Sl(ov)ak(i)a

I knew Slovakia was a bit different from the other countries we have visited, because it never really had a separate existence as a country prior to WWII. It was brought into Czechoslovakia because the languages are very similar, but the cultures were not and they never really got on that well. The Czechs have always been very westward looking, but the Slovaks not so much.

The Slovaks seem to have been much less perturbed by Soviet rule than most of the old Warsaw Pact, perhaps because they'd never really had self-rule before, and the Soviets let them be their own Slovak Republic inside the Czechoslovak one. So the Soviets were better in some ways than their previous rulers, who tried to make the Slovaks into Czechs or Hungarians.

The thing is huge – the statue on top is 5m high alone

It's the only place we have seen which still has Soviet iconography up on pubic monuments. You can actually see hammer-and-sickle motifs and red stars, even in the centres of towns (often with the original inscriptions removed, so not exactly glorifying, but they haven't scrubbed out the period entirely). The photo above is from Bratislava overlooking the town, and is a memorial to the Soviet liberation. It is massive, which is perhaps why they haven't got rid of it.

Because the Slovakian cities didn't grow much prior to WWII, the Soviets needed to build a lot of housing as the country folk moved in to be in the new industrial factories that the Soviets loved so much. That means that outside the small inner cities there is a massive ring of Soviet era apartment blocks. Most town Slovaks have to live in one, because they completely dominate the housing stock.

Unlike most of the Soviet bloc, the local Communists decided that it would be cheaper to stick to only a couple of building plans, and they really went to town on repeating them. Whole suburbs are the same block of what are called panelaky or panelovy (since they are built of prefabricated panels). At least they seem to have been built rather better than the average Soviet tower block, and have not started to crumble too badly.

Across the river from old Bratislava

The modern Slovaks have done what they can to minimise the damage to the visual environment. They have renovated most of them, and when doing so painted them in a mix of colours and schemes, which does a surprisingly good job of hiding their uniformity. Individually the strength of some of the colours seems odd, with strong pinks and oranges in particular, but the overall effect is as good as can be expected, and a vast improvement over dirty concrete.

The blocks were also generally built back from the road and with decent space between them (this was always the ideal, but in so many places money concerns over-rode common sense). In Slovakia those spaces now have lots of mature trees, which improve the look amazingly. Despite the uniformity of the buildings, it was quite hard to take a photo of the sort I could take easily in Romania or Belgrade, with block after block the same, because the trees shielded them.

The are exceptions, however. In quite a few towns the Soviets decided to build a series of blocks on a hill over town. No amount of trees can hide them looming over the town, and they must have been much worse in the original plain concrete.

Also in smaller towns the apartment blocks built on the outside sometimes end precipitously at the end of town, leading to a wall of them as one approaches.

The lack of infrastructure in the cities extended to administrative buildings. So the Soviets got to build lots and lots of town halls, universities and "houses of culture" as the towns expanded. That gave lots of opportunities for Alison and me to see some more of "Slaka".

The Slovakian buildings are far less grandiose and peculiar than the Romanian or Belgrade version, but they retain the essential parts of "Socialist Realist" style, and that's all good with us.

Touristing in Slovakia

After a few weeks in Italy and Austria, we're back in the old Soviet Eastern Europe. We've just finished a flying tour of Slovakia and are into Czechia.

Slovakia a nice place to visit as a tourist, although with its own peculiarities. On the plus side, they use the Euro, and prices are relatively cheap. The amount of English is patchy, but most of the tourist places have enough to get by.

The towns often had periods of decent wealth in the late Middle Ages and after the 30 Years War, and were on trade routes which brought them the latest techniques as well as styles. It then lost it as they, alongside eastern parts of Poland and Hungary, went into relative decline. They were largely spared the bombing of much of WWII. That means that all the old towns are remarkably compact and intact, built in recognisably European, mostly German, styles.

Bardejov, from the Cathedral tower

Many of them, other than the much larger Bratislava, are built around a sort of very wide main road, with the cathedral and town hall in the centre, so which effectively is also the town square (as in the picture above). You can see most of the interesting parts in quite a short walk as all of them are either on this main "road" or a street directly off it.

Even better, the old inner cores have all been either pedestrianised, or make using cars so difficult that few bother. That means you can walk the centres very pleasantly, with less noise and without being constrained to sidewalks.

