"Hey, remember when Jen tried to be gluten-free in Central Europe?"

{Ed. note: this is directed at search engines producing results for words in the subject. I didn't really find much guidance online earlier this year, so I thought I'd throw my own experience out there. In other words, if you *can* eat bread and/or don't plan to visit this part of the world, you probably won't care about any of this...}

A year and a half ago I found out I was potato- and wheat-intolerant. So when I told people our first Phase Two stop was Central Europe, the land of bread and potatoes, it was always with a laugh... and also a tiny prayer to The Universe that I wouldn't wither away from malnutrition.

Our first few days in Poland I meticulously avoided everything wheat- or potato-related. Armed with a Polish translation food list, we would carefully scan ingredients on grocery store packages and restaurant menus. It wasn't too different from being back home, actually.

Turns out that "no potatoes no wheat" in Central Europe really is a pretty ambitious endeavor. At first this meant a diet of corn flakes or oatmeal or yogurt for breakfast; a salad for lunch (pre-packaged from the grocery store or from a cafe); rice/rice noodles and veggies/canned tuna/kielbasa for dinner; fruit (fresh or dried), carrots, peanut butter, peanuts, and chocolate for snacks.

our intro to Warsaw

his: pierogies

hers: chef salad

... sooooo not fair

sausage:

welcome to Prague!

... now that's fair

Eating the same things over and over again got kinda boring. One day a guy at a hostel made eggs for dinner, and that opened up a lot of new ideas for us.  But even that got boring after a while.

also boring?

"English" breakfasts in foreign lands

I was thrilled to find rice cakes, rice vermicelli, bean noodles, dried soy products, and of course peanut butter in Polish grocery stores. Up until we got to Turkey these items were actually pretty easy to find in all the countries we visited (though for some reason the rice products got more expensive the further south we went, and peanut butter was more scarce in Romania).

sometimes the labels
were even in English -

neat!

A chain called Carrefour - kind of like the Safeway of Central Europe, slightly overpriced with a decent variety of food - carried everything I needed and their markets were in all the major cities. Even tiny markets in Bialowieza and Nemcicky had rice snacks and dried soy.

Bialowieza makeshift dinner by tea kettle:

rice noodles, rehydrated soy, mystery spices

Fruit stands were also easy to find; plums and apples during fall harvest season were fantastic.

Krakow fruit stand:

part one

Krakow fruit stand:

part two

Nemcicky rule:

pick one, eat one

After a few weeks in Poland I got curious and tried bread. Nothing terrible happened so I continued to experiment. Turns out that for whatever reason, wheat has not been as offensive to my system here.

the first offender:

thanks, little old pastry shop lady

it was all downhill from there

It could be that the wheat strain here is more pure. But my guess is that it's everything *other than* the wheat, yeast, salt, water and sometimes egg that goes into packaged wheat products in the US that caused me the real trouble. (I'm talking to you, potato starch, guar gum, xanthum gum, and everything I can't pronounce!) Here, I can't always read the ingredients but when there are just three or four listed on a package, that's a good sign that the product is not going to have too negative an impact on me. And bread is baked each morning, sold so fast that it's not even individually wrapped, and stale by day three.

we must've eaten 847

of these fresh-baked rolls

in Central Europe

Wheat products are not always fun on my system but they are almost always tolerable, and this has made life so much easier. Leftover hostel breakfasts of bread, cheese and meats became free lunch.

whereas pierogies become

not free lunch...

... so did dumplings

Cheap eats from doner kebap stands became viable snack options.

our first kebap -

thank you, Olomouc!

our 53rd kebap -

thank you, Bucharest!

So did bagel carts and pastry shop snacks, which ended up being lifesavers in some cases. Like that day in Budapest when we were starving and a two-mile walk from any signs of a supermarket. Of course, they weren't exactly the tastiest options...

best when purchased at 6am -

otherwise, for them there birds

... or the healthiest.

as the was the case

in Brasov

and Olomouc

and Krakow

But with all that walking it really didn't matter.

Pasta (which I can mostly also eat) became dinner. And garlic bread was often involved too.

Budapest hostel livin'

Lisinia farmstay livin'

Bucharest homemade pasta livin'

And all these lovely cheeses and jams now included bread accompaniment!

homemade cheese: even better

And beer was back on the menu!

Prague beer

Olomouc beer

Brasov beer

... you get the point.

Sometimes I even got to make AND eat bread made from scratch - something I have really missed.

There is still the mysterious yeast/potato connection... But I'm not doing a science fair project, I'm just trying to eat pain-free. So whatevs, we'll just roll with it.

Have not tried potato yet... Not intentionally, anyway. It's hard to avoid in soups and for some reason doner kebaps often include a topping of "chips" ("fries" to you US folks). I definitely know when I have had it and I still suffer afterward. But it's much easier to explain a potato allergy to a new volunteer host or restaurateur than to rattle off the list of things I can and cannot eat.

I shouldn't eat bread with every single meal but I still do. BECAUSE I CAN. But less bread and less sugar (mainly via honey in my yogurt and tea) are in my future - I'm starting to need less weight so that I don't need more pants.

luckily, we are past Krakow's zapiekanki

unluckily we are still in the land of pide

(OK, this is not exactly a bad thing)

However. When we get to Vietnam, I dare say all bets on "less bread" are off... but at least I will be able to counter the bánh mì with loads of delicious vegetables!

