Maribor, Slovenia

In 2018 I took a trip around the Balkans and visited all the countries of the former Yugoslavia - with one exception. I can't quite remember what stopped me going to Slovenia back then. But not to worry, for I have now set things right. I haven't bothered going to Ljulbljana, the capital, which is bigger and presumably more interesting than Maribor, but more importantly chalking off Slovenia means that I've now visited all the countries of Eastern Europe, as the term is generally understood. Naturally there are still many more worlds to conquer.

During my visits to former USSR countries, this blog has often been unsparing in its criticism of Soviet rule. But Yugoslavia was never conquered by the Soviets - they muddled along with their own home-grown dictator, Tito - and so this time it's the turn of the Germans to get it in the neck. The Nazis marched into Yugoslavia in April 1941, and did very bad things, many of which are commemorated in the fairly patriotic Museum of National Liberation here in Maribor. 

After a thousand years since the last meaningful foreign invasion of Britain, and with perhaps a thousand years to come of tedious ditties by Ed Sheeran and Adele dominating the airwaves worldwide, it's easy for us in the UK to disparage any hint of defensive nationalism. We can afford to be complacent about such things when the whole world speaks English. But things can look very differently when, within living memory, your country and culture and even your language has been threatened with extinction. (See museum picture below). There's nothing wrong with smaller countries like Slovenia bigging themselves up, provided it's not at the expense of their neighbours. I enjoyed my visit to the Museum of National Liberation and I don't begrudge them their five-euro entrance fee.

The grub here (see Edd vs Food below) is similar to what you get elsewhere in the northern Balkans, in that it's mostly based around meat (cevapcici), potatoes, bread, and cheese. I'm very fond of all four things, but I have to say that - even for an Englishman - it's all a bit bland. Things improve when you travel further south and the more exotic Ottoman / Mediterranean influences begin to show. But I'm not planning to revisit my 2018 trip. In fact, as I write this, I'm not quite sure where I'm going next. I'm just kind of drifting around central and eastern Europe, without any grand plan or itinerary, and enjoying it enormously. Hope you're all well back home too.

View of the old town from the south side of the river

Looking over the city from the Piramida hill to the north

Nazi leaflet in the Museum of National Liberation (English caption at bottom of pic)

Castle

Cathedral

Fountain in the main square

This is officially the world's oldest vine that's still producing fruit. Over 400 years young.

Edd vs Food #120
Ćuftice (meatballs) with mashed potato and bread.
At Bascarsija, Poštna ulica 8, 2000 Maribor.
 

Bratislava, Slovakia

Bratislava! It's the capital of Slovakia. Which used to be half of Czechoslovakia. The other half being Czechia, which used to be the Czech Republic. Here endeth the lesson.

Bratislava lies on a river which is becoming ever more familiar to me. If I were to put this year's blogs together into a book, it'd have to be called the 'Danubiad'. The journey between Vienna and Bratislava is about as quick and easy as you can get between two capital cities: only an hour or so by bus or train and no need for money changing or border controls. (Slovakia is in both Schengen and the eurozone). The Danube is also an option - you can cross the border by speedboat - but it's a bit more expensive, and I didn't really see the appeal.

Tellingly, when you google Bratislava, one of the suggested questions is: "are 2 days enough for Bratislava?" The answers generally say yes. So that's what people do: they come here for a couple of days, see the castle and the cathedral and maybe a couple of other things, have drinks and meals around the main square, and then leave without ever thinking of returning, having not bothered to learn any of the Slovak language, still less anything about this country or its people or history. I think you can see this reflected in a certain cynicism on the part of the locals, and I think the tourists deserve every eye-roll they get. Did I say 'they'? I of course meant 'we'.

Speaking of rolls, the owners of my latest AirBnB studio apartment earned a bit of a black mark for omitting the most essential of all consumable supplies in the bathroom department. I only discovered this at the last minute, and without going into any detail about the heads of turtles and the touching of cloth, it was a very close call indeed. Fortunately there was a supermarket round the corner where I could stock up.

Would I recommend Bratislava? Only if you're passing, or at least if you're in Vienna and you have a spare day or two. For me Slovakia is just another country ticked off on my slow and steady way to completing Europe. I'm getting cynical in my old age.  

Looking over the main square from the top of the old town hall.
Cathedral at top centre, castle at top right.

Presidential palace

Slavin
World War II memorial on a hill overlooking the city.
The names of the fallen are recorded in their thousands on these plaques.
Similar to the Vietnam memorial in Washington DC.

Spooky statues next to the castle walls

Looking north-west at the city centre from halfway across the bridge.
Castle in the distance. Posh Danube cruise boats in the foreground.

Castle again, this time at night

In the museum: I forgot to make a note of who this is.
Let's just call him King Mincey the Camp.
Ooh, shut that door!

Edd vs Food #119
Bryndzové halušky
Slovakia's national dish. Potato dumplings with sheep cheese, bacon and chives.
In the English-language menus they refer to the dumplings as 'gnocchi'.
At Koliba Kamzik, Zelená 5, Bratislava.

Vienna, Austria

Back on the Danube! It's a direct flight from Moldova to Vienna. For the first time in nearly a month, my sleeping quarters (another studio flat) are not shared with bedbugs. There's only been one cockroach so far on this trip, an elderly one ambling placidly around my Chisinau apartment when I arrived. I squished it humanely and no others appeared. 

On the train from Vienna airport, our arrival time into the Hauptbahnhof was signalled in English as 'three past three'. It doesn't sound quite right, does it? Not for the first time, I very belatedly became aware of a rule that I've been using in spoken and written English for nearly half a century without ever thinking about it. The rule is this: you can only give the time as 'X past Y' or 'X to Y' when X is 5, 10, 20 or 25. Otherwise, we say 'three minutes past three' or 'three oh three'.

