ToDo - Food! (All over Europe) Part 1

It's no secret that I love food. In fact, it's one of my favourite things about traveling. So here is a small collection of my foodies from past travels that I found on my laptop. Each has its own story.

 

 

 

I was in Prague for a weekend trip with a friend and after trying some of the local food, we decided we were not a fan. So instead we went to the Hard Rock Café. We ordered this monstrous starter, after which we both were super stuffed. I cancelled my main to share just one main together. But we could not even finish half of it. Pretty embarrassing, oops.  

 

 

When I was in Sarajevo we basically ate all the time. This was one of the local dishes and it was delicious. We choose the restaurant mostly for it's beautiful tables though.

 

This fish almost jumped directly from the river Bosna onto our plate in the park of the source of the river. And it was amazing.

 

 

 

In Mostar we ordered this dish for two. Either the people there eat a lot or we misunderstood the description. Because really, two more people could have easily be fed by this plate. But of awesomeness no lack!

 

 

 

This dish as a bit of a fail as you can see in the comparison picture. I found it in a very old folder of a new years trip to Madrid in the first year of my bachelor. We were visiting a friend who worked there as an au pair and we ate in the restaurant of a big mall where - apparently - nobody spoke any English. Well, at least it was an adventure.

 

 

 

 

While in Dublin we noticed that chocolate restaurants are the thing there. So of course we had to have our own little messy chocolate fondue dish. YUM!

 

 

 

This dodgy looking thing is one of Scotland's most famous snacks; a deep fried mars bar! Looks terrible, but is not bad at all. But really, just a bit too weird for me.

 

 

 

One of my personal favourites from Leeds. The famous Yo Sushi! sushi platter for 6-8 persons that we always managed to finish with just four of us. Only to be ordered in special occasions (to avoid eating it every week). Just epic and awesome wrapped together in some seaweed.

 

 

 

Another great food moment. To celebrate our graduation we went to eat in the famous vegetarian curry restaurant in Bradford (I think Gordon Ramsay named it the best curry restaurant of England). No meat needed when you have these gems. The cook came out to say hi to us and we got to take pictures with her. The restaurant only has about 40 seats, so a reservation needs to be made way before the night you want to go. But it's worth it!

 

 

This was the lasagne I got during m road trip through France, just after I knocked over an entire jug of water that was on the table of the people next to us. They were pretty unhappy French people I can say (sorry, but I'm just really clumsy).

 

 

This pizza from Genova was so nice that I forgot to take a picture before I started eating. But really, who can resist bresaola? After that followed a spontaneous night full of fake beach parties on the harbour with some cabin crew members that had hilarious dance moves. Oh yes, what a lovely time we had.

 

 

More foodies to follow!

 

HaveBeen: The Journey - The Bus to Prague (Czech Republic)

Once, I did an overnight bus ride from Leeds to Dublin. It was a pretty horrific experience since I did not sleep at all, was nauseous for a full 12 hours and super tired during my whole stay. I promised myself to  avoid bus trips like that form now on. Well, promise broken. 

When one of my friends suggested to do a weekend trip to Prague I soon realized it's pretty difficult to get there from little Luxembourg. Some options were trains + flight, bus + flight or flight + flight. Not only expensive, but also very time consuming. Then I remembered someone told me about a bus that goes directly from Luxembourg to Prague. Some googling did the trick. The company is called The Student Agency and has big bright yellow busses from several European cities to Prague and back.





 The website is: http://www.studentagencybus.com/.

The website looks pretty dodgy, but after some of my friends confirmed it was not a scam, I booked my ticket. The website I used to book my ticket is:

http://czech-transport.com/index.php?id=9505

You can book the same bus ride for the same price, but the website is a bit more professional and their booking system a lot better and easier to use. I got 20 euros discount for being under 26 (there is also a discount for students), so that was nice. The best part is that this bus was not only the cheapest option, but also had very convenient arrival and departure times. I could take it after work and arrive in Prague 9 hours later the next morning.





Also, the bus was really comfortable, with drinks on board, wide seats and a personal television screen for each seat (I watched some pretty good movies while not sleeping). You can choose the movie or tv series you want to watch from quite a good range and a headset is provided to you by the bus company.





There is a steward(ess) present in the bus to ask questions or buy drink from. Both the ones on the trips I did were really friendly and pleasant people, even though they were working all though the night. Hot drinks like tea and hot chocolate are included in the ticket price and the other drinks are really cheap. On the bus you can pay in different currencies.

I had a very pleasant trip both ways, very different than my earlier coach experience. I would surely recommend this way of traveling to Prague (and visiting this lovely city in general). 

P.s. I borrowed these pictures, I was too busy being excited about my trip to take some myself.

