More Istria

Front Door, Church of St. Mary, Beram

A day after showing my parents around the Croatian Riviera, we loaded back into our pair of rental cars and headed westward to the Istrian peninsula.  Our first stop was Pazin, located in the center of Istria, only about an hour from Rijeka.  We've been to Pazin before in the very early spring, but we wanted to go again to see a famous gorge we missed. We also needed to ask at the tourist office about how to get keys to a little church outside a village near Pazin.

Pazin gorge

With just a little effort, we found the gorge at the edge of town near the old fortress.  It was awesome, in the old-fashioned sense of the word.  Walking along a little farther, we found a bridge that gives you a more complete view of both sides of the gorge, the deep caves and crevasses.  The ancient fortress and little houses cling to the edge at the top of the gorge, and I can't help but wonder what living on a precipice would do to a kid's personality growing up.  "Now, if you kick your ball over the gorge, don't go chasing it!"  In late June, Pazin has "Jules Verne Days." The gorge might have inspired his book Journey to the Center of the World, but it was definitely the basis for his novel Matias Sandorf.

Lucy and the original Dance of Death

Next, we drove to Beram, a hilltop village with about 20 residents.  Beram's claim to fame is a tiny 15th century frescoed chapel,  the Church of St. Mary, in the woods about 1km outside of town.  In addition to being completely off the beaten path, the chapel is normally locked, so you have to call a lady in Beram and ask if she'll take you to the chapel.  From the center of Beram, having acquired her phone number from the Pazin tourist office, Adam called her.  Instantly, a lady appeared on a balcony with a phone to her ear and she came out several minutes later holding a 6" long iron key, and she told us she would drive with us in our cars to the chapel.  The most famous painting is the "Dance of Death" or dance macabre, which we've seen replicas of in Brijuni and also in the hallways of the art museum in Rijeka.  The dance shows 10 characters -- rich, poor, old, young, nobles, merchants -- each accompanied by a skeleton.  The frescoes, including the dance macabre, were painted by Vincent de Kastav who is from a village called Kastav just 5k from Rijeka.  As a result, most of the visitors to the chapel are from the Kastav area.   Just after we dropped off our chapel-keeper in the village, two giant tour buses pulled up to Beram, and that explained why there was a honey, goat cheese, and brandy vendor set up at a makeshift table outside the chapel in the middle of nowhere.

After the Beram chapel, we reprogrammed the GPS to lead us to Rovinj, on the western side of Istria, which we had visited in the early spring when everything was closed.  We drove through rain and thought we might get soaking wet, but we managed to dodge the rain the entire day.  We headed up to the church of St. Euphemia, which gets its name from a poor little girl named Euphemia who got fed to the lions by the Romans under Diocletian.  She was interred in Constantinople, but one day her marble sarcophagus disappeared, only to wash up on the shores of Rovinj.  The miracles don't end there.  No one could get her up the hill until a young boy with two small cows managed to haul it up.  Who am I to dispute any of the holes in that story, nor do I need to go into the ridiculous thresholds of Catholic sainthood in general (ahemjohnpaulahem), but Euphemie's church courtyard gives you some unparalleled views of the coast and the sea.

Now the kids were starving to death.  We found a lunch spot right on the water, complete with a very charming waiter, a cross between Don Juan and Rodney Dangerfield, who was half Croatian and half Albanian, and gave us double the amount of wine we ordered.  Clearly, he had not only perfected the skill of how to milk a slightly tipsy 60 something from the midwest for a preposterously outrageous tip, but he also knew how to make that person feel like the tip went toward a really noble cause, as noble as earthquake relief or cleft lip repair surgery for destitute children.  He was good, that waiter.

We loaded back into the cars with a very threatening thundercloud overhead, but we managed to get away from it before the downpour.  The plan was to make a final stop in Motovun, a picturesque hilltown in northwest Istria surrounded by olive trees and vineyards, but we decided to head back to Rijeka to get Jonah to soccer practice.  The road back to Rijeka wound around Motovun, so we snapped some pictures at a rest stop, and added Motovun to the list of places to visit before we come back to the US.   As it turned out, Jonah didn't have practice, he had a game.  He was about 1/2 hour late, but my parents got to see Team Locomotiva for a little while.

