I wish all Saturdays were like this….

First, a trip to the farmers’ market, where I wanted to eat every single thing at every single stand, immediately if not sooner. Failing that, taking it all home and eating it there would have also been quite satisfying.

But, alas, one has to be disciplined and make difficult choices. So, we ended up buying and taking home some organic (or ‘bio’ as they call it here) lemons and cherry tomatoes, a loaf of home-made bread, olives stuffed with almonds and seasoned with basil, garlic, pimiento and onion, an unsightly but delicious package of fresh foie gras…. and a dozen oysters! On their shells, there were still some worm-like sea creatures still alive and crawling around, so I guess they were fresh out of the ocean.

Then, after some considerable (and hands-endangering) efforts, the oysters were opened and lunch was served…. outside in the garden, in mid-December.

So, yeah, I am eating well. Southern France, it seems, is all it is cracked up to be, both weather and culinary-wise. 

Be careful what you wish for

by ekaterina (cross balkan blogging)

Before the coffee cup is turned around and your fortune is told, you have to make a wish…. In her infinite wisdom, Yasemin (who also taught me the invaluable lesson to never run while carrying cheese cake) advised me to be careful. “Take your time. To make a wish is a serious thing,” she said.

Now I wait for the magic carpet.

Turkish delights

by ekaterina (cross balkan blogging)

Three of a long list of my favorite things about being in Bodrum:

1.    Eating quail eggs;
2.    Drinking çay;
3.    Talking about twins. :)

finally... sofia!

we managed. to go to sofia and to put this post here.

sofia trip/gathering in the beginning of may was super. nothing less. you can imagine, twins, first on the road trip to treviso (guacamole, good navigation, good driving and much laughing), then fun right away on the airport, eating fast the home made cheesecake before checking the luggage, waiting in line for the turn to be able to try to squeeze the luggage in the measuring box and then waiting again. amazing how long the airport people still call "the last call" call. then the plane. this was a bit less fun fun, since you are so high up and just want to be down again. but with music and sleep it went ok. and then.....then.....ouyeah!! immediately when we saw us, it was trio bevanda team again! this is so great. you know, when you meet someone after almost a year but the vibe is still the same. so much good talking and laughing! super super gathering! and a lot of good food. when we came, for the first night, the grandma (she was cooking all the time and very good) made sarmi. uf. late in the night, after all the excitement of the day, they were just the right thing to have. in general in these days in sofia we ate good and healthy things all the time. really. we also met nice new people; we were exploring the places for lunches and dinners, being in the park looking at people while having šumensko, seeing the country side and checking good places for going out. one of the places to eat that specially stayed in our minds was supa star. great food, nice people, friendly ambient. we had to go there twice. divaka was also a good place because it is opened all the time, so it is a great alternative to pizza, burek  and kebab when you decide to be hungry late in the night. like this, at two in the morning at this place, we were eating different soups (including the vegetable soup in bread cup mmMMMMMm) and salads. sadly no photos from there. too hungry and too "tired". what we also did was visit women market. many things all over, but the reason we were there was turkish restaurant. and on the way there we stopped for a little snack; mmmmmMMMMmikici. one more and very nice thing about the visit in sofia was sitting on the balcony on the 13th floor and looking at the city, with good tea and good conversation.
uf...it was just great. 

we have to say that our host (very very good host) was much better with timing and made review about the trio bevanda sofia gathering already some time ago. you can find it here and here.

favorite cups

 sarmi

first walk

 

banica

 

 supa star

women market

 the view

  

brunch

 

 rilski manastir

 looking at the people

 dinner at home

trio bevanda - spet!/trio bevanda - again!

fejst na hitro tale objava, ampak ker zdej neki časa ni blo nič se mi zdi da je fino. in ni da nismo mele kaj za pisat, lih kontra. trio bevanda se je spet našu! tak da sma ble v sofiji in je blo tolko super druženja, odlične kulinarike in finga sonca, da nismo ble za računalnikom velik. smo pa foto beležle tak da bomo podelile tut tu. za začetek pa tale. :D :D 
very fast but still i want to write this post. there was nothing new posted here for some time now. but it's not that there wasn't anything to write about, the opposite. trio bevanda got together again! we were in sofia and had a lot of great gathering, good food and sun, so we didn't spend a lot of time with computer. we have some photos, so more is coming. but for the beginning, here goes one. :D :D

From Southern India to Southern Europe: Tamil breakfast

by ekaterina (cross balkan blogging)

On my last day in India, I had a very special meal, which I think the two Melinas would have really liked. Everything was quite spicy, including the vada, which looked deceptively like a fluffy doughnut, but was in fact filled with whole peppercorns.

