After Bagan, Jodee and I decided to spend some time in the Shan state. Funnily enough, our first introduction to the Shan state happened on the remote island of Flores, in Indonesia! I had just finished reading the book I had and was looking to swap it for a different one. A lot of hostels (sometimes restaurants and cafes as well!) along the backpacker route have a library with a swap policy. You can take a book with you if you leave one there. The policy is usually awesome as you get to read books you would not have come across otherwise! Rifling through the books on the shelf of the only Italian Cafe in Labuanbajo, Flores, I cam upon a book titled “Twilight over Burma: My Life as a Shan Princess“. Intrigued, I picked it. The book itself is not very well written IMHO. So unless you have an interest in Burma, I would skip it. However, it tells the amazing true story of an Austrian girl that met the love of her life, an unassuming Burmese fellow-student while at university. They fall in love, get married, and soon are headed to Hsipaw, the capital of the Shan state to meet his family. There she realizes that he is the Prince regent of the state, and she, now the princess! The book then goes on to tell the story of the military uprising and her husbands capture.

Having read it, I wanted to go check out the place. So it came to pass that we found ourselves on a journey to this strange town called Pyin-Oo-Lwin, and Hsipaw. Blogs on that coming soon!

 

Read about our journey and experiences in Bagan here. Learn why its one of the most beautiful places in Myanmar, and why it’s my least favorite of all places visited.

This is a part of the Myanmar Travelogue series, continued from the previous travelogue on Yangon

From Yangon, we took a comfy night bus to Inle Lake. A plush, leather seated, VIP bus, where each row only had 3 really wide seats! The plushest bus ride I had! You can read more on our bus ride and Inle Lake adventures, including an awesome visit to the Fire Balloon festival, in the following Blogs:

Inle-1: On taking buses from Yangon to Kalaw and Inle Lake

Inle: Introducing Shan State

Inle-2: The Hike from Kalaw to Inle Lake

Inle-3: Hike, Second Day

Inle: The Lake

Inle: Fire Balloon Festival

After a relaxing time in Croatia doing my Physical therapy to get back on my feet, we decided to visit the Czech Republic where Jodee’s ancestry is from. I looked at train timetables and found there were 3 routes to get to the Czech Republic. Through Budapest, Salzburg or Vienna.

The train line to Budapest I heard from some fellow travelers was broken. So people were made to get off the train when the tracks ended, take a bus across the broken bit, and reboard another train to continue on their journey! I decided to avoid that adventure and route through Austria. As it turned out, it didn’t matter because the tracks in Czechie were also broken and we had to go thru the same rigmarole there as well!

Now I was left with the tough choice of picking Vienna or Salzburg. Life was tough☺. Since we’d lost a week in Zagreb for Therapy and only had one day to explore any town we went through, I picked Salzburg, as Vienna seemed a much bigger city deserving more days to visit.

And so it was that on a sunny day in September, two weary travelers ended up in the town of Salzburg. This town, contrary to what people might tell you, is famous for one thing and one thing only – The Sound of Music! I hear there is also some musician that was born there by the name of Mozart. But who cares. The Sound of Music!

To prep for our journey into Salzburg, we meticulously watched the movie en route to Salzburg (Nerds Alert!).

The scenery entering into Salzburg is Breathtaking. I think the countryside in Austria is probably the most lush and beautiful that I have ever seen. No wonder the Nazis wanted to take over Austria (as The Sound of Music chronicled faithfully for us. Yes, I get my history lessons from Musicals.)

The town of Salzburg is a quaint beautiful town as well. I heard that 3 times the population of Salzburg enters the town as tourists due to the Movie alone! Salzburg is overrun with tourists clicking away at the various sites, posing goofily and wondering if a fairy tale ending will happen to them as well. The funny thing I heard is that Austrians aren’t really big fans of the movie at all!

The Sound of Music (I’m going to write SoM from now on to save space) was originally a book written by Maria Von Trapp chronicling her life before she and her family made their way to the US of A to open the Trapp Family Lodge which runs to this day. There was an Austrian movie made that was quite faithful to the book I hear. Unfortunately, it was made with German levels of Accuracy (and Emotional Depth). That movie didn’t fare too well. Come Hollywood, and some producer decides to take the original story, throw away historical accuracies, sprinkle on some good songs, and bang! A legend was born! Though the story now takes lots of liberties from the Von Trapp family’s real story (for instance, they didn’t really escape over the mountains. Like most boring escapes, they just took a train out of Austria), it has captured the hearts and minds of millions of starry eyed fans, and continues to line the pockets of all the tour operators in Salzburg.

