DONKEYS!!!!!

GUESS WHAT WE DID TODAY!!!!!

Okay, I'll tell you because I can't wait because it was too much fun::: we went on a donkey safari!!!!

"Safari" is actually kind of a silly word for it, actually. We asked Dragan (hostel owner) if we could have the day off, or at least do our work early in the morning (I think Steve woke up at 6am... ugh.), so that we could go on this donkey safari lunch tour thing. We were picked up a about 9:30am by some dude with an earring who didn't speak much English, and were driven to Zrnovo, which was about fifteen minutes by car from the hostel. From there, we were put on DONKEYS!!!!!!

Yep, donkeys. The guy who picked us up (who we later found out was named Darjo) led our donkeys to the beginning of a trail through the woods and off we went on an hour-long ride to Pavja Luka, which is a little bay on the other side of the island. You can see a little bit of the trek here.

I thought the donkey ride was super fun, even though Steve's donkey, Andrea (who we nicknamed Porsche) kept stopping to eat, and when she did, my donkey Gabby (nicknamed Ferrari) would trot up trying to get in front. Every time Gabby/Ferrari got close, Andrea/Porsche would instantly speed up again. Hilarious. Darjo followed behind on foot, urging the donkeys along whenever they slowed down too much. I was laughing pretty much the entire time because the donkeys were walking along the outer edge of the stony trails (aka, right next to tree branches which kept stabbing me in the arms) instead of the treeless but rocky center of the path. Sillyness. Steve, on the other hand, did not like that the donkey saddles had no stirrups and he couldn't shift very easily to get more comfortable.

But after an hour of riding through the woods that dipped into the valley entrance of Pavja Luka, we were rewarded with greetings (in English!) from Jimmy, a local who would be cooking us Croatian barbeque. We were each immediately handed a beer and given directions to the beach, which was a five minute walk from the house patio. This is what we saw.

After swimming around in this quiet, perfect cove for about an hour, we headed back to Jimmy's house for food. OH, THE FOOD! It has been so long since we had anything that was properly barbecued!!!!

The ground meat "fingers" are called cevapcici, a standard Croatian food, and next to the cevapcici are grilled squids!!! We also had grilled vegetables, tomato and onion salad, bread, and beer. After Steve and I had pretty much polished off all that food in those pictures by ourselves (Jimmy, Darjo, and the other house guests had their own platters), Darjo (who we found out is a chef at a local restaurant) came by plopped grilled pork belly onto our plates.

We seriously ate nonstop for like two hours.

Then we went back to the beach!!!

I know, I know... You aren't supposed to swim immediately after eating. But how could anything like the possibility of drowning ruin such a perfect day?

Darjo had to take the donkeys back earlier than we wanted to leave, so Jimmy offered to drive us back into town so we could stay longer, which was very nice of him. On the way into town he was telling us that on that half of the island, there were only about 600 people in the four biggest towns (villages, really) and that everyone knew everyone. Case in point: he dropped us off at Dragan's hostel and started chatting with the neighbor across the street.

I wish I could better describe how perfect this day was. It was seriously the single best day of vacation we've had on this entire trip so far.

The donkey ride? Surprisingly way more fun than I anticipated. The donkeys were cute and very calm, and the trail was beautiful, and I couldn't stop smiling.

The food? Reminded me of our barbeque. Do you have any idea how much I've missed that? My dad is the barbeque master. So to have familiar tastes like smoke and charred meat back in my mouth.... Well, like I said, we ate pretty much nonstop for two hours.

The company (Jimmy, Darjo, other house guests)? Lots of fun, even though Jimmy was the only one who really spoke English. It was a lot of laughing, a lot of charades, and a lot of random singing.

I could get used to days like this. It was the quintessential vacation day.

Cinderella in the Morning, Beach Bums in the Aftenoon

Something to note for anyone planning a long trip to Europe like we did:

In order to make travel within Europe easier for EU citizens, many of the countries in Europe signed into something called the Schengen Agreement. Basically, this agreement opens up borders between countries that are part of the agreement and eliminates border controls, passport checks, etc. For European citizens, this means less hassle while traveling between countries - and since the countries here are so much smaller than the United States, it's easy to do lots and lots of traveling. HOWEVER: when doing research for our trip, we kept reading that U.S. citizens don't need a visa if they are traveling within the country for less than 30 days. We got this same information when reading about every country we made plans to go to on this trip: Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary. So, awesome, we aren't staying in any of those countries for more than 30 days. But then about two weeks before our flight date, we stumbled pretty much by accident on this information about the Schengen Agreement. And one part of the Schengen Agreement says that U.S. citizens can only be IN THE SCHENGEN AREA FOR 90 DAYS WITHIN SIX MONTHS. Ah, crap! Our original trip plans meant we would be in the Schengen area for about 115 days, and we read/heard about people getting in trouble when exiting the EU and having to pay huge fines and being banned from the EU for ten years, stuff like that. Luckily for us, Ukraine is not part of the Schengen Agreement, so we were able to change our travel plans so that we were only in the Schengen area for the allotted number of days. Our original trip plans included another WWOOFing endeavour in Austria, but we changed that so we would be back in Ukraine, working on a buffalo reserve.

