Trip update

Thoughts

Several important developments have taken place on my trip. It pains me to even write it, but let’s get the worst out of the way first. The most unfortunate news is this: my beloved camera is dead. Like an angry god the Atlantic ocean in its utter cruelty has decided to devour it. On the idyllic island of La Gomera in the Canary archipelago a treacherous wave sneaked on me from behind. Some drops of water got onto my camera. But salty water, as I now know all too well, is deadly for electronic microchips. And so several seconds later the life of my camera was over. Trying to dry it did not help. I sent it to the repairs shop and the verdict has already been pronounced to me. Cheaper to buy a used body than to salvage this one with uncertain results. Ah my wonderful 5D Mark II, I will love you forever.

It was a strange coincidence that when our small plane was landing in La Gomera, I had this distinct feeling that my trip is nearing its end. La Gomera is so remote and so rugged that it really does feel like the end of the world. Little did I know that this little island really would spell the end of something I so treasured.
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Sardinian delicacies

Food, Italy

The Italian food is the best food in the world, and every province boats of a range of delicacies that would make a randomly chosen country proud. In this context Sardinia is no gastronomic champion, and yet it also does possess some articles of culinary pride. I must say right away that the craziest Sardinian foods were nowhere to be found despite our best efforts. These are: 1. casu marzu, the maggot cheese which features live insect larvae that jump up from time to time to threaten your eyes as you eat; 2. the snails that are borrowed underground for half a year, become fashionably rancid and then eaten in this form; 3. the sea urchins that are added to pasta and eaten in season in fishermen’s traditional restaurants. As far as I understood, the maggot cheese is nowadays illegal – you can imagine all kinds of health norms that it breaks – and so you can only buy it from under the carpet. It would not stopped me most likely – but the occasion did not present itself. Some other exotic dishes were tried though!

This account of Sardinian food is in the traditional Italian order of serving, from antipasti to pasta and pizza to main dish to the dessert.

Antipasti
In a small place on a side street in Cagliari we noticed a chance to enjoy a selection of local specialities with a choice of local wines. For me of course the mushrooms topped the list. But also ricotta fume with plum marmalade was remarkable, as well as the thinly cut pork cheeks and wonderful Sardinian casizolu cheese. There are three main sorts of red wine in Sardinia – these are cannonau, monica and carignano. This particular glass is of cannonau.

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Trip around Sardinia

Italy

Of the big European countries Italy is the one that I have explored the most. For a casual visitor, Italy is a wonderful country. The art and the history are top of the world, the food is peerless, the people are friendly and characterful, the language is beautiful. (It is a different story if you decide to live in Italy.) With this appreciation for Italy, I have now been almost to every single province. The only two places missing from my collection were the two islands – Sicily and Sardinia. And so this time it was Sardinia’s turn.

Sardinia is actually quite a large island. Yet it cannot be considered particularly dense in the cultural sense. Although it can boast of traces of one of the oldest European civilisations – the so-called Nuraghi culture – most people come here for a beach holiday. Sardinian beaches are considered the best in Italy. I am not a beach person but I can say with certainty that visiting local beaches without a car is an exercise in futility. Using public transport you get to the beaches that are full of people and consequently lack any charm to speak of. Only in a car would you have a chance to discover a true pristine beauty.

As we don’t drive, our options to travel around Sardinia were trains and buses. This is not a very practical solution, as the public transport is scarce and difficult to plan, but it does get you to the most important points. I will describe the places visited in a logical order (though our actual route was a bit more complicated): Cagliari – Villasimius – Oristano – Sassari – Alghero.