Rovinj

The storm we avoided

Georgie near our restaurant

Sue, Rovinj

Tom, Rovinj

This year's figs, Rovinj

Motovun landscape

outside Motovun, Istria

Senj, Croatia

The footpath to Nehaj

Because the kids were wet and freezing to death by the end of our morning hike at Plitvice, we decided to head toward the coast via Senj, a tourist town overlooking the Adriatic at the foot of the Velebit mountains.   Senj is located at the 45th parallel, giving it something in common with northern Michigan. After we found parking and bathrooms, we located a footpath leading up to the Nehaj fortress, built in 1588.  The fortress is the symbol of Senj.   Thirty minutes later, we were at the castle, looking at Uskok costumes and walking along the balustrade at the top of the fortress in a fierce wind.  The fortress is famous because it was the base for the Uskok warriers, mercenaries, and pirates (sometimes it's hard to tell these roles apart) that rowed a special type of boat -- they were fast and almost invisible before the rowers attacked.  They were all around a very feared group of guerillas.  After the fortress visit, we ate a late lunch in town and then headed to Rijeka to give my parents a taste of our little piece of Croatia.

Two girls smitten with a Senj dog

Senj restaurant and Croatian beer

Trying not to get blown off Nehaj Fortress

A wind-free zone

At Nehaj

Plitvice Lakes, Croatia

At the park

According to most every travel account we've come across, one of the "absolute must-sees" in Croatia is Plitvice Lakes National Park in the center of Croatia, and it absolutely lived up to its hype.  We've been saving this trip for my parents, who arrived on April 26.  Knowing they'd want to get over their jetlag as quickly as possible, we thought some invigorating walks in the stunning, but cool and rainy UNESCO World Heritage site for the first 36 hours of their trip would be the most humane way to help them adjust to the new time zone.   So after we picked them up from the airport in Zagreb, we headed to the park via Karlovac, where at lunch, my dad was introduced to his favorite Croatian beer, Karlovacko.

We got checked into the Hotel Plitvice, one of only a few hotels located immediately in the park, and headed out for a walk.   Electric boat taxis take visitors across the bigger lakes in the park (it's commonly called a "necklace of lakes"), and that's how we started out.   Immediately, you find yourself walking alongside dark turquoise to azure lakes with 18' trout swimming right at the surface.  There are 16 large and small lakes at varying altitudes (hence, the cascades and waterfalls), all in a beautiful forest-setting.  The paths, both paved and a wooden, meander right over the top of a lake and alongside waterfalls and cascades.  Besides the trout, we saw 10" slugs and a cool black and gold striped lizard, but the park is famous for having a huge diversity of wildlife.  

With my poor jetlagged parents who trekked for a couple hours in the park in the rain just hours after a transatlantic flight, we went out to dinner at a family-owned pension.  I had some kind of spicy sausage that almost reminded me of kibbeh, but the wine was even better.  We took my parents back to the hotel and they slept for 13 hours straight (medicated, of course), and they woke up without a lick of jetlag.

The next morning, we hiked in another area of the park up to the Veliki Slap (the big waterfall).  Unfortunately, it was still raining, but this had the unintended consequence of keeping the masses of tourists at bay.  In high season, when the weather is nice, the boardwalks and pathways can be jammed with tourists. You might proceed just inches at a time.  There were certainly a fair share of tourists, but we were absolutely not stuck in a human traffic jam.  At our first boat crossing of the second day, we met a lovely older man named Walter, from Canada, and his brother, from Slovenia.  When we ran into them again at the end of our wet and chilly hike, they shared with us a nip of their homemade sljvovica (the ubiquitous plum brandy) which we drank straight out of the bottle.  Walter told us the story of how he escaped Yugoslavia by traveling through the mountains to Austria during WWII, and eventually made his way to Toronto.

