Vladimir & Suzdal: Quaint, Charming Towns in Russia's Golden Ringby Randi / July 3, 2017
June 28-29, 2017
Middle of Russia
Middle of Russia
Dear Little Laptop Diary,
Well. The St. Petersburg-Moscow sleeper really spoiled me and set my expectations too high. Hell, 2003-era New Jersey Transit set my expectations too high. Our first superlong train, the 24 hour sleeper from Vladimir to Yekaterinburg, was a bit dismal. The cabin was fine, it really was, and we had a very nice older Russian lady in with us who helped us make our beds when we proved completely incompetent on that front (the mattress pad doesn’t go IN the duvet-cover looking thing, YOU do! Or nothing does! Still unclear!). But that first sleeper to Moscow was oh so special. They gave us slippers for crying out loud! Our beds were made for us! They were comfy! There were no slippers to be found on this one. And thank the lord I brought flip flops, because the toilets were the most disgusting I have seen since our non-sleeper train throughout the countryside of Bosnia. At least on that train I didn’t have to take my contacts out. On this one I did. It was horrific. The floor was wet and coated in sludge, the soap dispenser was dry, and the toilets were reminiscent of Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor ones. I should have remembered Amtrak the first time I had to use the sink, because I wasted 10 minutes trying to get it to work by turning the spigots as you do normally before I finally asked a Russian lady to help. It was the kind of sink you had to push up with your palm to get a trickle of water out. My god. On the Moscow sleeper I accidentally brushed my teeth with the train water; I wasn’t thinking because it was all so clean and nice. We were definitely using bottled water for this one.
Scenery’s nice
The samovar, one in every carriage. So you can always get boiled water for instant meals and tea. |
Down the hallway of our carriage. Rooms to the right, samovar straight ahead, toilet after the samovar, my exercise barre to the left, cigarette smoke everywhere |
At about 9pm I realized that the lady had fallen asleep, which is like wow I wish I could fall asleep with all these Russian children shouting. And someone nearby is smoking, which is not allowed but I guess Russia goes in the way of Greece where smoking isn’t ‘legally’ allowed but it is culturally always allowed and just ugh smoking is disgusting.
It’s the rockiest train journey I’ve ever taken, the kind where you are tensing your whole body so you don’t fly off the seat. Of course I couldn’t sleep like that! I was being thrown around my little bed mat by every bump and turn. It also made a lot of overnight stops, and when the train stops it’s like the world is stopping. The huge brakes made the loudest banging noises like we were being attacked. At least 30 times during the night I thought the train was going off the rails, it was that bumpy and uneasy. At the 5:30am stop, our second stranger cabinmate arrived, for the bed above mine. She had to stand along the side of my bed in order to make hers. Needless to say I didn’t sleep until maybe 7am, until 9:45. What a great rest. The other woman, the older one who seemed so nice, had the attendant close our cabin’s window because it would blow on her neck on the top bunk. But like. We are four people in an enclosed closet and you’re shutting off our air supply? Nyet nyet nyet! Also, fresh cool air is the only thing that really helps my constant motion sickness, so taking that away from me meant a restless night of severe nausea, discomfort, strangers, and tears.
Also, the sun is still rising like it did in Helsinki and all through Russia so far — at 3am. At some point in the night I lost my eye mask.
When I gave up trying to sleep, I brushed my teeth and washed my face with bottled water (hard to do the latter). The stranger above me was ready to eat her food which means she had to sit on my bottom bunk and use the small table that Husband and I both banged our heads on repeatedly during the night. So I just kind of stood in the cramped hallway for a few hours by the open windows out there (yesss) as more people smoked illegally and I tried to relax. There’s a bar running along the hallway so I did some barre exercises which a small boy found HILARIOUS. I felt a lot better after doing them though. The nausea got a little better with the fresh air and I had an orange that I brought for breakfast. I reclaimed my table and wrote for a few hours before a lunch of dehydrated vegetable crackers I got at Veggie Bro in Vladimir. Interesting day, I must say. Happily, I didn’t realize that 2 of the 26 hours of this train journey were just time zone changes (we are going through so many time zones jesus this country is enormous) so we have only 6-7 hours left! Ugh I can’t believe this is only the first of its kind. Once we land in Yekaterinburg, we have a night in a nice hotel, which seemed like a really sweet idea at first, to pamper ourselves after all these hostels and immediately after this first gross train – and immediately before our big 3-day gross train – but I think it might just feel like when Lewis Black talked about how the government one year gave refunds of $350 to people with kids to help out with that and he said it would have been nicer to them to just knock on their doors and piss on their feet. What I’m saying is I think a hotel might just make me feel worse about going back to close proximity with strangers for 3 days and the grossest bathrooms ever. At least not using my contacts for that long will be good for my dry eyes. Man alive.