Given that we only had a day here, we spent it doing the most important thing possible:

 

This was probably the height of Touristic-ness on our trip. It’s tough to beat this. Clambering aboard a bus with a bunch of Movie Geeks, going from site to site where different shots of the Movie were filmed, listening to Songs from the Movie, and taking tons of pictures in front of each and every monument; It was Touristic Hedonism at its most commercial. And we loved it!

Going from the lake into which the kids fall when they see the Baroness for the first time,

To the Gazebo that 20th Century Fox gifted to Salzburg after they were done with the movie, which filmed the 2 love affairs in SoM, viz. the “I am 16 going on 17” song and the “I must have done something goooooooood” song…

To the big horsey fountain that Maria splashes to reinforce her confidence in herself…

To the park where they filmed the “Doe a Deer” song…

Finally to the church where the Captain and Maria get married…

This was a movie feast, and a perfect holiday from a backpacking quest!

Interesting Tidbit. Other than SoM and Mozart, the other thing that comes from Salzburg, very surprisingly for a sleepy elegant town, is RedBull. The RedBull headquarters are located in Salzburg! Perhaps that was it that gave the Von Trapp family wings to fly over the Alps…

This blog chronicles my experience in getting knee surgery done. If you are looking for some advice on getting surgery done in Croatia, check out my other blog here.

Knee Pain, and the search for cheap healthcare

A month into my trip, while running (on a treadmill!) in London, I felt a clicking sound in my right knee. The pain died down after a week of rest and a couple physiotherapy sessions, but then popped up after a couple months. At that time I was in Munich. I decided to get an MRI to see what was up. It would cost 920 USD in a Munich hospital. Not knowing if my insurance would cover it, I elected to delay it by a couple weeks to see how it would feel.

Two weeks went by, and the pain was still there. In fact it had increased. At this time I was in Zagreb, Croatia. While the public healthcare system there offers free treatment to all Citizens, just like the rest of EU, foreigners like myself have to rely on private hospitals. To my good fortune, I found out that though part of the EU, the Croatian healthcare is a whole lot cheaper than the rest of the EU. So much so that, it’s one of the countries for ‘health tourism‘. Essentially a place with good and cheap healthcare where people from other countries fly into for getting their procedures done! I searched for one that specialized in Knee problems. I found two in Zagreb:

Sv. Katarina
Axis Hospital

Getting an MRI

I took an MRI with Sv. Katarina mainly because I heard of them first. It was only 200$, a bargain compared to Munich, and magnitudes less than an MRI in the US. Not just that, their customer service was excellent. I told them I wanted my doctor back in the States to review them, and they gave it to me on a CD as well as Dropbox files. Dropbox files from a hospital! Who does that?!! These guys were awesome! My Doctor back in the US, whom I asked for a second opinion, said that was one of the clearest, well done MRIs he had seen ever!

After getting the MRI, I found knee surgeons at both hospitals. The surgeons I found were

Andrej Radić at Sv. Katarina
Mladen Miskulin at Axis

This is one place where I like the US better. We have so many peer review websites where we can read other patients reviews. I use yelp a lot. Out here, you’re sort of shooting in the dark. A review site would be really helpful. Especially for travelers who have no clue where to go.

Both surgeons had impressive Bios on their websites, which was the only source of information I had. I talked to both, and finally decided on Miskulin. Mainly as his schedule and mine matched more closely, and his initial communication with me felt clearer. I loved working with the support staff of Sv Katarina for getting my MRI bills for insurance. My insurance required some US specific codes such as ICD-9 and CPT Codes which it seems no country other than the US uses (Way to go America. Yet another way to be different from what the rest of the world does.). They looked it up and figured it out within a day.

Scheduling The Surgery

While talking to both doctors, I realized that July August is pretty much the worst time to get anything done in Croatia, as half the country is on Holiday! both doctors were off on their vacations and would only be back end of August. Now, while in Croatia, we wanted to go sailing on the Croatian coast. It’s quite an experience (and yet another blog :))! However they all get booked way in advance, and the only one I got was a cruise on Aug 16-23 starting in Dubrovnik and ending in Split. Initially, both doctors gave me an earliest date of August 25th in Zagreb for a surgery. Doing my surgery on the 25th would mean missing the cruise.

Then Miškulin told me he could do an earlier surgery on the 15th if I were to come to Dubrovnik! This worked out perfectly as the cruise started from Dubrovnik on the 16th! Talk about alignment! I chose that, and scheduled both the surgery and the yachting trip. The yachting trip would be a nice slow recovery time after the surgery.

