Rijeka, the main port city for northern Croatia, used to be the Austro-Hungarian seaport known as Fiume, and is a stubbornly non-tourist city fabulously slagged off in almost every guidebook to Croatia ever written. It is a working port and working class metropolis by the sea - if you want beaches, go elsewhere. On the other hand, it is one of the most fascinating and unique destinations that nobody ever goes to on the Croatian coast. Rijeka isn't an easy visit: it doesn't expect people to stay, and accomodations are scarce and pricier than at resorts along the sea. Everything else - food, and the surprisingly lively night life scene - is far cheaper.
Who needs night life when you have street life. We caught a park festival featuring guys dressed up as clowns and animals while contestants dived into a deep pool full of sudsy water groping around to pick up bananas and win prizes. Surreal, yes, but in a 1960s Italian film kind of way. Rijeka is famous for its local rock scene: we saw the Rijeka band Let 3 at the A38 a month ago and they just about blew even the most jaded rock snobs away when they finally stripped for their final number - played naked with dog muzzles covering their family jewels and with roses stuck in their behinds.
Controlled by the Hapsburgs since 1466, Rijeka came under Hungarian control in 1870. Although the population was primarily Croatian and Italian, a prosperous Hungarian middle class set roots down here in the years before World War 1. In 1912 the future Hungarian communist politician and party leader János Kádár was born in then Rijeka as Giovanni Czermanik. Former New Yiork Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia worked at the U.S. consulate here from 1904 to 1906, allegedly playing for the Rijeka football club while here.
Hungarians tend to get nostalgic about the "loss of Fiume" - the only sea port they ever had control of, but after World War I things really started to go pear-shaped. After a brief Italian occupation, in November 1918 an international force of French, British and American troops occupied the city. Italy claimed Rijeka on the fact that Italians were the largest single nationality within the city. Croats made up most of the remainder and were also a majority in the surrounding area, including the neighbouring town of Sušak. On September 10, 1919, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy was dissolved. 
Two days later a force of Italian nationalist irregulars led by the writer Gabriele d'Annunzio seized control of the city. Eventually Italy and Yugoslavia concluded the Treaty of Rapallo, under which Rijeka/Fiume was to be an independent state, the Free State of Fiume. In 1924, however, Rijeka was annexed by the Italian Fascists to Italy itself, and was only ceded to Yudoslavia in 1947. (Given that I am going to be doing a gig in Gdansk/Sopot, Poland on July 22 with Di Nayes, this makes two former Free Port States I will be visiting this summer. I feel like I ought to annex some territory or something.) Another result is that while Istria feels like a lost bit of the Italian countryside, Rijeka/Fiume feels like nothing so much as a funky, down at the heels Italian port city that just happens to speak Croatian.
Rijeka is where you can really sense the meeting of Italian and Balkan cuisine. This isn't a tourist town, and we chose our dinner spot based on the "how many families are happily chowing down here" method of restaurant selection. And they were chowing down at a grill joint offering cevapcici and pljeskavica just next door to a tapas bar highly recommended by our associates at Time Out Travel Guides. The Tapas joint was deserted. The Cevap joint was packed. A difficult decision.
Cevap is the Balkan/Yugo version of the Turkish word "kebap" i.e., kebab. Essentially it is a mixture of beef and sometimes lamb (more beef in Croatia, more lamb in Bosnia and Macedonia) rolled into those tasty little skinless sausage patties we know in Turkish as köfte. I discovered at home that I could not make these using ground beef bought at the butcher's (or in our case, Tesco) because the grind was too coarse. The trick is to pulverize the already ground beef into a paste using a meat tenderizing hammer (hammer the handful of meat inside a plastic bag so you don't paint the room in explosive meat color) then season and form into thumbsize rolls. Smash the ground meat mixture into a dish-sized patty and the result is a pleskavica (or pljeskavica as the call it in je-kavian Croat) These may be served in a fluffy flat bread called lepinje, which can very rarely be found in Hungary as lepény. 
