cheeeese!

On Sunday we basically woke up, went to breakfast, sent a few postcards, and went back to Hungary.  Neither Györgyi nor I are big sleepers-iners, using waking up before 6am, so the early breakfast at the Hotel Grabovac suited well our fancy.  As you can see, the dining room was packed:

Okay, so it was just us and two Brits.  Right before we finished breakfast, the six Norwegian bikers, donning their finest leather chaps, also came into the dining room.  They were very polite and greeted us and all ate hardboiled eggs and drank tea.  Not exactly the imagine of hard-riding Harley bikers you’d expect, but a pleasant suprise none-the-less.

Okay, so Hotel Grabovac isn’t exactly a culinary paradise, nor a stop on the Croatia foodie hot spot tour.  But the food was warm and free so we weren’t complaining.  You can tell which plate belongs to the American and which plate belongs to the European without me even telling you.  (seriously who eats salami at breakfast but a real Hungarian gal?)

But Györgyi takes foodblogging very seriously and she always tries to get a good pose out of the food anyway.  The upside is that unlike in even Hungarian 5-star hotels that serve powdered orange “juice”, which is like a poorman’s version of Chilly Willie (come on Ohioans, you remember grade school lunch line beverages), Croatia actually served fresh orange juice.  So thank you Croatia.

On our way out of town we stopped for some fresh cheese a guy was selling on the side of the road.  Every region has their road side vendors, and in this part of Croatia it was fresh cheese.  You can see Györgyi handing him 62 Kune more than he asked for, but only because with his accent she thought he said 80 kuna instead of 18.  But he gave it back, something totally remarkable since who would have thought a whole cheese the size of Barnabas would be 18 kuna = 700 forints = $3.40?

We got back to Budapest in the afternoon, partly due to the light traffic, and other partly due to Zsolt launching his Infinity SUV 200 mph down the fast lane for the last two hours.  I had mixed feelings being back in the city, and maybe it’s because I’m starting to get that European city-dwelling mindset of I should be on holiday right now in the country or at the lake or at the sea.  It’s a great feeling and I’m very lucky.  To have friends like Zsolt and Szilvi who so generously took us on this trip, and to the universe in general that has opened up this whole new world to me.