People are still smoking, which is just like really cute for all of us. I love when people flout rules and common decency. At least some of the scenery is starting to get pretty. We just passed a big river which was nice. And we passed Chaykovskaya station, which is where the composer Tchaikovksy was born. It’s fun not having to worry about how to spell that in English anymore because it’s just made up transliteration. Like Chanukah! Spell it however you want when it’s not in its real language. Anyway, so Chaikoffskee was born near this station so they named it after him. Our guide book says that historians now believe that instead of dying from cholera, he was blackmailed into taking poison when his affair with a nobleman’s nephew came to light. So I guess that is worse than all these gross train journeys. As long as I don’t use the tap water. Oh also I figured out why the toilets get locked at every station besides trying to make me explode – because they ‘flush’ just onto the tracks so they don’t want the station tracks to be disgusting like the countryside tracks. Seriously the flush is a lever you step on that just opens the bottom of the toilet and you can see onto the tracks. I need to stop thinking of my clean bathrooms at home, my lovely clean bathrooms with potable water. I’m having a hard time remembering why any sane person would leave those bathrooms. Oh right to see the world.
We are at a longer stop right now called Perm, which is where they do fun curly hairdos that work on 9% of women, so most people disembarked to buy food from the babushkas selling all kinds of things on the platform. I am guarding our stuff. Outside my window right now, there is a babushka singing a traditional Russian folk song (I mean I’m guessing but come on it’s not like it’s a Nicki Minaj song) and intermittently she will stop singing to scream at someone who crossed her. I can’t see any of the babushkas with food, but I do see the ice cream cart (everywhere you go in Russia!) and it is swarmed, of course. Z money just came back and said the babushkas failed him and only had ice cream and soda and bags of chips and stuff, which is laaame. Luckily we brought tomatoes, cucumbers, and bread so we will make sandwiches. Sure to be better than my dinner last night of plain bread and cinnamon-y cookies I found at a supermarket (sure of their veganness this time because they also had English ingredients!!!) .
Overall, I’m grateful that the strangers are nicer than they could have been, I’m grateful that older lady allowed me to open the window for the daytime, I’m grateful to Iberia for our last flight when the soap dispenser wasn’t working and they showed me where they kept the single-serve liquid soap packs and I took a lot for this trip because we will DEFINITELY need them, and I’m grateful that I’m not being blackmailed into taking poison. I will keep repeating this to myself as a reminder that it’s not so bad, that we could smell worse, that I could be really sick and I’m not, that everything could be worse. As it is, I’m just on a kind of gross train through Russia and out of my comfort zone of silence and cleanliness. It’ll be okay.
Okay older lady just shut the window again goddammit.
Our cabin with two strangers. Would end up being one of the better/nicer experiences of its kind! Stay tuned.
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Eating Vegan in Mongolia: Ulaan Baatar is Surprisingly Veg-Friendly
Against all odds, Mongolia’s capital city is well-nigh a wonderland for vegans. Ulaan Baatar, despite being in a country that literally eats mutton at every meal and in every dish and frowns upon vegetables, has more all-vegan restaurants than London, and some better ones too (or at least some that I would love to have in London…or at least I’ve been traveling so long that I thought they were better than what we have in London). From Buddhist temple centers to veggie-friendly chains to nearly a dozen outposts of our beloved cult Loving Hut, UB (as everyone calls it) will let you eat extremely well – as long as the restaurants decide to be open when you go.
We arrived via (awful, smoky) overnight train to Ulaan Baatar (train here; UB city here) super early in the morning, and we were hungry. Armed with a long list of HappyCow and other finds, I was excited to get out into the city and find some amazing vegan food that wasn’t cabbage or kasha (I love cabbage and kasha but a month of it was enough).
Turns out we would have to wait.
