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!