Incidentally, the first Croatian casualty of the civil war was a park ranger at Plitvice in 1991, just as Croatia was planning to declare its independence from Yugoslavia.  He was killed by Serbians (who actually were an ethic majority in the Plitvice region until 1995), who seized the park, and then killed or evicted about 43,000 Croatians.   The Serbs controlled the park until the Croatians overtook it in a successful military offensive in 1995.  Payback was brutal.  The Croatians killed about 14,000 Serbs and evicted between 150-300,000.  There is still evidence of those forced evictions along the road to Plitvice, in the form of burned out houses, although far fewer than there were when our 1996 guidebook was published.  There are no surviving Serbian Orthodox churches.  After the war, one of Croatia's top priorities was to remove the landmines planted by the Serbs in the park so that tourism could recover.

Tom, Sue, Walter, Walter's brother, and the slivovica

On the boardwalk

Veliki Slap (the big waterfall)

Scenery

On the boardwalk

Vienna, Austria

Schonnbrunn

Because of our longer-than-expected Ljubljana visit, we arrived in Vienna quite late in the evening.  Adam dropped us off at our hotel and went to find the Otto Wagner parking garage, our hotel's slightly subsidized parking. 

In the morning, Adam was off to meet with his moot court team and my mission was to introduce the kids to my old haunting grounds.  My secondary mission was to impress all my kids with my German language skills, sprinkled here and there with Austrian dialect.  This was very easy to do because they don't speak any German and can't actually hear how pathetic my German has become these past 15 years.  In the end, I'm sure I got us into more trouble trying to speak German to show off than if I had just spoke English in the first place.

On the Riesenrad

We bought an unlimited public transportation ticket and headed for the Innenstadt, via the Rathaus, Parliament, and the Museums Quarter on the Ringstrasse.  We went to St. Stephan's cathedral and climbed the 343 or 434 steps of the south tower for some amazing views.  If you ask the kids what it was like climbing the tower, they'll tell you it felt like 15 steps.  So living here in Rijeka on a huge hill had some payoff.  With all the horses and carriages parked outside the cathedral, Lucy really wanted to ride in the fiacre until I told her how terribly hard the cobblestones are on the horse's hoofs.   

Riesenrad

Breaktime

Wienerschnitzel (turkey) Love

At the Prater

We changed Serbian dinars at the Sacher hotel (because they don't want anything to do with that currency in Croatia), but unfortunately, never timed our walk right on the Karntnerstrasse to get torte.  Fond though I am of Vienna, I wasn't sentimental enough to get Austrian torte for the children at 9AM.  We walked down the Graben and sat at the Pestsaule (the plague column), and then headed for the Hofburg.  They saw the silver chamber, the Sissi Museum (which fascinated the girls), and then we toured several of the Imperial Apartments where the Kaiser lived during the winter.  We got on the subway and went to the Prater, stopping for pizza on the way, but no one would try my tuna pizza, which I would eat regularly as a student (although back then it was square, thick, and had corn on it).  We rode the 19th century Riesenrad (a ferris wheel that goes around one time), built for one of Emperor Franz Josef's jubilees, and then walked around the amusement park.  We went on the modern ferris wheel, because that was the best compromise between Lucy (who wanted to go on a really fast roller coaster) and Jonah (who gets sick on fast rides), with only one attending adult.

Around 4:00, with blisters on the bottom of my feet, we met Adam back at the hotel for a short break.  All of us then went to St, Stephan's Cathedral to meet with the moot court team, and we went with them on the subway to the outskirts of town where the competition results were to be announced.  Unfortunately, team Rijeka didn't advance and that was a huge disappointment for them and for Adam.  The silver lining for me was that Adam got to spend more time with us in the subsequent days, but we both would have preferred that Rijeka advanced.

Since the kids were starving to death, we had to get dinner.  I led us to a famous wienerschnitzel restaurant on the Burgstrasse, recommended in my guidebook.  It was tiny and totally unequipped to seat five people at one table, but we squeezed in and after a beer, we hardly noticed we had no elbow room.  The schnitzel was all it was hyped up to be, and by the time we left, Jonah was one of wienerschnitzel's biggest fans, begging us to tell him when he could have it again.