The museums have been quite patchy, with some good and some not so good. Fortunately they are all cheap, so even the less good ones weren't so bad. They all close on Mondays, however, which was annoying when we turn up to Bardejov and couldn't get in to what promised to be quite a good town museum.

Getting to the smaller towns, however, isn't easy. The main cities of Bratislava, Košice and Prešov are on regular train connections, but after that we had to plan quite carefully, and make lots of interconnections to get to the smaller ones. The trains are quite well set up in terms of the connections, but the stations aren't very good about telling you which platform and intermediate destinations. We ended up taking the wrong train out of Slovakia as a result, because it turns out the "Prague" train runs two different routes – and we got the wrong one. It wasn't a huge deal, but it did waste two hours as we make a very circuitous tour to get to Ostrava.

Because Slovakia is quite small, the distances aren't huge, but we still stuck with public transport They are constructing motorways all across the place, but as yet don't even have one that runs the length of the country. Off the motorways driving involves narrow roads and negotiating frequent rural vehicles, so just didn't seem very relaxing. In five years when the motorways finally link up, I suspect driving will be a good option.

The main keep at Devin Castle

It's a good place to see untouched medieval stuff. Quite a lot of castles and old town walls survive outside the main cities, because in the period when they tended to be demolished the area was a military and economic backwater.

Devin Castle is on a Bratislava city bus route, fortunately for me, so we did get to that one – and it's a beauty. We also toured across to Nitra, to see what is one of the most disappointing castles I've ever been to (although the church was quite nice). After that the castles proved too difficult because they are out in the countryside and transport doesn't connect well, so we largely stuck to the cities and towns, with their city walls and old buildings.

For the same reason we never got to see the famous wooden churches which survive – they're even more remote.

Slovakia was also interesting for its slightly different route under Communism, but I'll cover that in a day or so.

Cheap Eastern European Wine

Alison and I have some wine most evenings at home, so we have done the same on our travels in the Balkans. As at home, generally but not exclusively dry reds, and not expensive.

Everywhere has had decent selections in the supermarkets, as they all have pretty relaxed licensing laws, both in price and variety. We've tried to keep to local wines to the country we are in, and where possible local varieties that we wouldn't get at home. That means excluding the shelves of cheap Italian and Spanish that you see everywhere. Also Jacob's Creek, which it appears has made a big name for itself in this part of the world. There has been some NZ wine too, but not a lot.

That means we've tried Frankovka Modra, Svätovavrinecké, Refošk and a whole lot of other varieties I can't remember. They've mostly been pretty good, fairly hearty if unsophisticated.

But mistakes have been made!

This is in Montenegro, this is six euros for five litres

We haven't bought anything truly nasty, because we have minimum as well as maximum prices. Five litre containers of wine rather too closely resembling cooking oil have not been on our list. While I think the carry-handles are a nice touch, I'm not sure my stomach is up for $2 per litre Riesling.

The bottling conventions, however, have caused issues. Most wine is sold in 750 ml bottles, as at home, but in the former Yugoslav republics they mix these with ones that are a full litre, which lead to buying rather more than I wanted before I learned to check the size carefully.

Quite a lot of the white wine is bottled using different bottling conventions.

I was just about to buy a bottle of the Tramin Cerveny above, when I noticed that it was alongside Chardonnay. Sure enough despite the darkness and shape of the bottles, these are white wines.

Twice I have made this mistake, being so used to red wine in this type of bottle, to a rather rude surprise. Not because it is white wine, because we don't mind, but because in the very warm weather we've been having, warm cheapish white wine isn't quite so pleasant.

I did not know that Merlot came in Rosé. I also didn't know that it came in a sweet red variety. 

In this case being labelled in English we weren't going to fall for buying a sweet when we wanted a dry, but most are not labelled in English. After a rather unfortunate accident of this type, there has been some furious Googling of "sweet" and "dry" in order to avoid a repeat.

Provided we carefully check we are buying what we think we are buying, it has been good though.

The beer is much more reliable. The default is always a lager of some sort, sometimes a Pilsner, which suits us fine. Often it's cheaper than soft-drink.

Famous sites in Italy

We did four day trips to the most famous tourist cities: Florence, Venice, Pisa and San Marino.