Remember we arrived at like 7am, and spent just a few hours at the hostel before setting out? Despite researching what would be open early for us, everything was closed! We walked the 20 minutes or so in the pollutiony heat to an area that had one of the six or so Loving Huts and the famous Luna Blanca, the buddhist temple restaurant that is all vegan and yet is in all the not-so-veg-aware guide books. Luna Blanca didn’t open until noon, which we knew, but the Loving Hut was supposed to open at 8am. It said so on their own site. But there was a huge chain across the door! Ughh! So we trekked to another Loving Hut, and another, and they were all closed. Then we tried to find other HappyCow places – first, a place called Love Each Other, which was closed! Then a place called Agnista, which NO LONGER EXISTS. We learned this after walking around a neighborhood forever trying to find it by the very helpful (eyeroll) HappyCow directions that it was ‘near a primary school’. A shopkeeper on its supposed block pointed to a big ramen place and communicated that it was now that place. COOL. What were you doing to me, universe?! By now, we’d gone through my whole list (and on foot no less). We even chanced upon another vegan-friendly cafe (green juice posters in the window!) that was ALSO closed. I was crushed! Ulaan Baatar was my beacon of hope during the first part of this trip, my surprising vegan city on a hill. But, we soon learned, restaurants and shops are often closed during and around Naadam – which seems SUPER stupid considering that’s when the city is flooded with tourists and people from the countryside! Why would you close during the busiest time of the year?! People need to eat! But I guess all the waitstaff and cooks are also going to Naadam and learning about ankle-bone beer pong, so they have to close. There are only so many Mongolians.
Remember we arrived at like 7am, and spent just a few hours at the hostel before setting out? Despite researching what would be open early for us, everything was closed! We walked the 20 minutes or so in the pollutiony heat to an area that had one of the six or so Loving Huts and the famous Luna Blanca, the buddhist temple restaurant that is all vegan and yet is in all the not-so-veg-aware guide books. Luna Blanca didn’t open until noon, which we knew, but the Loving Hut was supposed to open at 8am. It said so on their own site. But there was a huge chain across the door! Ughh! So we trekked to another Loving Hut, and another, and they were all closed. Then we tried to find other HappyCow places – first, a place called Love Each Other, which was closed! Then a place called Agnista, which NO LONGER EXISTS. We learned this after walking around a neighborhood forever trying to find it by the very helpful (eyeroll) HappyCow directions that it was ‘near a primary school’. A shopkeeper on its supposed block pointed to a big ramen place and communicated that it was now that place. COOL. What were you doing to me, universe?! By now, we’d gone through my whole list (and on foot no less). We even chanced upon another vegan-friendly cafe (green juice posters in the window!) that was ALSO closed. I was crushed! Ulaan Baatar was my beacon of hope during the first part of this trip, my surprising vegan city on a hill. But, we soon learned, restaurants and shops are often closed during and around Naadam – which seems SUPER stupid considering that’s when the city is flooded with tourists and people from the countryside! Why would you close during the busiest time of the year?! People need to eat! But I guess all the waitstaff and cooks are also going to Naadam and learning about ankle-bone beer pong, so they have to close. There are only so many Mongolians.
So guess what. We trekked around the city, famished, for so long that by the time we checked all the above stupid closed stupid places, Luna Blanca was open.
I mean.
What a day.
Luckily, Luna Blanca was fantastic! We loved it so much we went back twice for food and another time just for dessert – and we were always two of many, many tourists – soo many white people in there. It made me happy that so many tourists were clearly sick of mutton and wanted to enjoy good vegan food even if they weren’t vegan. Luna Blanca has a simple menu of salads (yay), soups (yay), and hot entrees of traditional Mongolian foods made vegan. It would have been perfect if they had a fun menu of sides instead of just bread, rice, and other kinds of bread and rice, but as it is it’s a great find. Even though they didn’t have ice cream any time I was there (and the menu says they have vegan ice cream I’m cursed to never find ice cream this whole summer), I still loved it.
yes I DO love spinach!
