the past.
Like us, the city has changed a lot in the past two years - it's more modern and wealthy and there is a hint of grungy hipsterness that I'm sure the college students of the coming years will love. For example, they had a bar that was an apartment that was set up like an apartment with different rooms and couches and tables, and even a kitchen. Kind of cool, but also kind of awkward. Where do you order the drinks? We didn't stay.
The first night, we did a little walk around the close parts of the city and then relaxed. The next morning, we did the tour of the main attractions.

Some things had changed quite a bit...

and some things not at all...

We had planned to spend our second and last night in Sofia going out after cooking for ourselves at the hostel (chicken nuggets, couscous, and peas)... but in fact, we only went to one bar (which had pretty gross beer, to be honest) and then we went home, because I guess we're old.
And that was Sofia -- finished again in a flash. 

Veliko Tarnevo

I'll catch up on my blog posts eventually... I hope.

Back to October Break (only 3 more cities to talk about ;) )...
Originally, we thought we were going to have to take a night train from Bucharest to Veliko Tarnevo because  according to all the information we could find on the internet, this was the only time there was a train. This involved us arriving at some random Bulgarian town near Veliko at like 5 in the morning and having to take a taxi to Veliko, else we would have to wait two hours for the train to get there. Luckily, we went to the train station the day before we planned to do this and we were able to get a very helpful woman (who spoke to us in French because that was the language we had common!) who got a us a train reservation for around noon. This cut our time in Bucharest short by half a day, but it was certainly worth it. 

So we woke up and checked out of our hostel to head to the train station. We thought we had given us enough time to get the train station, in fact we had left pretty early. But first we had to get ourselves food for on the train because we wouldn't be getting to Veliko until around 8 and we also decided to have lunch (rather than waiting until the train station, because we were starving). All this went okay until we got to the grocery store. Tristan stayed outside so we wouldn't have to check our bags and I went in to grab food as quick as I could. The problem was that I couldn't find any sort of chip like thing at all in the store. I searched and searched until I found them finally -- in the back corner of the second floor. By this time, we were running a bit late. But it would have all worked out if we hadn't gotten on the metro going the wrong direction... and then not realized it until like 5 stops later. We decided we needed to take a taxi to get there in time, so we exited the metro and there were some cabs right there. We approached the first cab, and when we told him where we needed to go, he just shook his head. Thankfully, the second cabbie got us to the train station with 5 minutes to spare. We were so thankful, we paid twice what we owed (the rest of our Romanian money).

A long train ride, with a border crossing that took literally 2 hours, later, we arrived in Veliko Tarnevo. The hostel picked us up at the train station and then directed us to their favorite restaurants. 

We ended up at Ego, which we later returned to several times despite the TERRIBLE (and I mean TERRIBLE service) because the pizza was yummy and they had the best ice cream cake ever. Also, it was inexpensive and had an awesome view.

Tristan, the Restaurant, and girl with horrible hair. Seriously, it looked ridiculous.

And the view would be something like this. Like everything in Bulgaria, the prices at this restaurant belied it's location. 

The next day we both woke up with somewhat sore throats - a hint of the cold to come. But we set off to see the fortress, which is really the only tourist attraction of the city.

As we entered the fortress, there was a man with an animatronic king and queen who informed us that this fortress is super important and unique because "many people lived and died [there]." 

I choose to believe that opasnost means "Don't do ballet on the fortress walls."

Looking towards Veliko -- as you can see, it was much warmer here than it was in Brasov.

The fortress was very interesting and the views were very pretty. We spent the early afternoon exploring the rest of the city. Particularly we searched for this road  that led along the canyon and good views or something that was supposed to be really awesome according to the travel book we had. We never found it but we did get followed by a creepy crazy seeming old guy. Almost as soon as we lost him, we we chased down by a woman who told us in broken English that she has a bed and breakfast and we should stay there and that if we come with her, we could meet the two Washingtonians who were there. Needless to say, we declined.
Later, we searched for Turikish Bath ruins that were marked on the map in the travel guide. We found them, we think. They were supper underwhelming... the rocks could have been from anything to be honest.

We planned to rent a car the next day to go to Buzludzha (an abandoned socialist monument pictured below) and also Gabrovo (which is the city Tristan would have been living in had he decided to do Fulbright instead of coming to France).

Credit: http://www.artificialowl.net/2008/12/buzludzha-abandoned-communist-concrete.html

But by the end of the day, it was pretty clear that we were sick and weren't going to be do anything the next day. We spent most of the day in bed, with a trip out only to go to the mall to see Skyfall (with Bulgarian subtitles), we also ate lunch at another Ego at the mall. And that's when we discovered the best ice cream cake ever. 

usually, I think it's pretty silly to take pictures of food, but I made an exception for this delicious cake . I'd probably go back to Veliko just for this cake.