Hungary on $40 per person per day.

Actually, Budapest on $40/person/day. We didn't see anything else of Hungary on this part of the trip.

Initial budget: 14 days at $1204 ($86/day, $43/person/day)
Actual cost: 5 days at $401 ($80/day, $40/person/day)

I can't get over how little info went into the WAG for the initial budget, and how close we are coming in. But that's because I am nerdy like that.

Here's the breakdown with some details...

yep, they all kinda look the same
we're so predictable

• Lodging: $153 - dorm rooms at hostels and one night for a hostel private room (CURSE YOU, SNORERS!!) averaging $15/person/night.
• Transportation: $145 - except for nominal dollars spent on metro rides in Budapest, this is the cost of the train from Budapest to Brasov.
• Groceries: $36 - we spent our peanut butter fund on the most amazing rye rolls from the local supermarket. If we never eat bread again after Central Europe...
• Meals: $37 - most of this is lunch one day at the touristy central market and our "last meal in Budapest" (goulash and meat!).
• Tours: $14 - two free walking tour guide tips.
• Alcohol: $14 - hooray for inexpensive, tasty Hungarian wine!
• Gear: $0.
• "Misc": $6 - more public toilets and various other randomness..
• Gifts: $0 - we'll just leave this one off going forward.

Other fun Budapest facts...

• Cities visited: 1 combined city of Buda and Pest
• National parks visited: 0
• UNESCO World Heritage Sites visited: 2 (Andrassy Avenue, Buda Castle)

Burned out mentally but not financially. That's a good thing, right? Here's to keeping on track to keep this journey going... and to getting some rest along the way.

A quick post on why - much to our surprise - we didn't love Budapest.

We thought we would love Budapest. We had no reason to believe otherwise so we booked five nights to allow ample time to check it out.

We saw Buda and Pest (mostly Pest), we got around easily using public transit, we walked 4-5 hours a day, we visited almost every green space we could find on the map, we found known and lesser-known fruit markets, we even explored the outskirts near the train station where one can sometimes find quirky shops or locally made inexpensive delicious baked goods. We stayed at a place called the Goat Hostel (no goats, only pictures, but still!) before moving to a more spacious hostel where they played excellent music at reasonable volumes all day long. We visited a ruins bar and a cat cafe.

WE VISITED A CAT CAFE.

You can flip through our Flickr set for proof of all of this.

But we did not love Budapest. In fact, no matter how hard we tried, we didn't even really like Budapest all that much.

We thought it might have to do with our tired, weary (OK, downright cranky) traveling moods but after talking through it days later we came to the same conclusion:  it felt like any city - Buenos Aires and San Francisco came to immediate mind. For whatever (misinformed?) reasons, we expected something a little more historic, maybe a little more exotic.

There is definitely history to the city. They are proud of their heritage and their (44-character) language. They talk about times other than WWII but they lived through WWII just like everyone else in Central Europe and while they don't dwell on it, they have mostly kept the downtown buildings reconstruction-free.  Between the bullet holes and the memorials there are constant reminders of that period of history.

But we found the mingling of past and present difficult to appreciate.  And as far as exotic...  There is definitely culture to be found, but things like "Van Gogh in 3D!" did not really appeal to us.  On the green space, the park on the north end of town was pretty and the park on the island was nice, but neither felt very welcoming. None of the green spaces felt very welcoming, in fact. Part of this is by design (homeless have been banned from major tourist areas) but still, it would've been nice to have more benches to choose from in the city park.

The one redeeming factor to us naive tourists was the free communist walking tour. We learned a lot about life in Hungary in the mid- to late-20th century, a perspective we hadn't gotten while in Poland or Czech.

Food notes:

• goulash!
• and great rye bread rolls at Tesco (a supermarket chain that sells amazing rye bread rolls... yes, we are sad to admit this but it's true)

Lodging notes:

• Goat Hostel: was perfect for two nights. Really nice staff, decent free breakfasts, great location. The second night, our dormmate slept in the common area so that his girlfriend could more easily take care of his drunk self. Jen wanted peace and quiet at 6am to write that morning and couldn't find it anywhere in this small hostel.
• Bazar Hostel: was perfect for three nights, especially because we booked a private room our third night in anticipation of not sleeping on the overnight train from Budapest-Brasov.  No breakfast but great coffee, all rooms have a sink (quite the luxury!), and Craig the manager was awesome - he made sure we had everything we needed during our stay. Although his staff were of the High Fidelity variety ("I hired these guys for three days a week and they just started showing up, every day - that was four years ago") they were always friendly and accommodating. It was in a great location, there was a nice big cozy common area (with a book exchange!), and the music was always amazing. Except for the music at the club that opened downstairs the night we got there... but we'll take that over snoring people anyday.

Perhaps if we naive tourists had been willing to spend more money on museums or other food/cultural activities, or maybe if we'd gone caving or out to the Buda Hills, or possibly if we could've gotten past our discomfort with the idea of public baths, we would feel differently about this city. We're sure we'd feel differently if we'd had a personal connection in Hungary or Budapest.

We know people who rave about Budapest so we don't mean to discourage visiting. If you're one of those people, we'd love to hear your thoughts - what did we miss? Do you have to immerse yourself to really love Budapest?