Now I should first explain that for whatever reason, Chris and I fell into a rather relaxed — read lazy — pattern that whole week in Trieste. We didn’t go to any museums, but rather spent most of our days trying different cafes, in the morning for coffee, in the evening for aperitivos. In between the cafes our main adventure each day was to wander around, see the city, and above all else find a restaurant in which to have lunch.

One day we decided to try to find a restaurant that one of Chris’ former colleagues had recommended. Before we left the apartment that morning, we opened the website page for the restaurant in the Internet browser on our iPad, so we’d have the address and a map to find it as we walked through town. We then stopped — as usual — at a coffee bar for a morning coffee, and we took out the iPad to check the address as we were sipping our coffee.

But … we couldn’t get view the page we’d left open on the iPad back int he apartment, because the iPad insists on reloading it, even if it’s already been loaded, and even if you’re not connected to the Internet. Which means that the page just displays as an error page, since it can’t reload, since you’re not connected to the internet.  That’s a most maddening design flaw, IMHO.

However, all was not lost. The barista at the coffee bar was friendly, so we asked her if she’d heard of the restaurant and knew where it was, since it was (we thought) fairly close by, we just didn’t remember the address exactly. And what do you know, she did indeed know exactly where it was,  and she kindly gave us directions to it.

But then, as we were leaving, she slipped us a business card for another place, saying that if the one we’d asked her about didn’t work out , we could try her friend’s place, as it was very good (she said). Hmm, do you trust a recommendation like that? It’s always hard to know if you’re just being lured into a “friend’s” place that will turn out to be touristy and not very good.

But we thanked her in any case and set off on our way. Following her directions to our original target, we easily found the restaurant — which turned out to be closed on Sundays.

Did I mention this was a Sunday? Right. Argh.

Ah well. All was still not lost. We pulled the business card from the barista’s friend’s place, since maybe that needed to be an option after all. However,  when we tried to find the street for the friend’s place on on our little tourist map of Trieste, the street wasn’t on the map. And we hadn’t gotten directions to that place from the barista.

Double-argh.

So our only option at that point was just  wandering  around a bit, hoping to chance upon another restaurant that was open on a Sunday. We walked for a few minutes before spying sign sign for a restaurant “near the oldest Roman arch in Trieste.” Sounds interesting, eh?  The sign’s map wasn’t exactly accurate, so we wandered around some backstreets for about 10 more minutes before finally finding that Roman arch (shown in yesterday’s post); the restaurant was to the right of the arch. The restaurant door was open, but when we went in it turned out that they weren’t serving lunch that day.

However, we had another plan. During that 10 minutes of wandering we’d noticed that a restaurant called “Osteria No” was open, so we decided to go back to find it.  However, with all the twists and turns we’d taken, we wound up taking a slightly wrong turn. But, once we realized that, we decided to  keep going, figuring we could intersect the “No” street we wanted another way, rather than having to retrace all of our steps.

As we approached where we needed to take a right turn to go to No, we passed the back entrance for what was clearly a cafe. We decided to take a left (instead of the right) to check  out the cafe, as we were building up quite an appetite what with all the wandering around.

On the downside, turning left brought us to the front of the cafe, and showed us that it was really just a glorified coffee bar and not an option for lunch.

On the upside, though, turning left brought us another street. We read the street sign and, lo and behold, we had just stumbled onto the street that the barrista friend’s restaurant was on! The street that hadn’t been on our map! Amazing. Although we still had reservations about the way we’d gotten the recommendation, we decided to take a chance on it and went in for lunch.

And…. it was by far the best meal we had in Trieste! The owners were wonderful and very friendly. The woman gave us the menu “a voce” (i.e., verbally, not written down), and as Chris commented to me later, we actually were fairly Italian, in that we listened to the menu and immediately made our choices; that’s not something we usually do that quickly, even though it was what we saw Italians do all the time.

For the wine, the guy came over and explained some options, then brought us 3 different ones to taste, so we could try them before we settled on a bottle to buy.

wine from the Serendipitous meal in Triest

Our complete meal:

– Orecchiette pasta (from Puglia) with a sauce of orata (sea bream) and calamari (squid). Outstanding!
– Orata (sea bream) baked in a shredded potato crust. The flavor of the fish under the potato crust was outstanding: juicy and flavorful.
– Wine
– 2 local digestivo drinks to finish

Consider the the high quality and large quantity of the food, it wasn’t even that expensive. We were so full we had no room for dessert. But on the way back to the hotel we did manage to stop at yet another coffee bar and happened to have one of the best espressos of the trip. A marvelous end to our accidental afternoon adventure on a Sunday in Trieste.

BTW, I meant what I said above. It really was the “mother” of all serendipity, as it wasn’t just any Sunday. It was Mother’s Day.

So maybe it’s not so much of a surprise today to be reviewing my photos and realizing that our best memories of Trieste were all from unexpectedly serendipitous moments.