Everywhere I look, I see twins :)

by ekaterina (cross balkan blogging)

My first night in Chennai, India, where I came to visit my lovely friends, we had some Bulgarian red wine called Twins, named after the twin oenologist of the Katarzyna wine cellar, who created this Cabernet Sauvignon. You can read more about the cellar and the twins here. The wine was nice, and I especially liked the Braille inscription on the label.

cross balkan blogging (od malega vrha in ljubljane do sofije/from mali vrh and ljubljana till sofia)

danes smo meline, za naš cross balkan blogging project, spet objavile nekaj na tem jako finem blogu.

today again, for our cross balkan blogging project, we posted something on this really nice blog.

On doughnuts, baby-toy jewelry, body shapes and historical mishaps

by ekaterina (cross balkan blogging)

Recently, I came across a mini-sized, but quite realistic, rubber doughnut, sitting on the table at my house. Most probably left behind by my four-year old nephew during his last visit. Inspired by one of the Melina’s transformation of children’s toys into jewelry, I decided to make it into a necklace and was quite happy with the results.

I was also reminded of the time the two Melinas and I were in Izola. Among all the other things we did to entertain ourselves, we played a game where we would imagine that our bodies would take the shape of the food we ate most. In between the running around, we (ok, mostly I) would sneak into the snack room and stuff our faces with powder-sugar-coated, jam-filled doughnuts that redefined deliciousness and challenged conceptions of normal calorie-intake. Hands down, if our imaginary game were true, I would have become a round doughnut. Not that, in reality, by the end of the festival I didn’t feel like I was rolling around Izola’s streets anyway.

In Germany, doughnuts of this kind are known as “Berliners.” Like hamburgers or wieners, they would have been just another food named after a city, and simply an example of the German mastery of the art of pastries. That is, if it wasn’t for US President John F.Kennedy, who – in a speech demonstrating the US support for Soviet-occupied West Berlin in 1963, shot the pastry into infamy.

The commonly circulated and widely pushed story is that, when saying “Ich bin ein Berliner,” Kennedy in fact referred to himself as “a jam doughnut,” instead of a citizen of Berlin, as he intended for his statement of solidarity with West Berliners. The correct thing to say, according to this version, would have been “Ich bin Berliner.” This account has become so popular that souvenir shops in Berlin now sell tin boxes replicas of the Berliner doughnuts.

As hilarious as that story is, however, it turns out it isn’t true. The phrase, as said by Kennedy, was in fact correct. According to linguistic experts, since the US President was speaking in the figurative sense – he was not literally from Berlin but was only declaring his solidarity with its citizens, omitting the indefinite article ein and saying “Ich bin Berliner” would have been incorrect.

And, just to share one last curious fact. According to the explanation printed inside my Berliner tin box, these doughnuts are called Berliner in all of Germany, except for Berlin, where they are known as “Pfannkuchen.” Don’t you just feel enlightened now?

Sofia’s autumn inhabitants

Now that autumn is here full on, the only feathered inhabitants of Sofia left are the pigeons and the crows.  

Yesterday, I came across their favorite hang out spot.   

When I sent the pictures to Tina, she immediately send me this song which had come up by chance as she was looking at them.  

When you come visit, I'll take you there.

ekaterina

FUN FUN film

glede na to kolko je govora o filmu, se zdita čas in mesto primerna, da pokažemo še mali film našega crossbalkantria.

since we are speaking of film already, here is one short one from the crossbalkantrio.

