Before I begin this posting, a couple of things I failed to mention earlier about our visit to Croatia. As we were driving to Osijek, we passed a lot of farmland (they have some of the best cucumbers and tomatoes) and our guide mentioned that as of a year ago, they were finally able to plant since all the land mines had finally been removed. There were so e beautiful woods on the other side of the road and she said that they have not been cleared yet and were not safe for walking through and most likely would never be.
She also said that currently Croatia manufactures about 90% of the Porsche Cayennes but the world doesn't know that because they do almost all of the build in Croatia and then ship the almost completed cars for finishing in Germany. Because of the way German law is written, since the car assembly is completed I. Germany they can legallyut made in Germany in the paperwork for the car. By 2016' all the Porsche Cayennes will be made on Croatia! How's that for interesting news?
So we left our 5-star hotel and moved to an apartment that we arranged for through AirBnB. Little did I know we would be in a communist revival building.
We were on the first floor and we did have a lift. The building was clean and well maintained just very stark on the outside. The apartment was well appointed, even with a washer and dryer, and that was a big plus for us. Or so we thought until we used it. Yes it worked but it was a combination washer and dryer and took forever to do a load once we figured out how to use it. Spent the first day just chillin and doing wash. We did go for lunch and wound up in the food court of the mall. Silly us, we decided to try Chinese food in Romania. I guess we asked for it. Actually the egg rolls were good even though we only got the plum sauce and no hot mustard (and had to pay extra for the sauce.) We also ordered sesame chicken and stir-fried vegetables with white rice. The vegetables were a bit bland and had a lot of peppers (they eat peppers in everything!) Sesame chicken in the US usually comes with some vegetables and some sauce of some sort. Not so in Romania! It was chicken tenders heavily coated in sesame seeds and then deep fried. While they were tasty, especially dipped in the plum sauce, they definitely were not what we were expecting. No soy sauce on the table so we asked for some. You got it, we were charged for it. Needless to say we didn't do that again during the rest of our stay in Bucharest.
Next day we took off for the old city. What a delight! The orthodox churches here are so beautiful. We found several in the old city along with a great beer garden & restaurant - Carú cu Bere.
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| In these churches, you light you candle for a loved one and then put them outside in these cabinet to burn. |
Dinner that night at an Italian restaurant just around the corner from the apartment (you'd have thought we learned our lesson but the menu looked really good and we saw some of the plates on other tables and looked really good.) Turned out to be great food and great wine! They even had Ernie's favorite after dinner drink, Amaro Montenegro. He was a very happy camper.
The next morning we went to the Jewish museum in the oldest synagogue in Bucharest. We had a really good conversation with the lady working the door and the museum floor that day. She was a wealth of information but surprisingly gave us some bad information - or at least glossed over some information. When asked how many Jews were extradited from Romania during WWII, she said none, that a lot had discerned the horror that was headed their way and evacuated the area. Check out the signs and photos from the Memorial Room in the back of the museum:
Since it was really hot and humid and there wasn't much more sightseeing to do, we decided to walk to this big park in the city center, get a drink and take our Kindles and enjoy the afternoon reading and people watching. What fun! The most fun was watching this young woman frantic because her dog would come back to her when she called. Instead, he was in the lake chasing the ducks. He was having a great time, she was losing it, and other people around were quite upset with her because she couldn't control her animal and they thought he was going to eat the ducks.
One last meal at our now favorite restaurant in Bucharest along with a good beer. Went back to the apartment to finished the last load of laundry and start packing for our flight in the morning to Istanbul. Ernie had not yet gotten confirmation from the young taxi driver with whom we arranged transfer back to the airport the next morning. He finally got through to him and he casually informed us he would not be able to pick us up because he had an accident and car needed repairing. Ernie was panicking! Tried to call the taxi company but they kept hanging up on him since the call came from a US phone number and they probably thought it was a wrong number. Tried to book on their website, but it was all in Romanian. He finally found a airport service on the internet and their site had English as an optional language. Success!
Oh did I mention that we had pots on the floor in the bedroom under the air conditioner because there was obviously a problem with the drain pipe and it was leaking water? We survived with some great stories.
Istanbul Turkey,tomorrow. Really excited about going there since we've heard so many great things about the city. I'll let y'all know in my next post.
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