Ignore the recent cevap recipe given at Chew.hu which includes pork - pork doesn't belong anywhere near a cevap or pleskavica. For one thing, it would fall apart (ground pork needs a binder or a sausage casing to form a stable patty.) For another thing... it would taste like a Tesco cevap, and we wouldn't want that. (Or, to paraphrase Frank Zappa "Is that a real cevap or is that a Tesco cevap?") If you are hankering for a cevap or pleskavica in Budapest you will find them either at the Kafana serb resturant or at the Jelen Biszto behind the Corvin Department Store at Blaha Lujza ter in Pest. Kafana is more elegant, but the Jelen accurately replicates the lepinje sandwich style. (The orange stuff seen below is ajvar - a mild red pepper paste condiment.)
In terms of interest, pleskavica and cevapcici are among the two items that lead the pack in leading readers to this blog from Google. Welcome to our blog, hungry Balkanoid appetites of the Internets! (The most common searches leading to Dumneazu are to the "Yidn Mit Pixels" page about B&H photo in NY, the Fröhlich Cukrászda post, the Kádár Étkezde post, with many, many Romanians visiting the posts on Vioara cu Goarne - possibly because those posts have earned themselves their own Romanian Wikipedia entry. Obviously, the world is hungrier for more info about weird bastard trumpet fiddles than we knew about. 
One final word: Croatia is still not conforming to the EU rules regarding modern information signs. As can be seen from the sign above (from the beach at Verdula in Pula) you are heartily encouraged to abandon your crippled family members by rolling them downhill into the sea. And this sign (downtown Novigrad) can be interpreted in several ways:1. Policemen Not Allowed to Play in Picnic Areas.
2. Free Wifi for Members of Marching Bands!
3. Do Not Attempt to Fly the Cylon Base Star by Yourself!
We would also like take the time to aknowledge the ugly little shitbird who served as our Hungarian State Railway conductor on the couchette car back to Budapest from Rijeka. As our train was to leave at 20 minutes after midnight on Sunday, Fumie asked the conductor about our seats only to be told that the ticket was for Sunday night, not Saturday night, and no amount of discussion would get him to admit that 00.20 AM actually was on a Sunday. He was pretending not to understand Fumie's (quite fluent) Hungarian when I strolled up. "But you are not on the reservation list!" After calmly conversing with this transparently corrupt retard (my sincere apologies to all the honest and genuinely hard working retards out there...but one bad apple spoils it for everyone) I asked "So how do we solve this problem?" "Well, it can be solved... with a tenner!" 10,000 Forints... about 40 Euros, this after we paid 9 Euros for our valid couchette and knowing that a couchette bed costs only 14 Euros without reservations. I said calmly "rendben" - fine. He led us onto the train and proceeded to warn us about all the dangers - thieves mostly - that awaited us in Zagreb station. In twenty years of riding every cattle car in the Balkans the only actual thieves I ever encountered on a train were within ten kilometers of Budapest.
Once on the train I had no intention of coughing up the bribe to this greedy little ogre, but faced by two speakers of Hungarian instead of one he lost face, and soon the little MAV geek popped his misshapened head into the cabin to announce "Oh! I found you on the list of reservations! Must have been looking at the older list!" So no, we will not bother reporting your pathetic attempt at extortion to the already pathetically corrupt MAV management in Hungary. They'll all be on strike in a week or so anyway. Nobody knows why. Nobody cares, either.
After arriving at the bus station, we checked with a private tourist office next door, and soon 50 Euros got us a beautiful private apartment twenty meters away from the sea. Air conditioning! Kitchen! Satelite TV! Croatia regulates its tourist business carefully, so you can trust these apartment rentals for quality - the rate per person comes to the same as a dorm bed in a youth hostel. No contest... 
Now, I am not the beachiest person on the block, but to be honest, the Istrian coast has pretty but uninviting beaches... rocky, stony, bring a pair of rubber beach shoes. At Novigrad, at least, the beach has a series of stone approaches and child friendly inner inlets protected from the open sea.