I needed some greens so I started with the sesame spinach under the salad section. I was slightly disappointed to learn that it was cooked spinach and not raw, but hey it’s still spinach, and that probably means I got 10x the amount of actual spinach because when it cooks it shrinks to nothingness. It was really good but mostly perfunctory, and purposefully so. A real star was the Mongolian sampler platter of traditional foods like khuushuur, the fried mutton-filled empanada looking thing, and buuzy (I think that’s what it’s called), the softer mutton-filled dumpling. Getting to try these traditional dishes in vegan form was a must-do, and I think Luna Blanca is the only place that does it. You only need to try them once – I still can’t get over how much khuushuur Mongolians eat during Naadam (like 10 patties per meal every day; trust me you only need or want one). But they were yummy and fun. And, the platter is so big and you can only eat so much of it that we took some of each kind home for the next day! Yay leftovers!
sorry I couldn’t wait to take a picture before trying some 😛
We also tried two fantastic salads at a later visit – my favorite which was just a plain green lettuce salad with a great dressing (I love lettuce), and Z’s favorite, a pasta salad with tofu. I don’t count pasta salads as salad (helloooo it’s just cold pasta) but since it had tofu I’ll let it slide. And it was really good!
yes I see that there’s tomato and cucumber in there because OF COURSE THERE IS but at least it’s mostly lettuce
you’re not salad but you’re yummy
We also tried a shittonne of mains during our visits. We had to get another vegan version of a Mongolian classic, the stir-fried noodle dish called ‘tsuivan’, while we could, and it was pretty good! So much better than the traditional mutton-filled dish, Luna Blanca’s version had soy protein (hooray for you!), cabbage, carrot, and pepper. I mean it’s a big heap of noodles and they tasted good.
dayyum that’s a lot of noodles
this is the ariun zoog (zoog means food! I don’t think ariun means what it sounds like). also here’s our guide book! we used almost every page!
We also tried the Ariun Zoog, which was like a soft meatball of mushrooms and soy nugget in a sauce of tamarind, tomato, and chili, served with two enormous scoops of white rice and – you know it! – cucumber and tomato and pickled cabbage. This was very good, although lacking in other vegetable matter for me. Equally as good, if not better actually, and equally lacking in vegetable matter was the balaton, which was Hungarian porkolt and goulash, the latter of which we saw a surprising amount of in Mongolia and Russia.
it’s like a Hungarian muppet happy face!
But my favorite dish at Luna Blanca was this soup, simply called the Luna Blanca Special. I know, it’s soup. And it was so simple and I guess boring. But it was just perfect. I needed a good, big bowl of soup (despite the heat) after being without for so long – remember that most of what I cook at home is soup. (Z asked early on in cohabitation if one day we could graduate to solid food.) This soup was in a mild vegetable broth and was full of tofu dumplings and some spinach. PERFECT, sort-of-bland-but-bland-how-I-love-it-not-in-a-bad-way soup.
mmm soup
The only low points of Luna Blanca (besides how they never had ice cream) were the desserts. Well, just the cakes. We got the chocolate mud cake and the chocolate cream pie over our visits. The mud cake, though it sounds amazing, was the driest, most tasteless cake I’ve ever tasted, bested only by the time early in my baking experience when I forgot to add all manner of sugar to a cake. It was bread, and gross, and this was pretty close sadly. The cream cake was better, because at least the cream made it moist (SORRY I KNOW BUT WHAT OTHER WORD CAN I USE), but it was still in serious need of a sufficient amount of sugar. And I don’t like when desserts are too sweet! But these were like, sugarless.
GO DRINK SOME WATER YOU ARE SO DRY
meh cake
You might be thinking ‘wait, didn’t you say you returned to Luna Blanca JUST for dessert one time? um, why?’ Why?? BECAUSE THEIR HOT CHOCOLATE WAS THE BEST I’VE HAD IN MY LIFE. Guys, I’m serious. We both were silent and then said, f-ing hell this is incredible. I cannot even deal with the fact that Mongolia is home to the best hot chocolate you can imagine. It wasn’t just chocolatey and it wasn’t just sweet; it was like…also vanilla-y? and caramelly? I DON’T KNOW.
YOU’RE AMAZING
I also got a little oatmeal cookie bag to go one night, and they were great, so just don’t get the cakes, and you’ll have a wonderful meal at Luna Blanca.