Florence was first. The "sights" were crazy busy. We flagged looking inside the Duomo (Cathedral) because the queue was too long, especially in the heat.

The queue down the side of the Duomo, (this photo starts 100 m back in the queue) 

Oddly, once you wandered away from the main areas the crowds thinned out to almost nothing. Instead of a queue and paying a small fortune to climb the Duomo for the view we wandered across to the other side of the river. We took in some Renaissance gardens and then the Belvedere fortress which, as its name suggests, has excellent views of the city. It was only a couple of Euros, and was virtually empty, so much better value than climbing the cathedral (also, of course, the most important thing in the view is the cathedral, so being on it kind of spoils it).

We did visit the Uffizi Gallery, if only to see what the fuss is all about. We went late in the day, because Alison hoped it might be less crowded, but it was absolutely chocker. Thirty minutes of queuing, followed by 10 minutes of security and shuffling in, to a museum packed full even before the tour groups came and blocked everyone.

Pisa has a lovely cathedral and baptistry to which the famous tower is attached, which is where everyone goes. Once you wander away from that it, and the main street leading there, it too is quiet. It turns out that Pisa has almost all its medieval city walls, which was a nice surprise.

We did San Marino from Rimini. It's a funny wee town, perched on a ridiculously steep mountain, but a nice place to visit for an afternoon.

One thing that did annoy me about San Marino, and all of Italy really, was their city museum. In most of Europe we have visited so far the towns divide their museums into quite distinct categories. These usually are ethnographic, archaeological, art, specialist, regional and city museums, and they stick more or less to their area of specialty.

The city museums are the ones I like, because they usually have quite a lot of detail about the history of the city to explain what we could see about us – why the city had been settled, what it traded in, when and why and where it expanded.

But in Italy, history museums are prone to becoming art and archaeological museums. So the San Marino city museum, had almost nothing about the history of the city. What it had was various art and antiquarian works made or owned by city members, many of really quite low quality. You could have told from the museum that San Marino had a Communist government for a few decades after WWII, for example.

Many of the other cities we were in didn't even have city museums. They had five or six art museums of different sorts, but nothing about their histories. You can even see the incredible focus on art with things like the Wikipedia articles on their churches, which often give a very brief history, a bit about architecture and then extensive details about the sculptures and paintings inside.

The leaning tower of Venice. Not so famous.

Finally Venice. I have never really wanted to go to Venice – and this despite owning several books on its history – because I feared it would be all crowds and gondolas and tourist tat. I persuaded Alison and Matilda that we should go there via the lagoon and its islands (specifically, Chioggia, Palestrina and Lido). They were interesting in their own right, although far well less known. But importantly that meant we approached Venice proper from the sea side first. It was a good decision, as the approach gave a much better sense of the city than you get from being entirely on the land.

The approach was like dozens of films and documentaries I must have seen of it. The buildings themselves were like the hundreds of photographs and Canaletto paintings I've seen. It had an amazing familiarity for a place we've never been to.

It was very crowded and was full of tourist shops, but nonetheless we enjoyed it.

Whereas "Florence" is really just a few buildings and piazzas with art galleries, and "Pisa" is really just one square, "Venice" genuinely is the entire city – and it is larger than I had realised from the (many) maps of it I have seen. Even wandering quite small back streets there were interesting and picturesque things to see and they were of a piece – whereas you don't have to wander far off the main sights and Florence is not remotely the medieval city of the tourist part.

I'm glad we went, but I'm also glad we only did it as a day trip (and half of that getting there via the lagoon).

Northern Italy

We've spent the last couple of weeks travelling around some of the towns of northern Italy – Trieste, Livorno, Rimini, Padua and Treviso. Not the usual haunts of tourists (except Italians).

Milan and Turin are too damned large to stay in, so we have avoided them. The other big names – Florence, Pisa and Venice we did as day trips because they are much more expensive, and we could cover what we wanted in a day fairly easily.

The towns we have been in are nicely different in small ways. Rimini is really just a beach town, with a huge strip for dozens of kilometers of hotels along the beaches. Along with the Lido outside Venice it really invented the sea bathing and beach holidays we take for granted today.

Being European beaches they are largely umbrellas along the sea front, but what I haven't really seen before which was (very popular) courts for beach volleyball, beach football and beach tennis in private beach areas.

