Posts Tagged ‘Scenery’

We had a pretty easy flight from Madrid and were SO, SO, SO excited to arrive safely in Africa.  We quickly met up with my mother, Maggie, who was joining us for our whirlwind, month-long, tour of southern Africa.  She had already been in Jo’burg for a week teaching quilting, so she arranged for us to have a bit of a tour of Pretoria (a city near Jo’burg) in between the flight in from Madrid and our next flight out to Cape Town.

We had about 5 hours so it was a pretty brief trip, but we got to see some sights and we had absolutely delicious savory pancakes at Harrie’s (Highly Recommended).  Here’s a few photos.  At this point I was feeling pretty jetlagged and to be honest wasn’t that impressed with Pretoria.  But it was nice to get out of the airport and it gave us our first taste of Africa and it was really wonderful to see my mom.

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Outside the Blue Mosque

Our first stop in Istanbul after a nice breakfast was the famous Blue Mosque. It is called the Blue Mosque because of the incredible mosaics which cover the interior. This building is enormous and absolutely stunning. I had not been inside a mosque before, and was not to sure what to expect. However, they are very used to tourists and it even provided nice cloths to cover up with in order to be appropriately dressed. This was lucky for me since my outfit that day didn’t cover my shoulders! Sorry I look so tired in this picture!

In front of one of the giant pillars in the mosque

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After our extreme adventure getting to Sofia we were happy to find our hostel and get settled in. We arrived late at night and then took it easy most of the next day. One of those laundry, blogging and recovering kinds of days. We went out for lunch at a kind of Italian-ish restaurant and were completely amused by the constant flow of weddings going on. I’m not sure what it was, but we must have been sitting outside a registry office or something because every ten minutes or so another wedding party would pull up with decorated cars and a big bridal party. They would go inside this shabby building for a few minutes, come back out and leave. This went on the whole time we were eating lunch (and in fact, we saw weddings going on all over the city the whole time we were there).

One of the many weddings we witnessed

It was quite an experience being in Sofia – they use a Cyrillic alphabet, but our map had the street names written in the Roman alphabet, so we couldn’t find ANYTHING.

Pretty useless map if you ask me!

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We opted for another free walking tour in order to get our bearings in Budapest, and I have to say, I thought it was one of the best.  Our guide was really good and we saw a lot of the sights.  The city is beautiful and we decided to give ourselves a little of a photo challenge – trading cameras for the day!  My camera has really awesome zoom capabilities, but Justin’s takes much better wide shots and has virtually no zoom.  We bought them because we knew they would complement each other, but it was a quite different experience to trade off!

Here are some of my favorites that Justin took:

Decoration on a building

Fountain

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Everything we’d heard about Slovenia told us that we should not just stick to Ljubljana – we needed to get out to the countryside. So, on the recommendation of a fellow hosteler, we set our sights on the small country town of Bohinj, a 2 hour bus ride from the capital.  The direction we headed (NNW for the crossword puzzle geeks out there) took us into the Julian Alps section of Slovenia, a mountainous paradise with lakes and hiking and everything you could want!

Bled Lake and Castle

In fact, on the way to Bohinj we passed another retreat town well-known to Slovenians called Bled.  There is a rather large lake with a super castle perched on a rocky overlook on the lake.  Unfortunately we had to pick one or the other but we will leave Bled to another trip.  It appeared much more built-up and touristy than our final destination: Bohinj!

The View from our Hotel

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