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<\/p>\nNo river valleys today! We went hiking on Velika Planina, a mountain plateau covered mostly in pastureland and cows. A complete change in scenery. And we didn’t even have to climb the hill to get up there – a cable car did the work for us. At 50 EUR for a family, the cable car ticket price seemed rather steep, and I was actually considering finding an alternative hike for today. 50 EUR just to be allowed to walk! But I’m glad we went with this option after all, because the scenery up there was quite unique.<\/p>\n
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The plateau with its gentle rolling hills made for easy walking. The sun was bright but we got a lot of wind, so for the first time in a week we were actually not hot at all.<\/p>\n
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Velika Planina has several old herder settlements with shingled huts.<\/p>\n
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Cows were mingling freely with the tourists and barely even curious about us.<\/p>\n
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One of the huts hosted a museum, which was closed today for some reason. Several had simple cafes or sold cheese and other milk products. Speaking of cheese, I found these Slovenian cottage cheese pastries that you can apparently buy in most bakeries and supermarkets. The cottage cheese filling reminds me of Estonian kohupiim<\/i>. I’ve been having these as my packed lunch almost every day.<\/p>\n
Speaking of pastries, I only noticed today that the word burek\/b\u00f6rek<\/i> (“filled filo dough pastry” in various places around the Balkans and the Middle East) is strikingly similar to pirog\/pirukas<\/i> (“filled pastry” in Estonian, Russian, Swedish etc). Do they have the same origin? Harden the B, soften the K, and you’re there. I went down a deep Internet rabbit hole to figure out whether that’s the case, and people on the internet have had some very passionate debates about the origins of both words, but I guess nobody really knows for sure. In any case, the Slovenian cottage cheese burek<\/i> are delicious.<\/p>\n
![](\"\/helen\/blog\/images\/daily_3\/2744_burek.jpg\")
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Back to the plateau and its huts! One of the buildings was a beautiful wooden chapel. The gateway of the chapel was decorated with two spruce trees, stripped of bark and branches all the way except for the very top. Eric had noticed a similar tree while driving, so it’s not just some tourist thing here on Velika Planina. I asked around, and a Slovenian colleague tells me they’re called mlaj<\/a> and put up for celebrations – traditionally for May Day (like a version of the maypole I guess) but more recently also for birthdays and weddings. <\/p>\n For those with tired legs, there was a two-seat chairlift between the cable car station and the top of the hill. (There’s a ski resort here during winter.) We walked, though, and actually kept pace with the chairlift. Adrian might have voted for the chairlift, had it had more than two seats so that we could all have sat together.<\/p>\n No river valleys today! We went hiking on Velika Planina, a mountain plateau covered mostly in pastureland and cows. A complete change in scenery. And we didn’t even have to climb the hill to get up there – a cable car did the work for us. At 50 EUR for a family, the cable car […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[633,18,775,745,773,768,11,779],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adrian","category-dailies","category-eric","category-food_and_cooking","category-outdoors","category-photography-2","category-travels","category-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15960"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15960\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15967,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15960\/revisions\/15967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"\/helen\/blog\/images\/daily_3\/2744_Velika_Planina_8.jpg\")
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