Food & Shopping
One of the salient pleasures of travel is sampling the local foods. Despite mild trepidations about a meat-heavy diet, I was curious to try Eastern European food. In Budapest the food tasted great but was often counterbalanced by rather poor table service. At some of the less touristy places, English menus were hard to come by so we took to just pointing at stuff. We were occasionally charged for bread, which surprised us because we were used to bread being a freebie, although the cost of bread was always trivial (about a dime per loaf). Grocery stores seemed to have roughly the same assortment of food that one would expect to find in the US. Brasov has a panoply of local restaurants that are are reasonably priced and tourist-friendly. Although there was little else to see and do there after the first day, we were certainly not bored by the restaurant scene in this little town. In fact, it would put any American town of comparable size to shame in a heartbeat. In Plovdiv the food was thrillingly cheap and the open-air farmer's market delightful. We discovered tasty new fruits whose names we learned only through sheer happenstance. There was a fruit expert at our hosted and he identified them for us as Chokeberries and Cornelian cherries. Although we ate a lot of different things in Istanbul, my memories are dominated by two items in particular that we ate repeatedly: lahmacun (Turkish pizza) and baklava. I was always amused by the fact that "vegetarian" lahmacun inevitably tasted like lamb!
One of the other popular activities while travelling is trawling for bargains and souvenirs. Because we had to carry everything on our backs, I wasn't inclined to acquire anything large or heavy but it was hard to resist picking up a few little things. I was delighted to find a pair of pants in Plovdiv that fit me perfectly and cost only $15. And while we were at the monastery near Plovdiv, I bought a jar of locally made marshmallow paste. In Istanbul I found a jar of chilli-infused nut-butter that proved to be delicious and I'm now struggling to pace myself so I don't consume the entire thing at once. In Istanbul I ended up with a t-shirt that says "Istanbul" in a font that looks a lot like Arabic.