Cagliari (the stress is on the first syllable) is the megapolis of Sardinia, all of 150 thousand people! Several wonderfully charming streets around Piazza Yenna on warm summer nights would be occupied by the locals sitting in street side cafés. An atmosphere of celebration would truly make it feel like a centre of the island. From there you take a steep stairs to get to the old town of Cagliari, located of course on the hill which controls the surroundings. From the top of the Elephant Tower – which guards the town gates – you get a fantastic view of all Cagliari:

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Umbria

Italy

I don’t have any hope that the reader of this blog could possibly follow all my movements. Particularly in the recent months in Europe they have become seemingly stochastic, although of course there is a reason for everything. I flew from Belgrade to Rome with the plan to reunite with friends. As is the Roman custom, our common Roman friend escaped the August heat and pollution of the capital in favour of the wonderful Umbrian countryside. We followed in her stead.

The house of our friends is located at the very end of the village, up on the hillside. This strategic position allows a gorgeous view of the countryside as well as the old castle that stands on a neighbouring hill dominating the surroundings. The castle though no longer belongs to the historical family owners. Some years ago a rich signora had bought it and now she spends the waning days of her old age in the house on the hill. Our revolution-minded friend shared with us the plan for workers to get rid of the signora once and for all and to claim the castle! So far the implementation lags behind the planning though, perhaps due to the heat.

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Belgrade, my love

Serbia

I am in love with Belgrade. It is my favourite city in Europe. I can’t believe I haven’t even been to Belgrade before this summer. And yet as I could not resist its draw, I visited it already four times since. The fatalistic calm and the explosive emotionality, the Eastern European familiarity and the Balcan exotic, the incredible energy and the melancholy. I am not surprised in the least that Lonely Planet would pick it as the number one party capital of the world. This doesn’t matter to me much as I rarely go to clubs – it is rather a symptom, an expression of this special atmosphere of freedom that rules this place. I did go to a club in Belgrade and what a visit it was. I love this place.

I’ve already written about Belgrade the first time I came here but I just feel like devoting another post to it. Bric-a-brac of photos that are full of memories.

The geography of Belgrade starts from the basic circumstance of geography. It sits at the confluence of two rivers: the Sava flows here into the Danube. It is the Danube that is of course the bigger of the two, and yet the Sava is the one which forms Belgrade, dividing it into two and yet uniting the two halves. The famous bridges of Belgrade, starting with the Brankov bridge, cross the Sava. The historical centre is on the East bank of the Sava, whereas the New Belgrade is on the West bank.

Further North West is the famous suburb of Belgrade called Zemun. The border between the Austrian and the Ottoman empires once ran here. In those days Belgrade was the Northernmost Turkish settlement, whereas Zemun was the Southernmost important settlement in the hands of the Austrians. Hence Zemun’s very special character. It feels like a Croatian town, or any other Central European, rather than a Serb.

Here is the view over Zemun from one of its vantage points. The broad river is the Danube and the Belgrade centre can be seen in the distance. The Sava flows into the Danube from the right, it is hidden here by the green mass of the Great War Island.

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Zagreb

Croatia

My trip around the Balkans exceeded all my expectations in terms of its twists and turns. Right now I am yet again in Belgrade – for the fourth time this summer, never having been here before! I don’t even know where to start describing this complicated web of movements. The previous post was about Skopje, for which I only had half a day due to a bus that broke. I was to leave Skopje early next morning, and when I say early, I mean early. After a sleep of 1.5 hours, at 3.15 am I was waiting in a tunnel next to the bus station for a minibus to the airport. Early flight to Zagreb!

To move abruptly from Skopje to Zagreb is akin to being woken up from a dream. From the crazy dream of the Balkans you jump into the bourgeois coiffed reality of the European Union. As my friend-Balkanologist would say, Croatia is no Balkans at all. Zagreb is a measured city with friendly people. No tourists almost, as all the tourists in Croatia head for the coast. As I was getting out of a tram in Zagreb, an elderly man suddenly and spontaneously grabbed my bag to help me get out. I was shocked – this has never happened to me in any other place in the world. The centre of Zagreb though is already ruled by the European neutral detachment, correct but uninterested service. The prices also correspond to an EU capital.