And nobody is ever far from a beer. I had my first beer in five months here... and probably my last beer for another five months. Actually, I dropped my low-carb diet while in Istria and was surprised that I didn't blow up like a puffer fish in response to eating pasta and pizza after months of going without.
I mean, how can you say no to a seafood risotto like this? As far as restaurant dining is concerned, Istria is definately a dialect of Italian cuisine, and the Adriatic this far north is known for its slimey crawly sea bugs. Grilled sardines are an affordable specialty, but almost any other scaled fish will send you to a bank officer before the waitress arrives. The Adriatic, indeed, the entire Mediterranean sea, is slowly being fished out and supplies of white-fleshed fish are at an expensive premium. Seafood, however, is within reach of the average eater, perhaps in a risotto...
Or in a pasta dish, as in this seafood tagliatelle for two (20 Euros for a portion for two) at the 
We followed this with a plate of fried squid. Kalamari are always plentiful and are usually grilled and doused with olive oil, or fried in a light coating of flour. The Croatian coast is a paradise for cephalopod lovers... octopus salads, cuttlefish risotto, or squids are on just about every menu. Apparently, the BBC says that squids are now the one species which is the most prevalent biomass of any living critter on earth. And they only live for 180 days. And they can comunicate by varying their skin color patterns and thus show signs of intelligence. And man, they taste gooood....
And then to the town square, where the cafes were all set up with wide screen televisions to watch the semi-finals of the European Cup soccer matches.
Rijeka used to be the Austro-Hungarian city of Fiume, and Opatjia, located just north of Rijeka, was where the the rich and benobled spent their summers. Yes, it is cute, in a Hapsburg way, but farther down the coast Istria reveals its Roman and Venetian history, and I have had enough of yellow Hapsburg houses for one year already. I was ready for something a bit older and more grand. Bring on the Roman colliseums!
The chef/owner ran over to demonstrate the proper method of attacking his humoungous cevapcici plate (rip up the bread, which merely serves to keep cevap warm, dip in red pepper ajvar sauce, and eat cevap with fingers,) expressed surprise in our ability to speak a bastard hybrid of Macedonian and Croatian (with far too many accidental vowel sounds) and tried out his gastarbeiter German on us. Astonished that we could actually communicate in some detail - "The Turkish goalie. Very Good! Most Beloved! Yes! He father his from Tetovo!" - he ended up offering us several rounds of free slivovitz. Perhaps more than several. Actually, quite a lot. Ahh, the Balkans. Paradise with landmines.
The classic Istrian pasta dish is fuzi, which is the local Venetian dialect for fusilli, and is essentialy a tube pasta rolled on a stick. Served with Istrian gulash (veal and light paprika sauce) it is a lot like what I tend to cook at home two days a week in the winter. Stew with mac. Just as in Dalmatia, there is always something non-fishy to serve the fishing boat crews who come back to port and don't want to see another damned fish on the plate for dinner. Luckily it wasn't too hot while we were in Pula... the old town buildings reminded you that you were, essentially, in a suburb of medeival Venice...
Contemporary Roma music is not too hard to find in Budapest - it is a happening scene for a downtown urban culture right now - and I am talking about the newer permutations based on a fusion of traditional and modern Gypsy styles. 
But, fusion is for those that want fusion. I'll stick with the 
The Gödör Klub on a hopping night. The name means "the Ditch" because the club was built in the ditch that would have become the site for the National theater until the FIDESZ party came into power and stopped construction in 1998. The place remained a hole in the ground until years later, when a park was built on the site. The city is constantly threatening to shut the club down. It's a sad fact that nearly every live music venue in Budapest is under constant threat of closure. You would think that a European capital city would be a bit less provincial about public cultural space, but this is Hungary, and every overblown city official wants his palm nicely greased or... we shut you down.