Lunchtime

Schonnbrunn Labrynth

Gloriette Cafe, Schonnbrunn

Schonnbrunn Park (Gloriette in background)

The next day was Schonnbrunn, where we spent a fabulous half day.  The kids each got a little handheld audio guide and it made them feel like they had a toy, yet the toy was educational.  Jonah learned all about the Pragmatic Sanction and Silesia.  We must have gone through 40 rooms of the palace before the novelty of the audio guides started to wane.   After we toured the inside, we walked up to the Gloriette behind the palace and the kid had an ice cream parfait, Adam had a torte, and I had a beer.  We then went to the labyrinth/maze and the kids were entertained by the maze trails for quite some time.  After lunch of sausage (and I had kasekrainer, cheese-injected into deeply toasted sausage, which was also a nostalgic food for me), Adam took the kids to the Schatzkammer (the Treasury) in the Hofburg to look at jewels and crowns.  We went back to the hotel for a short break, then took the 38 tram to Grinzing for dinner at a heuriger.  Although this particular one was recommended by our hotel, the service was awful.  I drank two incredibly refreshing weiss gespritzers (this is half seltzer water, half non-aged white wine) which I used to drink a lot of -- and I decided that that drink is going to replace diet Coke as my new post-gardening summer beverage.  We took the tram back to the hotel and fell into bed.

Electric boat on the Danube

Danube

Venus of Willendorf, Natural History Museum

Schubert Geburtshaus

My old apartment building

Antique lift in our hotel (Pension Baronesse)

Passing time on the tram

Our last full day in Vienna started out with a walk to Harmoniegasse, in the 9th district, where I used to live.  I hardly recognized the building, it had been so long.  I did register the fact that the Best Western next door was new.  From there, we walked to the Schuberthaus and managed to see Schubert's birthplace despite the annoying museum employee following our every move (we were the only ones there).  We took a tram to the Natural History Museum, saw the 25,000 year old Venus of Willendorf, and then went on an electric boat in the the Old Danube.  After the boat ride, we walked to a restaurant along the riverbank (actually, lakebank) and I continued to get reacquainted with the refreshing weisse gespritzers.  Then we went to our only art museum, the Seccession, and ate dinner in Judenplatz (Jewish square), where a new Holocaust memorial has been erected since I lived there.

We squeezed a lot into three days, and came home exhausted.  For me, it was exciting to revisit a place that was once so familiar and to introduce the kids to something new.  It might have been better if I had a babysitter for several hours a day so I could see the things that weren't kid-friendly, but on the other hand, I really got to see what I most wanted to see, and eat what I most wanted to eat, and drink what I most wanted to drink... so it all worked out really well.  

We sLOVEnia!

Ljubljana (stock photo)

This week, Adam had to go to Vienna, Austria for the Rijeka law school's moot court competition.  Since I lived there as a student in my early 20s, there was no belaboring the question of whether we would all accompany him or not.  But this blog is not going to be about Vienna, rather, it's about the way there and the way home, because Slovenia lies between Austria and Croatia.  After conscientiously buying our Slovenian vignette before we even knew if we would be on a highway that required it, we stopped in the capital of Slovenia.  We were going to get lunch there, but ended up spending the entire afternoon walking around, eating, and going to the castle.  On our way home, rather then hike a bit of the Wienerwald, we drove to Bled in northwest Slovenia, not too far off course.  Despite our lingering anger at the Slovenian vignette administrators, who were out to get us in February, we all were a little bit taken with Slovenia.  Or as their T-shirts say:
I sLOVEnia.

Ljubljana is the City of Dragons. On the way to the old city, we crossed a gorgeous bridge festooned with all sorts of dragons, so all the tourist tchotchkes about dragons made sense to us.  After our appetizer of a $12 pint of raspberries from the Ljubljana market, we ate al fresco in the old town where the waiters had to dress in traditional costumes and clearly resented it.  Jonah tried the "hunter's lunch":  wild boar, stag, and deer with a cherry sauce.  We walked around the old town and then took a funicular up to the castle.  The views were fantastic.  Unfortunately, my camera was out of battery so I have no pictures of this leg of our trip.

