Two beers

One of the luxuries of travelling alone and being quite disorganised is that rapid and frequent changes of itinerary aren’t particularly problematic. A fortnight ago, I was hellbent for Odessa. Last week, it was all about Albania. I’ve now realised that it would be folly not to detour to see my Pilsen contact for the first time in a couple of years. To get to Pilsen, near the German border of the Czech Republic, I need to go to Prague and to get to Prague from Budapest on the train, well, there’s Bratislava or Vienna. I’ve been thrilled by the new on many occasions but on this one, the lure of all that imperial regalia and secessionist art and gluhwein and late nineteenth century intellectual angst and goulash is impossible to resist. So Vienna it is, and from thence to Pilsen, home of pilsener beer, and onwards to Ukrania.

Treading this path, I am aware, will require some fortitude. My Pilsen host is a beer connoisseur of note and all of his emails have ended with some reference to the beers that will be consumed on our reunion. I need to toughen up so it’s goodbye, bellinis and champagne and martini bianco, hello, beers of Mitteleuropa.

Exhibit A
Lasko of Lasko
Union (pronounced ooo-nion) is the beer that is brewed in Ljubljana but I vastly preferred the Lasko, brewed in the wee town of Lasko. I randomly met a woman from Melbourne and even more randomly wound up carousing till the small hours with her newly discovered Slovenian cousins in Ljubljana and they all agreed, Lasko is far superior.

Exhibit B
Dreher of Budapest
One of the reasons Budapest is called the Paris of the East is, I suspect, because of the proliferation of long and endless boulevards which invite endless strolling. Just one more block. Just until we reach that square up there. No, let's keep going to the next one. (That's my internal monologue keeping me company there.) Not too many blocks away from where I’m staying is a fine establishment called the Zappa Caffe and there they serve all manner of drinks, including Dreher Classic, brewed in Budapest.
I drank this surrounded by airbrushed portraits of Frank Zappa, listening to De La Soul. I didn’t actually realise that these glasses hold half a litre of beer until I had drunk two of them and ordered another one and a Zappa salad. Gosh. I wondered, could there be anything more psychedelic than a Zappa salad? A salad with paprika! Hot Rats!


In France, you can order a gallopin of beer, which is a 100ml glass which would actually look quite like a thimble next to a Hungarian glass. Here, I haven't seen beer served in any vessel smaller than 500ml. Hmmm.

Mythic

One of the pieces of folklore which attaches itself to Ljubljana is that the city was founded by Jason, he of the Argonauts, who did here smite a dragon. Hence the dragon of Ljubljana Castle, down the stairwell of whose tower you can peer here –- and the dragon of the dragon bridge.

I left Slovenia this morning, catching an train from Ljubljana to Budapest. Nine and a half hours in a carriage moving slowly through the mountains and plains of Slovenia and Hungary, in which apple trees and haystacks feature prominently, did nothing to shake my conviction that long train trips are Good For The Soul. I shared my compartment with a chatty Slovenian curtain saleswoman on her way to a trade show for an hour and then later in the day with a young Hungarian couple more interested in each other than me or the scenery. I read a very out of date New Yorker and a book of short stories by Lorrie Moore, Birds of America, bits of which I really loved. I also took several pleasurable snoozes. A good thing I do enjoy train trips as they are likely to feature prominently over the next few weeks.


Anyway, I bid farewell to Slovenia with a photo of the first Slovenian town I stayed in, Piran. Piran is located but an hour away from Trieste and is conspicuously scenic, being possessed of hundreds of boat moorings and many old churches. Alas, like many conspicuously scenic and indeed perhaps charming seaside towns, it is swarming with tourists. If you need proof that not all French and Italian people are tall, willowy, cultured, well-mannered, well-dressed and under-thirty, go to Piran.

I last glimpsed the sea in its Adriatic incarnation in Piran. I will next lay eyes and perhaps dip toes in the great briny either in Albania or the Ukraine. For now, I'm landlocked in Budapest and trying to work out how best to pun on my being in Hungary.

Not a Facebook group

It's really tempting to turn this into an occasion to wax lyrical about the many charms of Ljubljana and to detail the quirky path that I followed involving black pudding which ended in my making this important discovery.
I think the significance of a Society for the Recognition of Sautéed Potato and Onions as an Independent Dish (SRSPOID) is self-evident.

B-grade

This looks like an upscale vanilla tart, doesn’t it? One of those quirky classics reworked and dusted with icing sugar and served as some kind of nostalgia dessert?This is, in fact, a picture of a kremna snezna rezina, a specialty of the spectacularly beautiful consequently tourist infested mountain town of Bled in Slovenia. With due respect to the culinary heritage of the Julian Alps, I wished to God that I hadn’t ordered it as soon as I saw it and once I had polished the lot off, deeply regretted doing so. The snezna rezina is pretty much what it looks like: a whipped custard (vanilla) layered with whipped cream (more vanilla) held together by flaky, crumbly sheets of pastry. The only thing that really captured my interest was the question of how they had sliced the pastry without the custard and cream oozing everywhere. Not bad, just, well, let’s call it a vanilla essence rather than a vanilla bean experience.

Fortunately, I didn’t go to Bled for the pastries, I went for the views. The thing that one does in Bled is hire a rowboat, row to the island, and ring a bell. I wanted to get far away from the alarming number of middle-aged folks from some godforsaken provincial British town wearing tracksuits and ‘just retired!’ smiles and flapping and yapping and moaning so I chose to walk around the lake instead.
As I walked, I got to thinking about just how good the good old vanilla slice can be. Custard which is so cheery and sweet and yellow that you forget how gelatinous it must be in order to hold fast as it does. A really thick and shiny veneer of bright pink icing, more sugar and cheer. Pastry (usually, I suspect, the leftovers from making the sausage rolls) whose only purpose is to aid the transport of the custard in the form of the vanilla slice into a paper bag to which the icing inevitably sticks and out of the bakery. I’ve never seen a vanilla tart eaten with a fork but there’s merit in the idea given that they collapse as soon as they are bitten into. Ah, culinary nostalgia. I’ve been out of Sydney for almost six months and clearly, a little homesickness is starting to nibble.


And how could I forget the autumn colour?