When the various Loving Huts finally decided to be open when they were supposed to, we went there multiple times too. I can’t stay mad at you, LH. If you aren’t familiar with the pervasive vegan restaurant chain, it’s a usually-small restaurant with a big menu of sandwiches, salads, and fun but always recognizable entrees that vary a little by region. They are all over Asia, all over Europe, and all over the USA too. Oh, and the best/most notable part? They are run by the veritable religious cult of the Supreme Master a Vietnamese lady who bills herself as an entrepreneur and not a cult leader, and every location plays videos from their cult thingies on TVs. I don’t care if you are trying to indoctrinate me as long as you are giving me good food. Oh, and the UB location we went to? The first time we went, it was playing a video of a concert they gave in honor of the Supreme Master, FEATURING BETTY BUCKLEY. GUYS. I was FREAKING OUT and all these Mongolian people were looking at me.
As usual, we ordered way too much and got to try a whole lot of stuff over a few visits. One of my favorite things was a huge surprise – the Victory salad, a cute molded (not moldy, molded like into the cylinder shape) mix of chickpeas, celery, seaweed, pickles, red onions, vegan mayo, and topped with a tomato mix. I don’t usually like mayonnaise-y things, but this was delicious, like a scoop of a perfect chickpea-based version of chicken salad, or tuna salad, whatever people keep going for with their recipes using exactly these ingredients.
As usual, we ordered way too much and got to try a whole lot of stuff over a few visits. One of my favorite things was a huge surprise – the Victory salad, a cute molded (not moldy, molded like into the cylinder shape) mix of chickpeas, celery, seaweed, pickles, red onions, vegan mayo, and topped with a tomato mix. I don’t usually like mayonnaise-y things, but this was delicious, like a scoop of a perfect chickpea-based version of chicken salad, or tuna salad, whatever people keep going for with their recipes using exactly these ingredients.
chickpea salad wins
We also of course got another perfunctory hot spinach salad, which was good as spinach usually is. I don’t remember much to distinguish this from the Luna Blanca version, but I enjoyed it. We needed to stock up on vegetables (is that how it works?) before our week in the countryside.
this was probably like 500 kilos of raw spinach first, right
I loved the dumpling plate we got, filled with an indeterminate but delicious mix of the usual dumpling veg and tofu. I was so eager to get to China for dumplings that I jumped the gun and got them in Mongolia! Dumplings are just so good!
As for mains, we tried this soy nugget platter (it came with green salad! amazing!), which we loved (probably because I mean it was chicken nuggets and french fries and it had been a month since we had such truly Western food). I liked the soy protein club sandwich (pickle, lettuce, onion) which I packed up and had the next day at Naadam, which was a genius idea and it kept beautifully in the tiny hostel fridge (didn’t get stolen!!!).
the pickle-y mayo with the nugget platter was so good I put it on my sandwich
all sandwiches should be pressed in a little grill pan
We went back to Loving Hut after our week in the Mongolian countryside and desert (next post I promise!) when we had one final night in UB before catching a sleeper train to Beijing. We were so eager for fun foods after a week of mutton (for Z) and rice, peas, and carrots (me). We got the Romanian salad, which was spinach and arugula supposedly but looked like mostly spinach (that’s ok) with orange pieces and a lovely orange and mint dressing. Perfect return to sort-of civilization! We also got a plate of tortilla chips and salsa, which said they came with hummus (HUMMUS!!) but that was a lot to expect in these parts and it was like a hummus-inspired runny sauce (I don’t even care).
We also got a Mexican burrito wrap that was very decent, and a hot mix of like pumpkin-based vegetable patties in a tomato sauce that I’m not really sure about but I liked it! And we got a side of fries. We needed them.
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Loving Hut, as usual, had a very nice smoothie menu, and we tried a green smoothie with spinach and orange and pear and stuff, plus a chocolate date drink. The chocolate one was delicious, and the green one was fine, but they come with the SMALLEST STRAWS IN THE WORLD. It was about 3.5 inches long, so after a few sips you had to give up and drink straight from the cup strawless. Hilarious and inexplicable.
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The only bad thing about the Loving Hut experience, besides how inconsistent and unreliable their hours were, is that the menu says they have ice cream AND ice cream cake. I think you’ve already guessed that they had neither, any time we were there. To tempt me with ice cream cake and not deliver is an unforgivable offense. But I still love you LH.