We flew to Dubrovnik a day early and I found an AirBnb close to the hospital, which had the least number of stairs to climb to it. It surprisingly hard to find apartments close to the ground. They told me that was because of the oldness of the town of Dubrovnik.

The Surgery

The surgery was on a Friday afternoon. My doc was a lot more carefree about the preparations than I was. He just asked me to show up at 5pm. Since I had had knee surgery before, I knew some of the pre-op procedures. I literally had to pull the remaining bits of advice, such as how long to not eat prior, and what pre-lab tests are required (none!).

My first experience was a bit scary, and happened when I asked the anesthesist about the lack of pre-op tests. He replied with a “Well, you look healthy.”
Jodee and I look at each other. Slightly scared look on my face.
“What do you mean healthy?”
“You know, no high blood pressure, diabetes, etc…?”
I started to look worried at the level of prep.
The doc came in and calmed me down. He seemed sure and definite and talked about how the tests were primarily required for general anesthesia. Since mine was local, it wasn’t required. I remembered that to be the case as well. Ok, we proceeded with the surgery.
As it turned out, I couldn’t take the pain with the local anesthetic (yes yes I’m a big wimp), and the doc made an executive decision to do general anesthesia without telling me! Coz the next thing I knew, I was sitting on my bed. It was 3 hours later. And half the staff had left. Fortunately, nothing went wrong. But this part was still a bit sketch.

After surgery I go on the yacht cruise for a week. The Croatian islands are beautiful, and I’m glad I got to enjoy them from the boat.

 

The post-op advice was like the pre-op advice. Minimal. “Walk normally, and ice”. That was it. As it happened. The next few days I “walked normally” for a couple hours each day. And my knee began to hurt. Quite a bit. So I call the doc from the yacht and tell him that. He replies. “Well, walk normally but don’t exaggerate.” The precision of his advice was almost overwhelming. So I get on the Internet and research post-op surgery, as any anal retentive researcher is wont to do. Thankfully I got a bit more advice.

A week later, we drive back to Zagreb after the cruise.

I’m back in Zagreb, my knee still hurting and now walking in crutches, I go to my post op meet.He asks me to stay back for a week to get physical therapy. That was a blessing. For after a week of the physical therapy, my knee was almost as good as new.

Physical Therapy

Physical therapy here seems way better than what I got in the US. In the states, a session lasted one hour, and they did electrical stimulation, and a couple exercises.
In Croatian private clinics, I got the royal treatment. The moment I got in, I got 10 min each of ultrasound and laser therapy, followed by two types of electric stimulation. One for knee and one for the muscles around it. Each for 20 minutes. This was followed by 35 minutes of magnetic therapy, a 10 minute knee massage, an exercise program and finally a 15-min ice machine! Each session lasted about 3 hours!

And since I was only there for a week, I went for 2 sessions, and put in an hour of swimming at the free Zagreb outdoor pool…. 7 hours of physiotherapy a day! And I loved it. I would walk in and sit on the comfy leather chair to get plugged into the various therapy machines. I would take out my laptop and connect to the really fast wifi in the office. They would plug me into the different gadgets for the different therapies, and provider with unlimited cappuccinos. It was pretty much like being in a caffe in Croatia, with soft music piped through the wall speakers as the electric machine softly hummed my cartilages to heal.

A week of physical therapy and my knee was way better. Special thanks to Marko and Dunja, my therapists who worked day and night!

Now onto the rest of Europe…

In this post I’d like to tell you a bit about the interesting coffee culture of Croatia, and what to do if you’re a tourist without a ready kitchen while in Croatia (hint, it’s not good!)

 

Croatian Coffee Culture

My morning breakfast is usually a Coffee and a Pastry (In retrospect, as I write this blog 3 months later, that breakfast was primarily responsible for about 15 pounds of weight gain. Kids, don’t try this at home. Or anywhere else for that matter!). While in most places (Well, most places in Eurameritralia at least) this can be accomplished simply by going to a Café and ordering one of each, in Croatia, this requires visiting first a Pastry Shop to get the Pastry, and then a Café to get the Coffee. Talk about singular focus on core competence!

It comes down as follows. Croatia has a culture of ‘Caffe Bars’, which are exactly what they say: A Café and a Bar. They serve all sorts of espresso drinks and juices, that you get in a café, and all sorts of Bar drinks, such as soft drinks and Alcohol.  Cafes seem central to Croatian hanging out culture. Come weekday or weekend, rain or shine, there are almost always tons of people hanging out in the myriad cafes in the myraid-er alleyways in Zagreb. If you were in August, you would probably have found me there as well.