Rimini seafront

Padua and Treviso, which are quite close to each other, are old walled towns full of arcades and cobbled streets and surrounded by river moats but still manage to be different. Padua is much bigger and was much wealthier, so has much more extensive walls and is packed with absolutely enormous churches, with loads of important relics.

Side view of Padua's Basilica, which is absolutely over the top, inside and out.

At the back, behind the trees is a side chapel for all the relics.

Treviso, doesn't have canals or rivers used for navigation like the rest, but has lots of water flowing through that seems to have been used for mills and power.

Trieste is Italian now, but resembles the cities of the Dalmation coast on which it is situated in most ways. It was also, surprisingly full of brutalist architecture.

Montegrisa pilgrimage chapel on a hill outside Trieste, 

which we made our own little pilgrimage to, albeit an architectural one.

Livorno is quite small and cut by wide canals, and definitely won't become a major tourist destination (we struggled to even find the entrance to the nice "old fort" because it was completely unlabeled and you have to walk through the industrial port to get to it). It does have some beaches popular with locals though, and was always intended largely as our base for Pisa and Florence anyway.

So that's where we've been staying. It's been nice being  in smaller towns without the crowds and the omnipresent tourist shops of the big sites. It's also been good to see things that are new and we hadn't heard of before.

Next time the day trips to the places you will know somewhat better.

Thoughts on the Balkans

As we come to the end of the Balkans, I thought I might make some random thoughts on them collectively.

They were good to travel. Cheap, but not nasty. Plenty to see, at least for us, with a nice mix of history, culture and countryside. However, if you stick to the capitals and biggest cities the differences between them are greatly reduced – which is a problem with those Danube river cruises, for example. Most of the cities needed two full days minimum, and often longer, just on the city part.

English has totally taken over as the language of international culture – art exhibitions will be advertised in English alongside the home language even to the locals. Most places had explanations in English, though not universally. In Ljubljana castle the explanation video was in English and you had to get a device to hear it in Slovenian!

However outside tourist spots, language was often an issue. Less so if you know some German (French wasn't a starter). We generally toughed it out, learning how to say "two tickets please" isn't that hard, but you'll lose much of the cost savings if you end up taking taxis rather learn how to negotiate trams and buses if that worries you.

Other than the Dalmatian coast, it's most not very busy. In particular you don't get full of coach loads of tourists just seeing a sight because it's on the list of sights to see, with little interest in the history or meaning of what they are seeing. There are coach tours everywhere, including deepest Bulgaria, but the ones there don't have the milling around while being sorted out, and then ignoring the actual sights, crowds that bug me. (A particular dislike, which has grown in this tour, is for people to stand blocking a busy pathway while they take a selfie. The sight won't be seen properly in the result, because the middle of the photo is taken up by the vapid person. In extreme cases the process can take 10 minutes while they get the perfect shot of themselves. Meanwhile people who actually want to see the sight in question have to wait.)

Some other thoughts

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While people say that there is considerable nostalgia for the Communist period, there is no sign of it visibly. All the pro-Soviet, Russian or cult of personality stuff is gone totally, even if it had to be dynamited out. The less excessive (politically) have merely had any labels removed, so that these enormous statues and monuments remain, but shorn of any apparent meaning.

The ex-Yugoslavs have a few remnants of Tito, but then they were never really Soviet anyway.

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People looked very much like people back home, especially in the bigger cities, with only minor differences in dress style. The middle classes seem to be doing well.

However the poor are very definitely much poorer, judging by clothing, cars etc. Houses and apartments, are still quite small and some of the older stuff rather sub-standard, although the newer ones look nice. The further south the more apparent the lack of money – Bulgaria and to a lesser extent Romania have pockets where money is clearly not plentiful.

However, while money was often obviously a bit short, the cities were mostly clean, once you got past the omnipresent graffiti.  It always felt safe, and people were usually very helpful.

In the countryside the villages were tidy and clean, even if the houses were very little.

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Most graffiti is in English, of a sort, when it isn't merely art or tagging. Much of it is football oriented. (The ex-Yugoslav republics did have some political stuff, some of it rather crude about other groups.)

The deal is, apparently, that when someone puts up "Partizan Army" to indicate that they rather like Belgrade Partizan you cross it out, rather than writing the equivalent of "sucks" afterwards. So you see quite a lot of crossed out graffiti. 