One night, when Naadam had claimed the lives/opening hours of vegan places, we decided to go to a Mongolian BBQ place called BD’s. I didn’t care, I figured I’d be able to find SOMETHING here, right? And I was being a good wife and letting Z go to a kind of must-go place here. It was expensive though – it was an all-you-can-eat buffet – so we looked at the setup before committing.
GUYS.
It was the best for vegans, to my absolute amazement.
They had a salad bar! With more vegetables than I’d seen in weeks! They had a make-your-own stir fry station with tofu and soy protein balls! They had a huge array of hot dishes including braised cabbage and carrots and stuff! And rice and kasha! It was so much food for me when I expected literally a potato.
my first enormous salad plate
I know that picture of my stir-fry after it was stir-fried is not pretty but I don’t care. I stuffed my bowl with bean sprouts, lots of tofu, and literally ALL the soy protein balls in the container (#sorrynotsorry). Then you put your bowl down on a numbered spot by the giant cooking station (wok?) and two guys put on a show with their sword-like cooking utensils (like Hibachi lol) while cooking like 10 people’s bowls at a time. Because they are more concerned with catching their sword-spatulas after tossing them in the air than they are with keeping the diners’ food strictly separated, a few pieces of #3’s shrimp got into my mix (spot #2). Luckily that’s easy to pick out, but if you have an allergy, note that there is some commingling of assets. Aside from the messy cooking of the showmen, BD’s was such a surprisingly treat! They even had good wifi and I did one of my Siberia blogs from there! For dessert, the only vegan thing was tiny spoons of watermelon pieces. And I mean tiny, like one cube of watermelon per spoon. I took 19 spoons.
Lastly, I think my favorite restaurant in UB was the all-vegan Italian restaurant Bosco Verde. I know – UB has an all-vegan Italian restaurant! Where even is there another one of those besides NYC! (Is there one in NYC or just ones with separate vegan menus?) Bosco Verde had decent food, and I’m not sure if the actual food was better than Luna Blanca’s, but the menu was my perfect menu – sooo many leafy salads, delicious veggie-packed soups, fun cutlet-y things as usual, pizza, pasta, and BEANS! SO MANY BEANS! Beans are hard to find so far on this trip, so I’m obsessed with Bosco Verde and I would have loved to have returned but they fell victim to the curse of Naadam closures.
so pretty inside!
We started with bruschetta, which we were super excited about, but we would have skipped it despite its deliciousness if we knew that every dish would come with almost of LOAF of bread, each! It was so funny but such a waste! Our guide in the country/desert gave us sooo much bread every meal, too – is it because we are westerners and they think we need bread or do Mongolians just eat a shittonne of bread?
I had a just perfect vegetable bean soup (mm soup!!) and a giant white bean, tomato, and fresh herb salad (the white beans were giant, not the salad, it was perfect sized). The salad dressing was so delicious it made me love the tomatoes even! I know you are like wait you just said the menu was long and incredible, but you got soup and salad? Guys soup and salad are my favorite foods. and beans. The soup came with good garlic bread and the salad came with lots of toast. Lol.
SO GOOD
ALSO SO GOOD
Z got a delicious cutlet thing (so many random cutlet things at vegan restaurants!) that came with fries and weirdly cooked veggie slices.
As for dessert, you guessed it – the menu said they had ice cream, and – you guessed it! – they didn’t. Instead, we got a chocolate cream cake – the same exact cake we would end up trying at Luna Blanca later on in our visit. This meh, sugar-lacking cake is clearly baked by the same outsourced company, one that needs to work on their craft. If any of my amazing vegan baker friends feel like living in Ulaan Baatar (bitch you crazy), there’s a job waiting.
I got this cake to-go hence the top icing layer got stuck to the plastic
As for UB food finds, there was an INCREDIBLE grocery store close to the Naadam stadium, super fancy in a sort-of mall and it had amazing random vegan finds. I just got super deja vu – did I already write about this? I don’t care I’ll share again. This shop had clearly marked vegan tofu and seitan mixes in the fridge! And the first good produce section we saw! And Bob’s Red Mill products! We stocked up on the vacuum-packed tofu and seitan, and I will be carting them around until Kyrgyzstan, where I imagine I will really need them. We also found these strawberry Oreos. They were gross. We still ate them all.
we see this flavor everywhere why does no one have the peanut butter? or mint?
