Food and Stuff

In my first two weeks here, finding out what to eat certainly took some adjustments. First of all, I no longer have the microwave that I have grown so accustomed to. Secondly, there also are no measuring cups, tablespoons, or teaspoons, as these are American units (I also don't have any in any other unit regardless). However, I've managed to make due, and it's really not too bad. My meals consist mostly of bread, meat, and cheese, the bread being bakery bread from the supermarket, the cheese being packaged soft cheese as shown to the right, and the meat being primarily a type of sausage-like ground meat called čevapčići.

Otherwise, I have been getting a lot of fruit, as they are very reasonably priced here and very easy to eat. As shown to the right, here is the mound of strawberries that I bought my first week next to the massive two liter bottle of Karlovacko beer. Still haven't drank it yet, though.

Outside of the kitchen, however, I have eaten many more interesting things. One of my current personal favorites is a type of pastry shown above called a burek. Bureks are usually filled with meat, cheese, or fruit. They are very heavy but delicious. The best one that I've had so far is the first one, a very filling meat burek.

As far as restaurant eating, the one that I went to so far was really good. It was called the Tribunal, and the food turned out excellently. I had very satisfying appetizer of bruschette, simple with only oil, vinegar, cheese, and tomato but delicious nonetheless. And for the main dish I had a pretty good tuna pasta dish.

 Another thing that I have been eating more of is coffee-- not because I make it myself, but because every day for a break from class, Mamić's wife Ana makes us coffee with these torus shaped cookies. To thank her, on our first weekend, Amber and I tried to make American chocolate chip cookies for her. It was quite a struggle, as we didn't really have any measuring devices. So what we ended up having to do was find a recipe that had ingredients amounts in mass (such as Alton Brown's), convert it to metric grams, and then use approximate percentages of bags of sugar and flour. Chocolate chips in the traditional sense aren't sold either, so we had to buy a block of chocolate and chop it up manually. The result can be seen to the right. They actually ended up turning out pretty decent all things considered, and I hope the Mamić family appreciated them.


















The one other thing that I have found issue with here is the difficulty in using the washing machine. How we think it works is you set the whites and darks with the spin dial on the left, and the temperature with the one on the right. But the list of settings for the left dial includes temperature too, and we don't even know what a few of the settings mean. In addition, the spin mechanism doesn't seem to run continuously, just in random spurts. I suppose it at least gets them wet, and I have managed to complete one laundry cycle successfully. I can then use the hot weather to my advantage and dry the clothes on a rack on the patio.

That's all for now, but I just enjoyed looking at Croatian board games on one of my trips to the supermarket and wanted to share them. I have no idea how to play them, but it's just fun to see original Croatian kids toys.