Well, plans changed again later on in our trip: we have been under budget for most of our trip so far, so rather than spend three weeks shoveling buffalo dung in Ukraine, we decided to go have ourselves some fun in Croatia (also not part of the Schengen Agreement). Whoo!

To subsidize our Croatian vacation, we did set up a stint volunteering at a backpackers hostel on the island of Korcula. In exchange for a room to sleep in, we are expected to work a few hours in the morning changing linens, doing laundry, cleaning the bathrooms and kitchen, etc. So that's what we've been doing for the last few days. The hostel has eight private rooms and a dorm room (pictured below) with twenty beds available for those who are looking for a really cheap place to sleep. The first couple days we were here, only about half the beds were filled, so we didn't have much to do, but last night TONS of people showed up. Tons as in, the hostel was overbooked and about six people who showed up without reservations slept in lawn chairs on the balcony, and Steve and I were relegated to sleeping on the couches (which actually turned out to be sofabeds) in the upstairs kitchen. It was crazy. Imagine fifty 19-year-olds all cramming into one house. That was what we came back to after dinner out.

On the bright side, we get done with playing Cinderella around noon or 1pm and have the rest of the day to explore the island. Dragan, the owner of the hostel, offered to take us and a few other guests out to the beach at Lumbarda, a little beach town about ten minutes away from the hostel. We spent the day floating around in warm, shallow, blue waters and getting lots of sun.

]

Down the street from the hostel is Saint Anthony's Church, which is very small, very old, and up a huuuuuuuge flight of stairs.

What a view, right? Croatia has a bunch of little islands along its coast. The one we're staying on, Korcula, is so beautiful - I thought that kind of blue only existed on postcards. The climate here is a Mediterranean climate, so as I think I've mentioned before, we've been seeing a lot of things that remind us of California, like pine trees, vineyards, and a lot of other plants we recognize.

I wanted to rent a tandem kayak, as I've never been kayaking at all, tandem or otherwise, so Steve and I went to a small pebbly beach about a fifteen minute walk from the hostel and rented one out for an hour.

Let me tell you, I did not realize that rowing on a tandem kayak would be so hard. Maybe it's because Steve is much stronger and much more coordinated than I am? If I had been left alone, I may have ended up just going in circles... You can see more of our kayaking endeavour here.

Other than cleaning and hitting the beach to work on our tans, we've been eating a lot of seafood. Like shark steaks! An huge prawms with their heads still on! And.... also a lot of ice cream (there are stands EVERYWHERE) and a lot of pizza (Italy is just across the Adriatic....).

So far? Life is good. It's nice to settle down in one place and sit back and relax most of the day. This is a vacation, after all....

The Great Unveiling.

Remember this picture?:

I know you've all been thinking about this ever since I put it up. What could it possibly be??? We had a few guesses for mushroom, but this is what it looks like from farthr away:

I thought it looked like the cross between a canteloupe and a potato, but it's a CUCUMBER!!!!!! A tortoise cucumber, actually. It tastes pretty much the same as your average cucmber, maybe slightly milder. But the cool thing is that they actually start out green - they don't start getting their "tortoise shell" until they get big.

In other news, we spent one night in the coastal city of Split, and aince we arrived at 6am on Friday and left at 5pm on Saturday, we had pretty much two full days of exploring to do.

We ate at a little cafe that offered "American breakfast" as one of their options:

So I guess American breakfast means double bacon? Someone please tell the diners to start dishing out double bacon with their breakfasts; our culture demands it.

We spent the morning hiking up Marjan Hill and, let me tell you, it's a good thing we were able to drop our bags off at the hostel/apartment/rented room in a local's house that we were staying at, because hiking Marjan Hill with a heavy bag would have been far too tiring and I would've collapsed. Marjan Hill is basically a giant staircase that goes almost two hundred meters up in elevation and runs through a ine forest full of chirpings cicadas. Did you know that cicadas on average only come out to annoy the world with their loud, incessant chirping about once every seventeen years? I read that in the Sword of Truth books that our friend Blonde Matt lent me and dismissed it as a myth, but I looked it up when we came to Croatia and found out it is more or less true. Cicadas burrow in the ground when they are babies and live there until adulthood, when they shed their skins, climb a tree, and sing non-stop for days. The average cicada only has a lifespan of 2-5 years, but some breeds in North America and in certain other climates similar to ours have life spans of 13-17 years. It's bewildering actually to hear so many cicadas singing in the trees because you don't ever see them! We stopped and looked for some but couldn't find a single one.

