Sunday 11 August 2013

Month 1 in Summary



Greetings from Pula, Croatia. On Friday we celebrated our 1 month anniversary of travelling so I thought I would do a re-cap of the first month of travelling.




Places visited

Italy - Rome, Florence, Pisa, Arcidosso, Bologna, Milan, Turin & Venice
Slovenia - Ljubljana, Bled
Croatia - Zagreb

Favourite places 

Bologna - I think we've already gushed enough about Bologna & don't need to say anymore, ace place.




Ljubljana - just a really cool town with the nicest most helpful people we have met yet (more on Ljubljana soon)


Venice - when we got lost in Venice we found some really nice quiet streets away from all the tourists and hustle & bustle. It was nicer than we could have imagined.


Best bits

Arriving in Bologna and realising straight away that we loved it and wanted to stay longer. The receptionist was getting fed up with us extending our stay every time we saw him

In Slovenia we spent a day at Lake Bled. We sunbathed, swam in the lake and hired a rowing boat, I kept having to look around at how gorgeous the place was it was breathtaking.


I really enjoyed the evening we spent in Venice. We strolled around heading for the quiet area with restaurants on the waterfront. We stopped at a wine shop & filled a water bottle with wine and sat on a bridge drinking the wine for about 30 minutes. We watched the shop owners lock up & drive away in their little boats and massive cruise liners passing at the end of the street. Then we found the restaurant we wanted to eat at and ate really good food. We shared a salad, Russell had pizza & i had the tastiest spaghetti carbonara ever. Obviously finished off with tiramisu & coffee. We sat right next to the water & the view was amazing, I never dreamed we would go somewhere like that while travelling so I felt really lucky that night.



Bad Times

Getting ill in Florence was pretty crap - we'd only been gone 4 days or something so we really didn't want to be wasting days sat inside the apartment, we were still raring to go. At least we learned our lesson early on & we only drink bottled water now.

For the first time in my whole life I got bit by mosquitoes. A LOT. I reacted really badly to them aswell and had to buy special gel from the pharmacy.


Getting fined 60 euros each on the bus in Bologna. That day sucked pretty hard. We had bus tickets but didn't validate them in the machine on the bus, inspectors wouldn't accept our plea of ignorance so slapped us with 120 euro fine if we pay within 5 days - more if we take longer to pay. At first we thought we just wouldn't pay it - what can they do about it if we don't? Well apparently they can do a lot. They had our passport details so we would have got stopped somewhere in Europe and the fine would be a lot higher so we just decided to suck it up & pay it instead of being worried about it for the next few months. It was a right pain to pay it aswell. We had to go to a Post Office in Turin where the staff weren't very good at English. They told us they didn't understand the Italian paperwork - if they don't understand how on earth are we supposed to understand?!


Best thing we ate

Mine was the tagliatelle bolognese in Bologna. I doubt I will ever have bolognese as good as that again (until we go back to Bologna). Russell's was the truffle risotto in Rome. I don't think I've ever seen him as happy with what he was eating (since he stopped eating steak anyway)



















Coming up in month 2

In month 2 we will be spending a week or 2 in Croatia then hopefully going to Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro & Bulgaria - stay tuned!

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