 

What they don’t serve is any sort of pastries, sandwiches or any solid food at all. So unlike cafes elsewhere, where you could get a coffee and a pastry or a sandwich (or a Chatpata Paratha Wrap if you are in India!), here you bring your own food and have it with your coffee. This is made convenient by neighboring establishments called ‘Pekaras’ or ‘Pekarnicas’ (Bakeries) where they sell only Pastries and Sandwiches.

I couldn’t figure out what resulted in this kind of a system. Talk about focusing on your core competence and outsourcing everything else!

The other unusual part of Caffes is that they only do Espresso. There is no concept of Drip Coffee.

If you ever find yourself in a Croatian Caffe Bar looking incredulously at the menu, here is a tiny guide to help you:

• Kava: Espresso
• Kava s Mlijekom: Espresso with foamed Milk (this is the closest equalent to a (wet) Cappuccino/Flat White that I have tasted)
• Kava s Šlagom: Espresso with cream. Depending on where you go this could be Heavy Whipping Cream or just Whipped Cream from a can.
• Cappuccino: Coffee doused in foam.

I soon realized that to get what I considered a Cappuccino, I needed to order the Kava s Mlijekom.

After a week, I was really excited upon finding the 2 places in Zagreb that actually do a Cappuccino the way I’m used to – complete with micro foam and artwork! Express Cafe Bar and Elis Caffe. These 2 cafes have Baristas that partake in the Barista competitions and know their coffee. Also, Croatia is blessed with good milk, so the Cappuccino in these places are really good.

Now that we talked about my favorite subject of coffee, let’s come to the topic of food in Zagreb (and indeed, in many towns in Croatia).

 

The Food. Uh Oh.

I have to start by saying that I love the country of Croatia. It has a rich history, beautiful cities, an amazing coastline, and an honest and hardworking people. The food here, unfortunately, was the most disappointing bit of our entire stay in this country.

This would be my take on how you would create the cuisine if you were the God responsible for the creation of Croatia. You take middling Italian food, blend in some middling Greek food, and throw in a pile of grilled meat, and you pretty much have it.

 

Most Croatian restaurant food can be summed up in 3 words, and this restaurant did so very aptly:

 

That was pretty much the fanfare at any Croatian restaurant we went to. The main difference between the menus of different Croatian restaurants is the paper that it is printed on.

They all have the same set of the following:

• The same 4-5 different varieties of Pizzas, Pastas, and Lasagnas
• The same few grilled meat options (Čevapi)
• The same few seafood options
• The same 2 unappetizing salads (One with Cucumber and Feta Cheese, and one with leaves)

Čevapi is a grilled meat dish which is essentially a Smorgasbord of different meats, with some potato fries on the side and the odd tomato added for garnishing.

Now the list probably looks like a decent amount of variety. But just try the same menu everyday for 3 weeks, and you’ll soon be resorting to hunting around grocery stores and the like. Speaking of grocery stores, I found the very best flavored yoghurt in Croatia. It’s Pista&Almond flavored yoghurt with real Pistachios in it! We spent many an afternoon feasting on just this!

Now I ended up spending 6 weeks in Croatia finishing up my Physical Therapy. As you might guess, the last couple weeks were spent searching high and low for any place that served non-Croatian food. In Zagreb I finally found a few and was happy. In the small touristy coastal towns, unfortunately, unless you’re willing to take a car and go hunting outside the coastal towns for food, you’re pretty much stuck with same ol’ Pizza Pasta etc… I had to make up for the lack of flavor with the view. And make up it did. The Coastal towns are some of the most beautiful towns I have seen in my life…

Now I’m sure that in every town, if you go outside the main areas you might find more variety, and the locals know these places. But as a traveler, you spend most time around the center of most towns, and this was unfortunately the only options we had there…

 

If you do end up going to Zagreb, these are a few of my picks to get a respite from Croatian Pizza Pasta Čevapi:

• Mundoaka: Not too surprisingly, this was born out of a collaboration between a Croatian and a New Yorker. Awesome fusion options, and decadent desserts. Just a few doors down is Express Caffe, one of only two Zagrebian cafes to offer really good Cappuccinos from La Marzocco machines. Hop on over for your after dinner cup!

• Kisa: A Russian-Georgian-Azerbaijanian restaurant. The menu is not extensive but this is a welcome respite, and the Ambience is casual and laidback. And we often ended up chatting with the waiters here long after the restaurant had closed for the night.