Snow and Christmas Cookies

The first snow of the year. The Sunday before the Sunday before last. 

Last Wednesday, I spent about 5 hours baking cookies in order to bring some Christmas cheer into my apartment. And also, I have a lot of free time. Baking proved to be quite an adventure, because I have EXTREMELY limited tools.

My measuring cup and only bowl of decent size.

my teaspoon (i.e. a small spoon)

my tablespoon (i.e. a normal spoon)

my cookie sheet (i.e. a pizza pan)

This meant that I had to convert my recipes from US volume measurements to metric weight, and that any size smaller than a teaspoon was guess work.

I also made my own sprinkles because the grocery store only had one color and they were hideous and expensive:

A few drops of food coloring in sugar.

Mix and allow to dry over radiator 

All things considered, the cookies turned out quite good. Especially the first two batches -- the sugar cookies and the spritz. 

A mini-disaster struck however with the snickerdoodles. After they had been in the oven for maybe 4 minutes a burning smell began emerging from the oven. I opened the oven to discover that the cookie dough had dripped through the holes in the pan and burnt on the bottom of the oven. I had to take them out and put foil underneath. But by that time it was too late and there was smoke billowing out of the oven for the rest of my cooking. And then even the second batch turned out flat and crunchy. Not bad, but not right. 

Nonetheless, it was fun and the cookies turned out on the whole well. 

Note puny Christmas Tree in the background...

Bucharest

We left Brasov around noon the next day, and took a train down to Bucharest. When we arrived at our hostel, it was already getting dark. It was a dreary rainy sort of day, and it took us forever to walk to our hostel which was pretty far from the metro stop they suggested we get off at.

It was also in a... interesting neighborhood. This was one of the houses on the street. Also note the sketchy apartment complex to the right. The hostel itself was brand new, and it looked like they had bought one of these abandoned houses and fixed it up. It had high ceilings and crown molding. The beds were in what were probably once dining and living rooms. It was an odd mix of elegant and...hostel. There were unframed cheaply printed pictures on the wall, and a room with at least 8 beds in it can only be so fancy. 

One of the people staying in our room was an american truck driver in his 40s who claimed he was in Romania to find a wife. Later he was replaced by this guy who spent his entire time there in bed on his computer. Hosteling is always full of characters.
The first night, we didn't do much. We went to McDo for dinner (it was gigantic! They had a special area for Birthday parties and a separate cafe  -- it is easily the biggest McDo I've ever been in in my life). Then we walked down the "Champs Elysee of Romania". This huge boulevard was specifically designed to be a "challenge" to the Champs Elysee of Paris and was designed to be some nominal amount of meters longer just to show them up. I didn't really get what the point of that was, but Tristan suggested that what the communists were trying to say was something like "Your Champs Elysee is only for the rich. It is based on commercialism. Ours is lined with housing for the people."  Anyway, I'm sure that today these apartments are some of the most expensive in the country.

We ended the night by playing a pirated version of Monopoly in the hostel's abandoned common room. 

The next day we saw all the sights of Bucharest which there weren't that many of, to be honest. 

The national library. It's clear that Romania has fully embraced capitalism.

The People's Palace - or today the House of Parliament. It's one of the biggest Parliament buildings in the world, or something. There are pictures of me with this building, but they must have been taken with Tristan's camera, and I still don't have those photos

This disturbing and befuddling monument is the Revolution Square where one of the key events of the revolution took place (I guess that might be obvious)

We had an early dinner at a popular Romanian restaurant. Normally you need reservations, but not when you eat at 5. It was really delicious. I had a sausage and bean soup dish, and Tristan had chicken schnitzel. Then we went back to the hostel to rest our extremely tired feet. We had intended to go back out but we never did. We did make one small trip out to the small store around the corner for water -- which was pretty nervous-making because the neighborhood's general abandonedness. We paid for our water through the window because they don't let you in after a certain time and we made it back without incident.