    

HaveBeen: CityTrip - Zagreb (Croatia)

If I am honest, Zagreb was my least favorite stop from the Balkan tour. Although that might not be entirely fair. I arrived there feeling absolutely miserable from food posining and spent my first day there just sleeping. The second I spent mosty in a daze, still recovering. Also, the weather was really bad. It rained and it was cold, for which I did not bring the right clothes at all (lesson learned). So we spent most of our time in Zagreb wondering around and drinking tea. Which was not bad at all.

 

 

 Zagreb is quite a nice city, with many restaurants and lunch rooms, but it is quite similar to any big city in Europe. It does not really have the vacation vibe (perhaps the lack of sun contributed to that). Our big plan while being in Zagreb was to visit the Plitvice lake park. This is an absolutely amazing nature park (judging from the pictures) where you can walk around the beautiful waterfalls and lakes. But due to the heavy rainfall we could not go. We were super bummed!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 So instead of going to the lake park we had another day of stroling around and drinking tea. By the afternoon we had the feeling we saw the whole city (and yes, that catherdral tower is fake indeed) and we were pretty sick and tired of the gloomy weather, so we decided to go to the cinema. It was maybe not the most spectacular way to pass the last evening of our trip, but it was surely very relaxing and fun (and really cheap by the way).

 

 

 

 

 

On the last day of our trip we took a small transfer bus to Slovenia because we would fly from there. We spent our last afternoon in Ljubljana before taking another one of these transfer busses to the airport. These busses are really connvenient. We got to choose what time we wanted to leave and from which place we wanted to be picked up, so we could maximize our time in Ljubljana. We were just there for a couple of hours , and the weather was still bad, so we were not able to do a whole lot. But this small citytrip was still a nice end of our vacation.

 

What a lovely trip it was! We did and saw so much in these 11 days, even with our pretty lazy food and drinks schedule. On to the next amazing location!

 

 

 

HaveBeen: Citytrip - Dubrovnik (Croatia)

The next destination of our Balkan Trip was Dubrovnik, in Croatia. To get from Mostar to Dubrovnik you can take a bus that will take about 4 hours and drives a beautiful route along the coast. During the route we passed the border three times and each time a police officer came into the bus to check our passports. Some passports were barely looked at while some were taken at random to be checked at his office. Turns out we were lucky to be able to stay seated, if the officer had had a bad day we all could have been asked to leave the bus and have our passports checked one by one, which of course lasts much longer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We stayed in Dubrovnik for just one night so we booked a simple hostel (one which I would defininitely not reccomend) close to the city centre. After the nice appartments we had in Bosnia this was a dissapointment. I stayed in quite a lot of hostels all over Europe, and I know they really can be better (especially since this one was not even a very cheap hostel). Luckily it was just one night.
We left our things at the hostel and got ready for sightseeing again. As you can see on the pictures, the weather was already pretty bad by then (this was at the time Bosnia and Serbia were being flooded).

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dubrovnik has a lovely city cenre, full of cute norrow streets and small cobble stones (I bet it even looks better when there is sun). You could wander through these Streets for hours, just exploring the many small cafes, shops, old buildings and restaurants. There is definitely no lack of beautiful scenery and lovely views.  

 

 

 

 

The city is for a large part surrounded by the sea, which gives many amazing viewing points. The harbor of Dubrovnik is absolutely great with its many small boats and the view of hills full of white houses with red roofs. You can walk along the water and get some good fresh air or just sit on a bench and watch the waves (which were pretty wild in our case). It's a very peacefull place and I could imagine sitting here for hours, staring at the water or reading a book.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 At night we did not do much more than looking for a nice place to have dinner and drinking a cocktail afterwards. Plenty of opportunities for both. The food here is not as cheap as in Bosnia (and probably not as cheap as in Croatia some years ago), but prices are pretty okay considering that it's a very touristic city. After our cocktail we walked around some more. The city is also pretty lovely by night, it has a really nice athmosphere. It's that kind of athmosphere that sea cities often have, where the sky is very dark and clear, you can see all the stars and smell the sea. All in all, it was a lovely day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The next morning we went out for breakfast. Bad bad choice in my case. I ate a tuna sandwhich that probably had tuna on it that had gone bad. I had an hour or so more to do some sight seeing before it kicked in and I managed to take some Duckioso photos before things started going dowhill.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was unlucky to get sick just several hours before our flight to Zagreb. And I was still sick after we arrived there. That was not a great trip. The only good thing about it was that the flight just lasted 40 minutes. According to our taxi driver it happens a lot that tourists get food poisoning from the food in Zagreb. Especially the fish. So be warned. I will be avoiding tuna for a long long time.