For example,

1. We happened to arrive in town just in time to take in the sunset by the water:
   

   Sunset, Trieste, May 2015

2. While walking near the biggest plaza in town we focussed more on some unexpectedly interesting jelly fish instead of the buildings:
   

   Jelly Fish Photo #2, Trieste

3. Our vacation apartment was unexpectedly huge and decorated with pop art, which was fun. It also had one of the few tiny balconies in the building, so that was a nice surprise:
   

   The Friendly Tourist standing on our balcony, Triieste

   As a side benefit, our favorite coffee spot in town turned out to be the one on the ground floor of that same building – very handy.

4. Speaking of coffee — which is a reasonable thing to speak of, since Trieste is actually famous for its coffee — we stopped at a randomly picked place downtown one morning for a coffee. While the coffee was good, what was more interesting was the street performance happening down the block. Forget what you know about dancing in the streets —  these women were ballerinas:
   

   Ballet Dancers on the streets of Trieste

5. In the late afternoons we stopped at different cafes for an afternoon drink of some sort. One day we stopped at a place that was in a part of town that wasn’t too touristy. We had a lovely drink as we watched people walk by on their late-afternoon errands:
   

   Aperitivo reflection at a cafe in Trieste

6. On other days we’d go to a pedestrian-only tree-lined street near our hotel, which had many cafes at which to stop and have a beverage or a bite to eat. At the end of that street, we stumbled upon this  interesting two-faced fountain:
   

   Two-Faced Fountain, Trieste

7. During the day, in addition to monumental architecture all over town, we would occasionally come upon the random Roman ruin:
   

   Roman Arch, Trieste

   

   Roman Theatre, Trieste

8. Trieste was known back in the day as a place where writers hung out (in the cafes) to write. One author from Trieste had the pen name Italo Svabo. Svabo in Italian means “Swabian” as his father was from Schwabia (southwestern Germany). That just seemed like an odd coincidence somehow, since we had just spent 3.5 years living in Schwabia. So one day while when we ran across a statue of Svabo, the Friendly Tourist couldn’t resist a photo op:
   

   Two Gentlemen from Schwabia

9. Now there were a couple of serendipitous food things that happened to us in Trieste as well. One story is too long for today’s post, so I’ll do a followup tomorrow about that. However, as a sweet way to round out today’s post, let me tell you about discovering the presnitz. You see, as we walked back to the hotel from that cafe in #5, we just happened to pass by a bakery advertising a local specialty called presnitz. It’s a pastry log filled with nuts and sugar – very tasty. The shape of it can vary, but most often it’s done as a spiral log of some sort.So I found it serendipitous to discover that for this post, where I am sharing 9 marvelously unexpected moments from Trieste, the presnitz we’d happened to buy that day was shaped like this:
   

   Trieste Pastry

Enjoy.

P.S. More from Trieste coming tomorrow…

Let me explain.

To set the stage, here’s a quick look of Trieste from above:

Trieste Harbor Scene, from above

The Piazza Unità d’Italiaa is the central square in Trieste, and is visible in the middle of the above photo at the left end of the long white pier that extends out in to the water.  Here’s a look at it while standing on that pier:

Piazza Unità d’Italia, Trieste, Italy

However, it was when we turned around to look down at the water a little beyond that pier that we spotted an amazing sight: a large group of jellyfish floating gracefully through the water. Here a few I caught in motion:

Jelly Fish Photo #1, Trieste

Jelly Fish Photo #2, Trieste

Jelly Fish Photo #3, Trieste

They were so pretty and such fun to watch! Not a treasure for everyone, perhaps. But definitely an unexpected delight to stumble upon in Trieste.

Our vacation apartment here is quite palatial: the smallest thing they had left when I booked the place 2 months ago was a 1 Bedroom apartment, complete with kitchen, living room, bathroom. And a washing machine – definitely handy! It has Internet, but it’s rather slow, so I think my posting will be sporadic for the next 7 days here, as I coax the Wifi to let me save my post to the Internet.

Anyway, here are some links to some webcams of Trieste (I’ve also added them to the webcams section at the top of the right column on the home page):

1. Piazza Unità d’Italia, Trieste
   — Live Video View
   — Photos taken every hour over the last 24 hours
2. Port of Trieste webcam
3. Piazza della Borsa, Trieste

As always, more to come as often as my Internet access permits. As I mentioned in my last post, you can use the  “subscribe” button under the webcams list in the right-hand column of the home page to receive an email notification when there’s a new post.

For now,  I’ll leave you now with this quick photo taken last night with my cell phone camera just after we arrived near the Port of Trieste.  We’re staying about a 10-15 minute walk from this view of the water, which is a scene very reminiscent to us of Vancouver and always fun to see.

Enjoy.

Sunset, Trieste, Italy