IWe also spent a lot of time chilling at our favorite Mongolian coffee shop chain, Tom & Toms’ Coffee. We liked them too much to tell them that just using “Toms'” is sufficient. The wifi here was strong so we went frequently since the wifi at Modern Mongol hostel was pretty much nonexistent. I don’t drink coffee but they had this amaaaazing grapefruit ‘ade’ made with fresh grapefruit and soda water. It had pulp in it! It was sooo good. I would share a picture of it but trying to upload one literally crashed the computer twice so use your imagination.
So, as you can see, eating in Ulaan Baatar was better than doing pretty much anything else in Ulaan Baatar. I don’t know how it became such a hotspot for all-vegan restaurants – I guess Buddhism? But I’m a fan of it being one! Hooray for Buddha! Or whatever the reason is!
Madeira, Portugal: Lovely Little Island Paradise (for Oldies and Old-Adjacents)
Not just a fortified wine! The small island of Madeira, off the southwest coast of Portugal, is a popular resort-holiday spot for European vacationers, and for dern good reason. One of two autonomous regions of Portugal, Madeira is gorgeous, relaxing, and manageable enough to see in a short visit. Quiet but not boring, the best thing to do there is enjoy the scenery and the vibe, not run to check off a list of museums and sights that tourists must *absolutely* do like in many places, so you are free to enjoy your time in a stress-free and carefree manner. Because it’s one of the most popular cruise ship ports, it’s hella filled with white-haired people at all times. Also, the resorts tend to cater to families more than young adults, but happily that means nightlife is not the focus (i.e. you don’t hear awful house music emanating from clubs when you are in bed at 10pm). My kind of place!
The largest city on Madeira is Funchal, and we spent our whole time exploring this great city. If you like to hike and climb mountains and be cold and stuff, the hills outside the city might be cute for you, but Funchal was a perfect base to learn about the culture and people of Madeira (and to swim in an indoor pool (honestly my fave)). Although the weather in Funchal is pretty much always pleasant, it doesn’t get very hot (especially in December, when we were there). But that’s fine because, despite being an island, it’s not a beach town. Madeira was formed of volcanic eruptions and so is rocky and volcanoey, without the sandy beaches you might be thinking of when you hear ‘island paradise’. Kind of like the pretty side of Santorini. Unless you’re visiting via cruise ship (and so more aware of the ocean aspect), it’s best to think of Funchal as a lovely, pleasant European town that just happens to be an island closest to Africa.
Like all lovely and pleasant European towns, Funchal is best introduced through a stroll. We walked around with no particular aim on our first day and found beautiful city gardens open to the public, lots of fountains and statues (and stories!), and lots of cruise passengers. Walking in view of the marina (but not super close to it; marinas tend to be more industrial looking close-up) and thus the ocean was beautiful and instantly transporting. I love getting to know a city through aimless strolling, and Funchal is one of the best for that.
oh this piece of shit
In our strolling, we chanced upon various Christmas markets, which European towns hella love having. I guess saying we ‘chanced’ upon it is kind of misleading because it was almost Christmastime so it should have been hundo p expected at every step of the way. If we didn’t see one it would have been weird. There were long parts of main streets overtaken by street vendors (mostly with alcohol) as well as kid-friendly areas repping that north pole spirit.
When I said before that most of the street offerings were alcoholic, I bet you thought of Madeira wine. And while that was everywhere, the real star of the market stalls was ginjinha, a traditional Portuguese liquor made from ginja (sour cherry) berries. We became acquainted with ginjinha during our first trip to mainland Portugal, where we saw little shops selling the stuff on every block and saw Portoguesers line up outside to drink it in little shots. It’s a potent sumbitch, and trying it once what, 8 years ago? would be enough for me, especially considering that might have been the last time I had alcohol, but these vendors were Christmassing it up by serving it in little chocolate cups. After one vendor confirmed that the chococups were dairy-free, I had to get one.
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you can see I tried to just eat the chocolate but then realized that wasn’t going to work |
The ginja (for short) wasn’t my favorite match for a little cup of chocolate (that would be peanut butter) but it was nice to get chocolate and an experience in one go.