So yes, the walk up was exhausting and the cicadas kind of creepy, but hey, at least the view was nice:

Once we got to the top, we wandered around a bit, but stopped when we saw a group of emergency vehicles (six cop cars, two ambulances, a few search and rescue jeeps) parked along the road. We were curious but didn't want to get in the way, so we turned back. The Split Zoo is also at the top of this hill, so Steve jokingly made a comment that maybe all the animals escaped.

Seriously, like thirty seconds later, this is what we saw:

I couldn't stop laughing, especially after Steve started following it around, taking this video, reminiscent of our friend Korea Steve's video of a rooster that was wandering around our old apartment complex, the Pine Club.

For dinner that night, we went to Split's top restaurant, according to TripAdvisor (which they use much, much more than Yelp over here), Apetit. We went in early for dinner (by European standards), around 6pm, and by 7pm there were so many people wanting to get in that the wait staff were basically turning people away.

And the food was DELICIOUS. it's wonderful being in Croatia because EVERYWHERE serves seafood. After almost three months of eating pork or beef almost every day, it was refreshing to be eating fish. And eat fish we did! We ordered fish carpaccio to start, fish soup for me and cream of shrimp soup for Steve, and then the main course: grilled tuna with grilled vegetables for me (meat that isn't pork/beef that has also been grilled???? Yes! Finally!) and amberjack (whatever that is) in tomato-bacon sauce for Steve. Here are pictures in case your mouth isn't watering enough already:

Just FYI, that tuna steak is half a kilo. THAT'S MORE THAN A POUND!!!! i almost couldn't finish it. It was easily the biggest piece of fish I've ever eaten. By far the biggest I've ever seen served in a restaurant for like fifteen dollars.

The rest of our stay in Split involved wandering around the Diocletian Palace, which is now full of street vendors and restautants and shops and people, and when we get back to Split I will see what I can do about taking some pictures. But our next adventure involved a catamaran ferry to the island of Korčula, in the Adriatic Sea, where we will be working at a hostel in exchange for a bed. Our original plan when we were first planning this trip was to go WWOOFing again, but plans changed due to the fact that we have gone under budget most of the trip so far, and now instead of farming for the next three weeks, we will be part working at a hostel on an island and part relaxing at the beach! Whoo!

Trains, Planes, and Automobiles.

*SPOILER ALERT* This blog post has absolutely nothing to do with planes. Unless you count the plains we passed by on our ways to Croatia.

First things first: I can't believe I forgot to post this video of us harvesting potatoes! aren't potato plants fun?? :D

Anywho, so we took a train out of Tapolca down to Zagreb, the capital of Croatia (called Hrvatska by the Croatians themselves), which should've been about a four-hour ride.... Until there was a malfunction on one of the rails at the border of Hungary and Croatia, and we were told to get off the train so we could take a bus to another station..... DEJA VU. Remember that train ride from Prague to Vienna that lasted all day long? We groaned and exited the train, expecting the worst after what happened in the Czech Republic. But instead, we were pleasantly surprised to find a whole fleet of buses waiting for us. We were on our way within minutes.

However, it was roasting hotnin the bus, so we hung my two jackets on the curtainless window curtain rod to block the sun, and I forgot to take them back down when we left.

UUUUGGGGGGGGHHHHHH.

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Lost & Found Items List:

Lost (or otherwise discarded):

- One dress, left behind at an apt in Kiev, Ukraine.
- One tank top and three pairs of socks, donated to the WWOOFer clothing stash at the farm in Hungary.
- One longsleeve shirt, dirty and discarded at the farm after I cut out the soccer tournament logo for use in the soccer memories quilt I'm going to (eventually) make.
- One pair of undies, lost in the laundry or something, gone forever.
- Both jackets I brought with me, left on a bus somewhere in Croatia, never to be seen again. :'(

Found (at the store....)
- Two dresses, which I bought in a bout of retail therapy while mourning for the dress I left in Ukraine.