Also, they tend to put up their supporters groups, rather than the club itself, so you see a lot of  "Bad Blue Boys" and "BBB" when you enter Zagreb. Which requires knowing that they are an ultras group for Dinamo Zagreb. 

I think someone likes Hajduk Split! (Spalato is the old Roman name for Split)

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The exception was in Bulgaria and Romania that some of the gypsy areas are really quite squalid. The locals don't particularly like them, associating them with crime and laziness. The governments want them to become "normal" citizens, but they resist. Not many still live in caravans, but they don't particularly settle and live on the margins.

Begging was a big issue until we got to Slovenia and Hungary. Mostly but not exclusively gypsies, and it was often quite brazen – literally walking up to you in the street to ask.

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I'm still getting weird language rubbish on my devices. My computer in Belgrade was deciding that it would load the Google home page in Hungarian, despite having left there, and then was immediately translating it to English (sometimes not very well).

Both of us are getting advertisements in Romanian on our phones. That is because we have Romanians SIM cards – Bulgarian plans were too awkward and the EU forces providers to have decent roaming options. They are usually hard to decipher, but not always:

I particularly like how the ad is in Romanian, but the "Learn More" stays in English. 

Lovely Slovenia

It's raining today, reasonably heavily, so I thought I would catch up on what we've been up to.

Intriguingly, this is the first day that rain has interrupted us at all in three months and is a welcome break from the heat. Too many sunny days in a row have actually made things difficult, because it's so tiring in the relentless sun. What rain we have had up till now has been brief and largely at night and has barely affected our plans.

We've been staying in the two larger cities of Slovenia – Maribor first and then Ljubljana. Both are quite little and there's no way that we could spend four days in each, so we hired a car for half the time to see the rest of the country.

It's ridiculously pretty. The countryside is farmed unless it is very steep, but in a colourful mix of crops and meadows rather than monoculture. The farms seem to be quite small, and have an amazing number of barns and associated buildings scattered around .

There's pretty churches in most villages, castles and palaces are scattered over the place, and the towns have well-preserved old centres.

The couple of "big name" tourist spots are over-full (Bled Castle in particular, but not like Dubrovnik) but because outside of those sights on the package tours, visitors generally come to hike and cycle, so you aren't fighting off crowds. However because some tourists do make it to even the remoter locations, there's almost always instructions and explanations in English, which has been a boon.

Ptuj city centre. Amusingly pronounced "ptooey". Not really, actually "ptwee" listen here

The town centres are German in style now, having left behind the Italian influence on the Dalmatian coast. They are uniformly lovely, but if you've been to Austria it looks very similar. On the outskirts you can sometimes see older dwellings that are clearly more local in origin.

The towns historically were inhabited largely by German speakers, although the surrounding peasantry were overwhelmingly Slovenian. Hitler intended to make much of it part of his greater Germany on that basis, but the effect of that was to prejudice the locals against the German speakers. After WWII meant they either emigrated or started to speak Slovenian (which is a version of Serbo-Croat).

So all in all it's a great place to visit for a couple of weeks.

One downside has been that the locals love drinking coffees, ice-creams and eating cakes at all hours of the day, so there are cafes everywhere, but they don't do light lunches. In the heat we haven't really been that interested in heavy restaurant meals, so lunch has been a bit of a mission at times. A few bakeries do filled rolls, but generally we have had to buy something from supermarkets when we would have preferred a cafe lunch.

Driving to see it all has been a mixed experience. The motorways are fantastic and very quick. The main roads are OK, except that they almost never have anywhere to pull over and enjoy the view or take photographs. If you stick to the main routes between the bigger towns it's fine driving.

But the minor roads are a different story, and the roads get minor despite looking on a map like they should be decent sized. They are invariably narrow but nevertheless busy. We've faced unsealed sections, mountainous hairpins where I have been down to first gear, and blind corners on roads too narrow for two cars. The locals are good drivers, but drive very confidently because they are used to the conditions, and don't like being held up. I'm used to some pretty rough places, from unsealed windy NZ roads and zigzagging up mountains in Switzerland, but this has been unpleasant rather too often for my taste.

Still, if we hadn't hired a car we would have been stuck with the main towns, and the really interesting and different parts have been out in the countryside.