• Wok by Matija: Interesting variant of Chinese food. Tasty nonetheless. (Why was I looking for chinese food in Croatia? You try eating Pizza & Pasta everyday for 6 weeks!)

 

To be fair, we did get excellent, tasty, Croatian food one evening. It required taking a taxi out of the town center to probably the parts where the locals camp out! The place was called Stari Puntijar. It was in a hotel that was converted from a castle, and is worth going there just for the décor! I hear it’s used by the Government officials for their formal dinners. If you want to sample Croatian food that’s not the staple tourist fare, go there.

After 3 months of traveling through countries where the sun is worshipped fervently because it only makes an appearance rarely, I arrived in Croatia, a Mediterranean Sun Kissed land blessed with miles of beaches and over a thousand islands.

 

Having only heard about the country recently (embarrassingly enough), I tried to remedy by ignorance by learning a bit about it. Here are some interesting tidbits I learned.

 

Itsy Bitsy History

As far as countries go, it’s brand new, having been formed only in the 90s when Yugoslavia split up in a Civil war.

 

Prior to that, it existed as a Republic of Yugoslavia. It seems that Croatia got the lions share of the coastal land from the other republics when it was formed, almost as if the Croat king secretly told its people “All right, all of you quickly go and stand along the coast. Now!” That ended up nearly locking out their southern Neighbor, Bosnia, from having any coastline at all. But they weren’t having any of that. Somewhere in 1699 they laid claim to a town called Neum, squat on the coastline that Croatia was trying to get. So now the southern most coast of Croatia, which has the famous (and annoyingly touristic) town of Dubrovnik, was cut off from the rest of Croatia. In fact if you’re driving along the coastline of Croatia to Dubrovnik, you have to cross the border twice! Once into Bosnian territory and then out.

 

For Jodee and I, Croatia was supposed to be a quick stopping point towards the end of the European leg my trip where I’d meet up with friends, and then have Jodee join me from Chicago before moving on. As it happened, my knee started to hurt pretty bad and it turned out I needed a minor surgery to get back full mobility. It’s tough be a wanderer hopping on one leg. So we ended up staying back and taking in Croatia while I underwent my surgery and did a bunch of physical therapy. You can read about that here (blog coming soon…)

 

The good side is that we got to spend a month and a half in a beautiful country, make some new friends, and learn some Croatian.

 

The Beginning

I arrived in Croatia by taking a bus from Munich, through Slovenia, and ending up in the Island of Pag.

The island of Pag, to put a broad stroke of generalization on it, is the less glamorous and cheaper cousin of Hvar, the Mediterranean partying and Yachting hotspot. We visited Hvar on a yachting trip from Dubrovnik to Split. More on that later.

 

Pag is known for 3 things:

• The Cheese. Known locally as “Paški Sir”. They come in a lot of varieties from 6 months old to a few years. Needless to say, there’s a lot of cheesy foods there. In fact the only thing cheese was missing from was their sense of humor, which I found quite dry.
• The Lamb. Which supposedly has meat that is naturally salted, a side effect of them drinking salt water throughout their life. This supposedly results in Lamb Meat that is evenly salted and is claimed to be quite tasty. This might have been the case, but I felt their cooking process left much to be desired, and the end result was lamb that was pretty mediocre.
• The beach parties. Specifically, Zrče Beach Parties. It’s referred by some as the Croatian Ibiza.

Though Croatia is supposed to be cheaper than the rest of Europe, I found prices here still pretty high. I soon learned that the tourist season in Pag is essentially for 3 months. During those 3 months, the locals make enough money to last them 12! No wonder then!

Pag was a beautiful place to hangout with friends. We spent a good 2 weeks here taking in the sun and the DJs that flew in to perform. Or at least, we spent 1 week doing all that. During the second week, as I found out, the country of Italy had a national holiday. And so we had an Italian invasion as bus after bus of loud, drunk Italians swarmed the entire island, yelling phrases in Italian to each other.

After spending the next 5 days pushing through throngs of drunk Italians to get from A to B, we happily left and went on to our different destinations.

 

I took a bus to Zagreb where I spent the next week recovering, prepping for Surgery, and getting disappointed with Croatian Food. I’ve written more on our experiences with food in Croatia in my next blog.

 

After my surgery, Jodee and I spent the next couple weeks taking a sailing trip from Dubrovnik to Split, followed by a road trip up the coast, back to Zagreb. More details on that coming as well!

On a rainy Monday afternoon, I ventured out to try one of Scandinavia’s time honored traditions. This is the story of how to get in and out of one (relatively) unscathed…