The Flavour of Eastern Europe

So I seem to have fallen a little behind with my blogging over the past couple of days.  I have been a little sick and have therefore been utilising my bus time for sleeping instead of blog writing so I am going to try and catch up and bundle a bunch of Eastern Europe together as evidently its basically all the same food I have discovered!

Who would have thought that my dream would come true of vegies and nutrition! On arrival to Poland our first main meal that was served was pork schnitzel (yep another one) steamed potatoes and coleslaw.  I could have eaten a bucket of that coleslaw and potato as it was so refreshing to have something that was not deep fried, dripping with fat and may have had some nutritional value to it. Another early night to try and kick this cold I have got before heading off to discover Krakow, although we did not realise it was a public holiday in Poland (Corpus Christi, celebrating the tradition and belief in the body and blood of Jesus).  This meant that all of the shops and some museums, including the Schindler museum, were closed as well as what seemed like all day Mass in the town square and castle districts.  This limited what we were able to do and see in Krakow, but it was great to experience the culture and see firsthand how strong the catholic beliefs are in Poland.  We managed to walk around the Jewish quarter and see some amazing history before we needed to have a snack.  I decided to try a hot chocolate and chocolate cake for a little snack.  I was surprised to see that the cake was more like a slice and had an orange taste to it and the hot chocolate was almost undrinkable! The drink is basically pure chocolate and about half a cup of cream.  Apparently this is normal for hot chocolate in Europe, but wow, hello sugar headache. 

We then did a little more site seeing and checked out the castle district with the fire breathing dragon and had some lunch in the town square.  Time for another healthier option so I had salmon with potatoes and steamed vegies which was delicious.  While they were just boring vegies, there were amazing and complimented the salmon well.  It was a little dry, but the lemon gave it a nice freshness and was a delicious lunch. We then spent the afternoon at a salt mine which was something a bit different.  Very interesting to be approximately 400ft below the surface and see chapels, carvings and chandeliers made purely out of salt.  It looked similar to marble sculptures and would love to show you some photos but unfortunately we were unable to take pictures. We also arrived in Poland at the launch of Euro Cup 2012, a European soccer tournament and were lucky enough to stumble across the Netherlands team at the bus parking.  This has got everyone rather excited for the cup and have been watching matches ever since, the only decision we now have to make is who we are going to barrack for.

We had a sombre start to our next day with a visit to the Auschwitz and Burkenau concentration camps.  Having studied this all thorough high school I was very interested in this and words cannot describe the atmosphere that these places still have today.  While the tours are very confronting, I am so pleased that we did this on the tour and certainly brings new appreciations to the world that we live in today.  After a 3 hour tour we were back on the road on our way to Prague.  Once again arriving late at night we went straight to dinner at the hostel before we even unloaded our luggage off the bus.  For entree we had some potato pancakes with tomato sauce and mayonnaise dressing. They were a little rubbery but not too bad and reminded me of a slightly worse version of my Grandma’s mock fish!  For mains we then had a traditional Czech meal with lots of meats to choose from including sausage, pork and chicken with some cooked potatoes and capsicum.  Chicken was a very welcome change to the pork overload I have been having but most of the meat was very salty.  A little disappointed that my salad and vegie stint at Poland was already over, but time to fit in some more soccer watching and watch the home country Czhec v Russia at a local pub where the sunset on the walk was amazing before hitting the hay for a walking tour of the city in the morning.

Prague is a beautiful city and I took the opportunity to relax a little as the pace of the last few days was starting to take its toll.  Relaxing also meant that my food tasting of the local cuisine was out the window and not only did I eat nothing traditional, I also failed to take any pictures of the pasta and pizza that I ate today!  I did manage to check out a few of the sites, including changing of the guards at the castle (which was more exciting than Buckingham palace as I could actually see it this time!) before a small spot of shopping and heading back to the hostel to have a relaxing afternoon as we had quite a night planned where we ended up at a five story night club for some Prague style partying.

Another bus day and we are now in Berlin with a stop at Dresden for a couple of hours.  Very excited to be spending some time in Germany and look forward to updating you on the adventures as our journey is drawing to a close (only 4 more nights with the top deck crew!)

Keep holding your breath people as I will give you a little insight as to what to expect from our first nights dinner...yep you guessed it...SCHNITZEL! xx