The festive spirit spread all over town, with amusement parks popping up in the center and art installations or what have you, I’m not really sure what to call it but there were THINGS and we walked INTO THEM like this cool jawn:
so pretty right but what to call it? an inside out xmas tree? cool cool cool
Although strolling and chilling are great, we did have a list of things to do and see in Funchal. First up was the Madeira Botanical Garden. It’s open to the public now but was previously part of an estate belonging to William Reid, the founder of Funchal’s premiere hotel, Reid’s Palace, which you can stay in if you are Jeff Bezos I guess. (#billionairesareinherentlyimmoralandshouldntexist) It’s fancy and expensive like a real lot, is what I’m saying. Anyway the Botanical Garden, or in Portuguese the Jardim Botanico da Madeira (much better if only because I love the word ‘jardim’ for garden a) it sounds prettier and b) it sounds like what happens when my mom tries to say Javier Bardem too quickly) is a great place to explore on a sunny afternoon. Funchal, and Madeira in general, has an exorbitant number of beautiful gardens to visit, and this one features mainly non-flower specimens like trees and succulents, which sound delicious.
little lizard friend!
all of Eleanor’s files
While it’s cool to be on Madeira but have it look like you’re in Arizona, the Javier Bardem Botanico isn’t my top garden recommendation unless you really like cacti. No, the best garden in Funchal is my favorite place of the whole trip, the Baller Gardens. Oh that’s what I wrote in my notes. It’s apparently actually called the Jardim Tropical Monte Palace.
up in the treetops of the jungle area
Whereas the Jardim Botanico was reminiscent of a desert climate, the Tropical Monty will make you feel like you’re in every other part of the world, from Africa to China to the jungles of South America. It’s an enormous town unto itself, with exotic plants and extravagant design elements that make for an endless maze of mind-blowing views.
you bet i hopped across that !
This sign stands in front of an olive tree that the Romans planted in 300 BC! That’s super long ago! |
Hey super old tree! Did you know Cato (obvs I mean Cato the Elder) |
like a scene out of a GOTTAMN FAIRY TALE
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These pictures show maybe half the grounds. It goes on forever and I highly recommend leaving a whole afternoon to explore and relax. There’s even a whole museum of Zimbabwean sculptures on the grounds!
Both of the gardens I’ve shared are located to the east of the city center, and they’re both up Monte Funchal. And when they say Monte, they mean Monte, as in, the top of a mountain. All of Madeira is very, shall we say, bumpy, so you need to plan how you get to the outskirts of the city center. We took a local bus to the Jardim Botanico, and it was a harrowing journey. It’s bad enough when you’re trying to navigate those super narrow cliff-face roads going round and round and round and hoping no opposing traffic comes. It’s worse when you are doing this on a big public bus. Man alive!
Happily, we had a different plan for the Tropically Monty, as I call my new fave place. Funchal has a cable car, and it goes from the center directly to the grounds of the Tropical Monte Palace! We love a good cable car or funicular, but this one is EXTRA. Funchal’s teleferico, as its called, is one of the longest ones in the world, with a ride over the gorge of 15 minutes! It doesn’t sound like a whole lot but it feels like a whole lot when you are that high about mountain crevices. Luckily the views distracted me from the impending sense of doom.
We picked out a lot of ‘future houses’ on these rides up and down! How cool would it be to have a lovely little terracoota roofed home on the side of a cliff with NO NEIGHBORS MAKING NOISE sigh that’s the life.
At the top of the Monte Palace (Monty Hall?) there’s a cafe and fortunately the only thing I could make out was vegan is also the best thing: fried semolina wedges. It was the perfect little snack before all the gardening.
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why yes i DO have a bomb appetite |
Not everything was perfectly loverly though. We did a thing that seemed like The Thing To Do so we did it, but it was Not the Thing For Me. I’m talking about a whale-watching boat tour. The boat, the company, the accommodations all were great. But. Apparently I get seasick! I enjoyed the amazing views for about 20 minutes and then I spent the remaining hours bent over the side of the boat. SO GROSS. So not fun. At least I wasn’t the only one; we were dropping like flies. The worst part is that we didn’t see any whales! Booo-arf!
boats are monsters
my main view
But one unfortunate experience of the trip is still a pretty great ratio, and now I know that boat tours are my enemies. And we still have so much to talk about! Namely, lodging and, namelier, food! That’ll be the next post. Until then, my dear-a! DO YOU GET IT.