Bran Castle and Rasnov Fortress

Random aside that has nothing to do with this post: Today, I am alone all day because my roommates went to Nancy for the weekend and also Tristan is taking the LSAT so I have literally no one to talk to for 7 hours today. I was originally planning to join my roommates for the day. But because of the train times, I would have had to pay 40 euro for 5 hours in a town that doesn't sound that spectacular. I'm going to try to productive today, unlike my last two off days. I'd like to run, but my weather app says it's -3*c (26.6*f) which sounds awfully cold (on principle, I'm a Fahrenheit person. I think it makes a lot more sense for measuring weather (and not just because I understand what it means better). But when it comes to cold temperatures, I am more accustomed to Celsius.)
Now back to our regular scheduled programming (which involves overly detailed descriptions of my vacation):
For our second day in Brasov (Halloween), we took a day trip as planned to see castles in the region. We originally planned to take a tour with the hostel, but A) one of the castles was closed and B) it was actually quite a bit more pricey than taking the bus.
So we ask the hostel for directions on how to get to the bus station and they tell us we need to take bus 6 or whatever and that we can catch it across from the theater. So we go there, buy a ticket, and then wait, and wait. We begin to get impatient and nervous. Is this really where this bus comes? Maybe it doesn't come here? Why isn't it coming? So finally, we decide we will walk down towards McDo to borrow their wifi and make sure we are at the right place. We *know* the bus will come as soon as we are too far away to have a chance to catch it, yet we walk away. Thirty seconds after we pass what we marked as the point of no return (ie. if we are past here, there is NO way we will make it back to the bus stop in time to catch the bus) we see the bus up ahead stopped at a light. We make eye contact, then we turn around and sprint towards the bus stop as quick as we can. Making it there just as the bus arrives.
We made it the bus station with little other event:

Note the things hanging from the ceiling of the bus. Those are air fresheners and there were like 5 bazillion of them  hanging from the ceiling. 

One of my favorite parts of Romania (and the trip in general) was the many bus and train rides. Rather than a means to an end, the views outside the window were an attraction unto themselves. The countryside was beautiful: mountains, trees, plains, valleys and fields. There were huge expanses of land that looked much as they did hundreds of years ago. We saw villagers in horse drawn carts, horse drawn plows, shepherds standing in fields with there flocks.

I guess these would be the Carpathians.

When we first got to Bran Castle, we weren't sure initially if we wanted to pay to go in the castle, because castles are generally pretty unspectacular inside (I mean generally it's just a bunch of ridiculously ornate furniture and furniture is boring.) So we meandered through the trinket sellers. 

We made a sweet doggy friend. We fed her these (pretty nasty) chicken flavored  Lays. She seemed to like them quite a bit. 

"Clever" trinkets 

We eventually decided to go in the castle, because I wanted to use the restroom and though there was a public restroom in the trinket area, it was underground and frankly terrifying. Also, it was difficult to see the castle well without paying to go on the grounds. I think it was about 4 dollars each or total to go in, or something not very high. We used our student IDs to get the reduced rate and had our IDs scrutinized like they were forgeries (which reminds me of that time I went to a bar Chico just before we left, and had them think my ID was fake). 

At this point, Tristan hasn't the slightest idea why I'm taking this picture.

This is why. She was also sweet, though considerably more skittish then the other dog. Tristan spent at least10 minutes trying to woo her. Before, after, and while I used the distinctly not terrifying restroom.

Inside, the castle was worse then expected. It was sparsely furnished with furniture we later learned was only from the early 20th century. Bran Castle is funny because it seems to have become well known as "Dracula's Castle" - that is that it was the castle of Vlad Dracula (commonly known as Vlad the Impaler) or something like that. But the truth is that he never visited it, and there is no records to suggest Bram Stocker (author of Dracula) even knew it existed. Of course, this doesn't stop trinket sellers from trying to milk it. 

Nor did it stop this. I wonder how Queen Marie would feel about her furniture being displayed next to this atrocity .

On the other hand, paying the admission fee was well worth the views from the castle which were spectacular. 

And this is the castle as viewed from the grounds

After that, we took a bus to Rasnov. The trouble was that by the time we got there we were famished because we hadn't eaten anything (aside for some nasty chips) since breakfast. Rasnov, it turned out, was rather lacking in places to eat, but we eventually stumbled upon a completely empty restaurant and decided to eat there. It took over an hour for us to get one single, rather small, pizza and get out of there. Which was made extra horrible by the fact that they were playing a music video channel on the TV and we had to here song after song of some of the worst dance music ever created by man. By this time, it was getting dark. We started climbing the hill to the fortress, but the path was this meandering street that didn't seem to be any hurry to get us up the mountain. We very quickly gave up on getting up to fortress and decided to just head back. So Rasnov ended up being a bit of a fail.

In fact, one of the best pictures I got of the fortress was on the bus ride to Bran. 

That night, after having KFC and relaxing a bit. We went out on the town a bit for Halloween. The first place we went was this "Rock and Roll" bar that played metal. As we were walking in, we were approached by a Romanian guy who heard Tristan speaking German. At first, we weren't sure if he worked at the bar, or what. But it turned out he was just a friend of the owner. He talked to us the entire time we were there. His name was Chris and he was quite a character. After that we walked around the city a bit more, and then went back to the hostel. It was quite a pleasant day.