I thought I was over New York, but I'm not. Just watching this trailer makes me deliciously happy.
This was our second time in Bratislava (Slovakia) and our second time staying with our friends Jano and Janka. They are great, and our weekends with them are always filled with wine, music, and bacon - lots and lots of bacon, sometimes homemade. (You love them already, don't you?) Since we had done quite a bit of sightseeing the first time we were in Bratislava (back in April), this past weekend we just relaxed and hung out. Our only excursion was to the castle Červený Kameň ("Red Stone"), where there happened to be a quirky little medieval festival taking place.
They were awesome.
I made my mom's kimchi bap, one of my favorite meals growing up. It is one of those one-pot deals. You cook it all in your rice cooker, by alternately layering just kimchi, washed rice, and ground pork. (Kimchi and pork are a classic combo in Korean cooking - it just wouldn't be the same with beef.) My mom also serves it with a little sauce of soy sauce, green onions, sesame oil, and sesame seeds, which each person spoons and mixes with his/her rice to taste. So I made that too. My kimchi bap turned out pretty okay, and Leon liked it too, but it was not quite like my mom's - it never is.
You know how, when you are in a new place - oh, like a new country or something - there are certain things that the locals take for granted and find mundane that seem so novel and delightful to you? For Leon and me, this happens to us a lot at the grocery store. "Hey, look! It's Mr. Clean, except here he's called Mr. Proper! HOW ABOUT THAT!" Or: "Oh, wow! This wine is sold in a glass JUG. Cool!" Or: "Hey, get this. These are chocolate eggs, and when you crack them open, there are PRIZES IN THEM!" That's how we end up coming home with all kinds of junk from the grocery store. Never mind that the wine is crappy or that we already have Cracker Jack in the US (although those prizes are inferior to the kinder eggs', for sure). It's just novel because it's new. To me.
An example of this is my love for the tram. I LOVE riding the tram, for various reasons. For one, unlike the metro, the tram runs above ground, so to get on one, you don't have to go down the famously long metro station escalators while carrying heavy grocery bags in both hands. And of course, on the tram you can look out onto the city, which never ceases to mesmerize me. So I got it into my head that I wanted to take a tram all the way from one end of the line to the other, in the hopes that I would see parts of the city I wouldn't otherwise see. As with the jug wine and junky chocolates, our Czech friends probably find it amusing that we'd spend a perfectly good hour on a Saturday to ride the tram. For fun. But that's what we did. We chose the #18 because we knew it would be at least partly scenic, and because one of the endpoints was pretty close to our apartment. I thought it would take longer, but the ride took all of 48 minutes to get from one end to the other. (Other lines seem to run a little longer, but still only about an hour or so. I guess Prague is a pretty small city.)
These are just a few shots from our ride, but you can see the entire set on flickr in chronological order (you'll see how we went from suburb to city to middle of nowhere, and also notice how the tram gets crowded, then thins out again, as we go in and out of the city center).
Done! We did, however, nix the champagne in favor of beer (we are in the Czech Republic, after all).
We went on an hour-long ride, and I think it was just the right amount of time. Too long and I might get bored. It happened to be a rather cloudy, muggy day, so it was nice to be out on the water and get some fresh air. Things we saw:
Prague Castle in the distance
Check out this little panoramic video of Hvar, the island we stayed on in Croatia. Breathtaking, right? BONUS: Leon in his I'm Vacationing In Paradise outfit.
