We sped over the border from Italy heading straight for the Istrian peninsula, and the small village of Sveti Petar u Šumi - we'd booked ourselves into an agritourism-style place we'd found on the internet, where they said they could teach us all about the local cuisine.  Sadly, this meant completely ignoring Slovenia (well, we stopped for lunch) - we'll have to go back.  On the up-side, it meant more time in Istria, supposedly the gastronomic centre of this side of the Adriatic. 

We didn't quite know what to expect from Istria (or Croatia in general in fact).  We knew there'd been a lot of Italian influence in the past (and the architecture on the Slovenian coast certainly looked like Venice to us) - but was this still true?  And looking at the map, we also weren't far from where we'd been in Hungary all those months back.  Or would it remind us of Slavic Bulgaria?  Or even Turkey - the Ottomans got this far at one stage.  We were keen to find out ...