So why is my backpack still soooooooooo heavy????? :P

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When I realized I left my jackets on the bus, Steve jumped off the train we had just boarded and sprinted to the front ofnthe station where the buses dropped us off, but unfortunately came back empty-handed as the bus had already left. [And while I appreciate my sweet husband running off as soon as I said I had left my jackets behind, in hindsight we realized it was perhaps not the best idea because what if the train had left without him????? Whew.]

And the one-hour delay caused by the train-bus(this is where the automobile part of the title comes in)-train extravaganza meant that we arrived right in time to check in to our hotel (a real hotel!!!) rather than having to kill time for an hour since Arcotel Allegra was right across the street from the train station. Whoo.

And let me just say... It was sooooo nice to walk into a very clean, very classy, air-conditioned, fly-free room after a month of playing in the dirt all day long at the farm.

We booked an overnight train to Split for the next night, so we made haste to see all Zagreb had to offer in the very short time we were there. It is a pretty little city, with lots of parks (have you noticed that most of the major cities we've gone to have lots of parks? Can you even find a single park in Los Angeles?) and not too many tourists.

Zagreb also has lots and lots of museums, so if you're into museums and not getting run over by tourists, Zagreb is a good place to visit. WE ALSO SAW BULLET HOLES ON SOME OF THE BUILDINGS! For those of you who don't know, Croatia was at war with Yugoslavia just over a decade ago, and bullet holes have been left in some of the buildings as kind of a reminder to the people that they fought hard to win their independence.

That beach scene above is made out of BREAD! We saw it in a bakery window and couldn't help but take a picture.

After about a day and a half of wandering around through the giant farmers market and renaissance fair booths and debating on whether we should go into any of the many museums (which we didn't because we aren't really museum people) and watching the new Pixar movie Brave (in Croatian!) to get out of the heat for a while, we hopped on yet another train down to Split, a city on the coast.

Someonenplease remind me next time to book a sleeper car. Sitting in a seat in a compartment with five other people is not the most pleasant of overnight experiences. My butt was the only part of me that managed to get any sleep, at least until I found an empty compartment for us to take over on my way to the bathroom. That gave us about two hours of stretching out across three seats for some actual sleep

(look at how cute Billy is!)
before we arrived here:

Split, Croatia. 6am.

Our Final Days.

Today we left from the Tapolca train station to head down to Croatia for the next two and a half weeks.

Monday, as you all know, was the day we slaughtered, skinned, gutted, butchered, cooked, and ate a whole slew of bunnies. That evening we also headed out to the Balaton one last time with Aaron, Orsi, Naomi, and Barney to view fireworks in celebration of Hungary's independence. While they were nice, they weren't nearly as big as our fireworks. It was pretty, watching them from across the lake, but it made me sad that we missed our Fourth of July. One thing I've noticed about myself after being gone from home for so long is that I feel more patriotic, for lack of a better word. I miss the United States. I'm proud to be American. I wish I could have been home for Independence Day. It's my country. Even though it is all screwed up in all kinds of ways, I miss it.

Tuesday was mostly uneventful, other than THE HORNS! You remember the cow we saw slaughtered in our first week, yes? We're taking home both of those horns (assuming U.S. Customs approves :P). Coolest souvenir ever, right?!

There is apparently a huge process to cleaning out the horns. Bone grows through those horns, and the "shell" of the horn, made from material similar to fingernails, is attached to the bone with a lot of cartilage. When you let the horns dry out for a long time (read: 3+ months), the cartilage will basically disintegrate and you can simply pull the bone out.

Since our horns (along with some other fairly recent horns that Aaron and Peter figured they should clean out anyway) were so new, they took a loooooong time to clean out. We boiled them for probably about an hour to loosen up the cartilage before Steve and Aaron sent another hour or so trying to pull the bone out.

Eventually, as you can see, they cleaned out all the horns.

Meanwhile, I took Billy out around the farm for a photoshoot! :D

In the evening, a trio of girls showed up as the new WWOOFers to take our place. We showed them around the farm and had a very good meal before falling asleep for the last time in Hungary.

And now on to Zgreb, Split, and Korčula!

There's Only One Way To Eat A Brace of Coneys.

[conies?]

For those who don't want to know the grossly intimate details, this is what we did on Monday:


BEFORE

AFTER

For those of you who are more interested in what it takes to skin and gut a rabbit (slaughter video is not available. You don't want to see that.), WHICH I PERSONALLY DID (one rabbit to Steve's three), you can click here to watch Steve skin and gut a rabbit in less than four minutes.

Ahem. Please excuse my silly commentary, e.g., "Cut its butt off!", "Rip its heart out!", etc. Steve watched this video and promptly informed me that I am worse than a little boy. :P

In othr words, there were six rabbits in that cage, and we ate them all.