I tend towards the sweeter version: lángos with home made lekvár jam, usually either plum or apricot. The lekvár is usually more tart than sweet, and when I wake up to find the home bereft of breakfast goodies I hop on my bike and zip on over to Bosznyák ter and go straight to the lángos stand for a jam lángos and coffee - the whole breakfast special for only about FT 200 (US$ 1.30) complete, making this one of the last cheap meals available in newly inflated East Europe.
This stand is what you see as soon as you get off the #7 bus at Bosznyak ter. It serves a somewhat inferior product to the stand in the back of the square, so fight your impulses, and head into the market itself. Besides, they also serve something called "Argentine Palacsinta" which is too scarey to investigate. Stands like this used to be found almost everywhere in Budapest, but no longer. I was happy to see that frybread stands are still common in Miskolc and other towns in the countryside.
It doesn't take much to make lángos. A portable oil fryer, a dish rack to let them drain, and a bath basin full of rising tater dough and you are in business. Lángos shacks were a part of the city landscape in Budapest until about 1992. You would find them set up at bus stations on the main intersections, at Metro stations, and always at markets. The city set about "cleaning up Budapest" and the first things to go were the dismal-but-delicious snack shacks selling lángos, strudels, and fried sausages. Then came stringent tax laws which tended to edge out those vendors whose products were based on incredibly small profit margins. Frying dough does not make you as rich as selling pizza by the slice does. Goodbye dough. It is now hard to find a lángos seller in Budapest outside of the outdoor produce markets. 
There are bad lángos: these are from the fancy market at Szena ter, near the Mammut shopping Center off of Moszkva ter. Dry, greasy, no trace of the yeasty spudsy discs of heaven that we come to expect. Lángos for tourists. Sad, really. If you aren't near Zugló, try making it at home someday... just joking.
Horseback archery is a big, legitimate, and rather difficult sport in Hungary. Historical leatherwork and sewing ancient Magyar outfits is a booming business. I was amused, therefore, by the big kettle of guylás that seemed to be at the center of the yurt village. These folks don't cut corners on accuracy, believe me. But paprika didn't really come to Europe until 500 years after the Hungarians had hung up their furry hats. Gulyás soup with paprika is actually a dish that developed in the late 18th century, after the Turks introduced it. But no matter: one doesn't get between a Hungarian and his gulyás. Ever. Especially if he is carrying a battle axe.
I'll delve into the revival of Ancient Hungarianism in a later post, but the atmosphere at the National Gallop was surprisingly positive and refreshing. Suddenly it hit me: it has been years since there has been any public event involving Hungarian history and traditions that has not been co-opted by the loonier fringes (including the center right) of Hungary's polarized right wing political groups. This was a day that normal Hungarians could take their families out and be proud of their Huszárs and cowboys and old Magyar forebears without the droning, raging aggressive whine of nationalist loudpeakers. Calling the event the "National" Race was like waving a red cape at the nationalist bulls. The right wing groups denounced participation in the race since it was serving "Mammon" - in this case in the private sponosorship of banks and the directorship of Wonder Boy Peter "Hey! I can get Rich off of Damn Near Anything I Do" Geszti. If this is the case, go Mammon!
Áron digging into a microscopically small serving of kolbász. Usually I don't suggest the kolbász at outdoor festivals - it tends to be dry, burnt, and overpriced. Not here.
Everybody loves pizza, right? So what if Hungary has no tradition of pizza? Make one up! These mud ovens pop up everywhere there is a festival, offering "traditional" Hungarian "flat bread" with remarkably pizza-like toppings, served by enthusiastic folks dressed in folk costumes. But I have never seen, heard , or eaten this pizzoid object except at festivals since 1995. I grew up eating Hungarian food. All the men in my Hungarian family are either chefs or butchers. Years of studying Hungarian ethnography and visiting in villages have never revealed this "tradition" to me or any other folkorists, but heck, pizza is pizza, right? Bring it on!
I have to admit, Erdélyi kürtos kalács, or transylvanian horned cake is gooood. Of course, paying Ft 1000 for one is not gooood. These were merely priced 300% more than they cost at the subway station in Kőbanya. Mammon indeed. Alas.