The spirit and geography of Zagreb reminded me very much of my native Tallinn. It is also composed of two towns, an Upper Town on a hill and a Lower Town down below. Just like in Tallinn, Gradec and Kapitol used to be enemies and now form an indivisible ensemble.

The view from Gradec towards Kapitol and the Cathedral, the undisputed focus of the city space.

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Macedonian Disneyland

Macedonia

Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, was on my list of must-see places. I headed there from Ohrid on a regular bus. But we are in the Balkans, so on the road the bus broke down, in the afternoon heat we waited for a replacement bus, so instead of three hours as declared the trip took over five. On arrival in Skopje I now had less than half a day to see it. I hastily checked in into a random hostel by the bus station and run to see the city.

The first thing I saw were the bridges over the Vardar river. Each one of them was decorated – I would even say crowded – with incredible number of statues of all kinds of famous and less famous characters.

Мост Око, the Eye Bridge:

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Wonderful Ohrid

Macedonia

On a sunny early morning in Pristina I took a bus bound for Skopje, or Shkupi, as the Albanians would refer to it. Of course the bus was late to Skopje – which is the rule rather than an exception in the Balkans, hence I had programmed it into my planning. In the fifteen minutes left until the next bus to Ohrid I managed to exchanged money, buy my ticket and even drink some coffee with characteristic Macedonian pastry.

I’ve been told more than once that travelling around the Balkans with a car is madness. Basically I must agree that it’s rather impractical, as your own car does make things an order easier and permits you to visit many out-of-the-way places otherwise too hard to reach. And yet with intelligent planning also the public transportation actually allows you to do quite a bit. My blog is one evidence of that.

I arrived in Ohrid in the afternoon, moved in to a room I’d booked a day before and immediately went for a walk around town. Ohrid is located on the shores of a wonderful lake. Let me start from the views of Ohrid as seen from the Car Samoil Castle. Direction South, the Old City:

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One day in Kosovo

Kosovo

Initially a visit to Kosovo never figured in my Balkan plans. But as it happens, and especially as it happens in the Balkans, the route took on a life of its own. I was researching ways of getting from BiH to Macedonia (the only country I hadn’t yet visited in the Balkans). Gradually it became clear that the only route that made sense had to go through Kosovo. And suddenly I realised that I was simply obliged to stay in Pristina for a day and to see what it’s all about. What is Kosovo anyway?

Apart from the obvious – the war with Serbia – my only association with Kosovo was the presence of a legion of international workers, as well as various horror stories in the press about Kosovo mafia, going all the way to human organ trafficking.

But Pristina met me with tranquility and silence that immediately confounded my stereotypes. On a hot day the main Pristina pedestrian thoroughfare looks like any other broad and empty street anywhere in the world eaten by the scorching sun at a random midday:

A paradox: the main boulevard of a resolutely Muslim country bears the name of a Catholic nun. The favourite game of recent statehoods is fighting for the building blocks of identity. Malaysia fights Singapore and Indonesia for batik and chilli crab. In the Southern Balkans it is Mother Theresa who has become an apple of discord (as if there weren’t apples of discord enough). She was born in Skopje to an Albanian mother and an apparently Aromanian father, himself born in what is now Kosovo. Who owns her? In the Balkans – everybody! And so she gets the main boulevard of Pristina named after her, and her statue graces a tiny park in the middle. Two likenesses of Ibrahim Rugova, considered here the Father of the Nation, flank both ends of the boulevard, lest you forget who really controls the place.

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Sarajevo

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Three main reasons the world has heard of Sarajevo are:
1. The murder of Franz Ferdinand which started the First World War;
2. The Winter Olympics of 1984;
3. The epicentre of the war in Bosnia, the site of the infamous siege, which was lifted only after the NATO bombings in 1995.

Sarajevo today appears a peaceful yet exotic place swarming with life. In a word, Sarajevo is unique.

Welcome to the Pigeon Square, the centre of the historical Ottoman area of Baščaršija, where the touristic nerve centre of the city lies:

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