The three bevandas and the sea

Although this post is part of our Cross Balkan Blogging exchange, it technically doesn’t come from the two opposite ends of the region, as – due to an auspicious development of events, Ekaterina was able to join the two Melinas in Slovenia again.

This time, the three of us went to Izola for the Kino Otok film festival. In addition to the main reasons we were there – the two Melinas as volunteers and Ekaterina as a participant in the Happy Camera workshop, we also decided to take part in the Isola Cinema Photo Contest.

Since we were already taking pictures all the time, we though we could easily “return the town its gaze and try to make the winning photo of Izola and its people,” as the competition announcement rules specified. In addition, we also made our own rule (which we fulfilled with varying success) – that the pictures should show Izola, its sights and people in a way that isn’t cheesy or too obvious.

These are the 11 pictures we submitted:

We sent all the pictures under the name trio bevanda, inspired by having spent the previous nights enjoying copious amounts of red and white wine mixed with water. In our case, the ratio was always 2:1, with the wine sometimes being 2 and sometimes 1, depending on our mood. But the final mixture was always glorious, not unlike the 2:1 varying relationship between us three – sometimes it was 2 Melinas : 1 Ekaterina, and sometimes it was 1 Melina : 1 Melina + 1 Ekaterina. (Funnily enough, in Slovenian, the term bevanda is used for the wine and water mixed drink, while in Italian the word simply means ‘beverage’).

And then, we started to wait. We obsessively checked e-mail for any response and carefully scoped out the other submitted photos published in the festival’s daily paper and on its website.

Quickly, we became a classic case of counting one’s chickens before they hatch. Or, as the saying goes in Bulgarian and perhaps more appropriately to our seaside setting, putting the pan on the stove though the fish is still in the sea.

Did I forget to say that the prize for the winning photo was a Canon EOS 550D camera worth several hundreds of euros? Fuelled by each others’ enthusiasm, we became convinced that one of the photos we submitted would surely win the competition. After some brief doubts about what to do with the prize we were certainly getting, we decided we would sell it and use the money to sponsor the trip of the two Melinas to visit Ekaterina in Bulgaria. Once that was determined, all we had to do was wait to see which of our photos would be the winner.

And then the crushing announcement came. Somebody else had, in fact, won the competition and was getting the camera, which was supposed to finance our great plans. Now, it seems, we would have to find a different (and more reasonable?) way to do it.

meline čez balkan/meline through the balkans

1. cross balkan blog objava melin

1. melinas' cross balkan blog post

 

CROSS BALKAN BLOGGING PROJECT!

cross balkan blogging project je še ena noviteta na našem blogu. je projekt, s katerim želimo ohranit našo bulgarsko-slovensko navezo in luda druženja z ekaterino. zato si bomo nekajkrat na mesec izmenjavale objave čez balkan.

cross balkan blogging project is one more new thing here. it is a project that will help us to keep our bulgaria-slovenia connection and crazy gathering we had with ekaterina. for this we will monthy exchange few posts over the balkan.

#1 

Ways to Alleviate Withdrawal

(by ekaterina "The Ground beneath my feet")

Definition of withdrawal: any sort of separation, but is most commonly used to describe the group of symptoms that occurs upon the abrupt discontinuation/separation or a decrease in dosage of the intake of medications, recreational drugs, and/or alcohol. In order to experience the symptoms of withdrawal, one must have first developed a physical dependence (often referred to as chemical dependency). This happens after consuming one or more of these substances for a certain period of time.

If we substitute the italicized words in orange with ‘Tina and Nina’, it pretty much describes how I was feeling as I headed back from Ljubljana to Sofia via Munich. After spending much of the last two weeks’ waking hours together in Trška gora, Mali Vrh and Krško, the sudden separation hit me pretty hard.

A few things made it slightly better:

 

Bussines class meal

The view of the early-morning sky from the airplane window

The free coffee and newspapers in the G zone of the Munich Airport

Now, I am back in Sofia, and continuing our joint endeavours, this time with a distance of much of the Balkans between us. Welcome to our Cross Balkan Blogging project!