Here there is a Sigmund Freud museum, but I never paid much attention to the ideas or writings of Vienna's second-most famous 20th century resident. As to Vienna's most famous 20th century resident, well, the less said about him the better. There is of course a grubby furtive industry of 'dark tourism' where you can go on walking tours and learn all kinds of interesting facts about how a failed landscape painter overcame injury and adversity to succeed in causing 55 million deaths. The Judenplatz square and Judengasse street have been there for many centuries, and the fraktur signs remain in place with the consent of all concerned - there is a Holocaust memorial in the Judenplatz - but still it's hard not to feel your skin crawl when you see the combination of that font and that word, as in the picture below.

And yet, for anyone who prioritises music among the arts, Vienna still represents pretty much the apogee of human civilisation. I've been paying homage to local thinkers such as Hayek and Karl Popper, but mostly it's all about the thrill of walking the streets that Mozart and Beethoven walked. Sadly, having come here at short notice, I've found that the big symphony orchestras and opera houses are sold out long in advance. You can always get tickets to the generic Mozart concerts, but in most cases the advert doesn't even mention what's on the programme. It's just Mozart's Greatest Hits for people who might recognise a melody or two but wouldn't know one piece from the other. At this point my nose goes up in the air an inch or two, and I shall say no more.

The bustling centre of Vienna is not to my taste. Everyone is a foreign tourist. I lost count of how many McDonalds branches there are. And if I'm being completely honest, the castles and palaces just don't inspire me all that much. They're big and stately and impressive and grandiose - all those things - but I couldn't really call them beautiful. It's hard to shake the impression that they were nothing but pointless vanity projects for deluded aristocrats living on borrowed time. All over the world right now, Russian oligarchs and Arab oil sheiks are building similar-sized things, and in time they too will go the way of the Hapsburgs. Hopefully sooner rather than later.

Looking at my pictures below, I can see that I've just taken the same shots as all the other tourists without capturing any real impression of the cultural and social life in this city. I guess I don't like intruding on the privacy of others by taking random pictures in crowded streets or cafés. But in spite of everything I've written above, Vienna is definitely the highlight of my trip so far. I could never share Midge Ure's indifference on this matter.

Belvedere Palace

Hofburg

Lowry-esque view of Schonbrunn Palace, seen from the rear on a cloudy day.

Schonbrunn from the front, on a non-cloudy day

St Stephen's Cathedral

St Charles's Church

The Gothic font is called fraktur and it pre-dates the Nazis by centuries.
Even so...see my comments above.

Writing this blog in my studio flat with a Vienna lager, while my washing dries on the airer.

Edd vs Food #118
Wienerschnitzel on its home turf!
Just like chicken kievs in Kyiv, and KFC in Kentucky.
And Yorkshire puddings in Yorkshire. I've done it all.
For the official authentic genuine Vienna experience, it's served with potato salad, not fries.
The potato salad is more vinegary and moist than the chunky American version we're used to.

Chişinău, Moldova

First things first: the 'h' is in the wrong place. It's pronounced 'ki-shi-now'.

Officially there are 195 countries in the world at the time of writing. (193 of them are in the United Nations, the other two being Palestine and the Holy See.) I've never felt the remotest interest in seeing them all, not even if I won the lottery and retired tomorrow. Undoubtedly there will be many wails of regret on my deathbed, when I get there, but "whither Liechtenstein?" will not be among them. 

That said, I do think it's entirely possible that I'll manage to visit every European country before I pop my clogs. Depending on who you ask, there are between 44 and 51 countries in Europe, so I'm already over halfway there on any measure. I also reckon I'll get round the whole of the former USSR: it contained fifteen Soviet Socialist Republics, and Moldova is my sixth. 

It's the second poorest country in Europe, the poorest being Ukraine, and the border between the two is only about 30 miles away from me as the crow flies. The Black Sea port of Odessa is a short drive to the south-east, and without doubt that would have been my next port of call in ordinary circumstances. But these are not ordinary circumstances and the Russians are bombing the hell out of Odessa right now.

Touchingly, you see EU flags flying around almost every government building, even though (like fellow aspirant Ukraine) Moldova is a very long way from being eligible to join. As for NATO, Ukraine is keen for obvious reasons, but Moldova's military neutrality is enshrined in its constitution. Of course, neutrality didn't stop the Russians marching in here after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1940, and it wouldn't stop them doing it again.

They speak Romanian in Moldova, so I've gained extra profit from the roughly seven minutes that I spent learning Romanian phrases before Bucharest. My favourite Romanian word is beletristica, which means 'literature', and is derived - via German - from the French belles lettres.

I'm a fan of Chisinau. It's clean, safe, and friendly. There's a fairly plush shopping mall which is, inevitably, called 'Malldova'. Speaking of bad puns...they think it's Moldova...it is now! (I'll get me coat.)

Sometimes former USSR countries look how you expect them to look

Government House
The train carriage holds an exhibition about forced Soviet deportations to the gulag.
Needless to say, the Russian government has complained about the exhibition.

Cathedral and bell tower

Birdhouse in your soul
(Valea Morilor Park)

View from the rotunda in the same park as above

Posh gaff (AirBnB as always)

An English breakfast, as imagined by Moldovan fast-food chefs.
Soft cheese on cherry tomatoes is fine, as is the potato cake thing.
I've had those in Belarus and Lithuania.
They're just hash browns by another name and they're very nice.
However that is plainly a hot dog masquerading as a sausage. Epic fail.

Edd vs Food #117
Not too inspired by the local restaurants (see photo above) so here's my home-cooked bangers & mash.
Plus carrots & peas, and also the Bisto that I managed to find in Sofia.
That's a full-sized dinner plate and yes, those sausages are ridiculously big.