Island in the haze to the left,  + Adam

About to ride bikes

View from our restaurant

Panorama restaurant

On the way back from Vienna, we decided to follow up on the recommendation of Adam's colleague Vesna and go to Lake Bled.  This is a glacier lake surrounded by hills, forests, snow-covered Julian Alps in the background, a castle, and in the middle of the lake, there is a tiny island with a picturesque little church on it.  There are sidewalks around the entire lake for hiking or biking.  After our lunch on an outdoor patio looking out at the lake and the mountains in the distance, we separated.   Georgie was too little for renting her own bike, and too big to be on the back of an adult bike, so we got gelato and explored the area on foot.  Jonah, Lucy and Adam rented bikes, and travelled around the entire lake.  After they returned, we went to a cafe and everyone tried the famous Bled creamcakes (this after the Hello Kitty gelato).  These creamcakes, by the way, don't do much for me, but they seem to be a favorite in Hungary/Croatia/Slovenia/Austria and everyone else in my family is a fan.  Bled was absolutely gorgeous, and although my camera had full battery capacity, the pictures don't do the town justice at all.  Not surprisingly, it's a major tourist attraction.  Georgie and I picked up a few groceries in a small market while we were waiting for the bike riders, and I heard more American English than Slovenian.  To be fair to Bled, I just have to tack on a stock photo that does better at showing how beautiful the area is.

Zagreb

Egg hunt

We carpooled to Zagreb with our friend Iva on Saturday morning, so the kids could attend an Easter Egg Hunt at the ambassador's residence.  They were very excited for the bouncy house, the face painting, the sack races, the egg hunt, and especially to get to play with some American children.  Unfortunately, it was rainy and quite cold the entire morning.  I made the kids dress up a notch from their normal attire, and Jonah complained bitterly, but when we got there, it was clear from the ambassador's hooded sweatshirt that this was not a churchy kind of egg hunt.  I should have worn my bluejeans (which, by the way, were brilliantly rescued from their courtyard purgatory by my upstairs neighbor, so the torment is over).

Trg Bana Josipa Jelacica (Zagreb's main square)

We took a taxi from the leafy northern part of town back to the main square and warmed up with hot chocolate at the very fancy and jam-packed Gradska Kavana (City Cafe).  We had been warned to stay away from the main square because the day before, in the International War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague, two Croatian war generals were convicted of atrocities against Serbs during a 1995 ethnic cleansing campaign.  The protestors were out in full force.  They're raging mad at the EU and the Croatian

Old town (Sabor around the corner)

government because their government agreed to cooperate with the trial so they could move forward with their EU application.  All the roads and alleys leading up to old town, where the government buildings are located, were occupied by police officers with riot helmets, so we felt that the Croatian government was taking the anger of the protestors quite seriously.

Most every museum was closed after 1PM on Saturday, so we decided to just walk around a bit. We passed a sign on a building commemorating a synagogue that is now a parking lot.   We took a funicular up to the old town and saw the Croatian Sapor (the Croatian Parliament), which looks strikingly modest after seeing the Budapest version a couple weeks ago.   And then, at a statue of St. George and the slayed dragon in the old town, we completely LOST the entire three bags of Easter hunt goodies which were supposed to entertain the kids on the 2 1/2 hour bus ride home.  The girls didn't mind a bit but Jonah...  There was a very serious gelato shop.  Jonah cheered up a little when he got to have a Kinder Chocolate gelato.

We were on the 4:00 bus back (everyone slept), and then we went out to eat at our favorite Rijeka pizzeria, Pizzeria Bracere, which has a nautical theme and a wooden boat hanging from the rafters.  In the back, while looking at a painting on the wall, Georgie said "that's our building!"  Sure enough, it was our very own Casa Nave.

St George statue (where the Jewish easter baskets got left behind)

Looking up the funicular

Football at the Ambassador's residence

Jewish easter baskets

Hunting for eggs

Coloring station

Our Casa Nave!