Thirsty travelers in the Dolomites

People say dehydration is a dangerous thing. With hours and hours of skiing also comes thirst and one has to take care of it. As a consequence of that, last week we drank many liters of liquid every day. But just like the Thirsty traveler on Travel Channel, we couldn't miss the opportunity to taste some of the local beverages. Mostly alcoholic ones. We had to be very careful though - skiing and alcohol don't go together well.

There were loads of various home distilled fruit products (prugna, fichi, genziano), many kinds of beers (we loved a German Franziskaner Weissbier), wines (Chianti, Cabernet and Cabernet Frank), vin brulè (hot wine), various hot chocolate and egg-nog cocktails with funny names (Bombardino, Civettino and Caramelino).
I have tasted and liked almost every one of the mentioned beverages. There was only one exception – genziano. That is a gentian-flavoured alcoholic drink, which I would dare to say is the bitterest thing on this planet.

In case if the Italians ran out of alcohol, we also brought some with us. We wouldn't go on such a trip without a few liters of Slovenian wine, some pear-schnapps and a couple six-packs of beer. There has to be some strange reason why we have chosen a toast (Zdravljica) for our national anthem.
The above mentioned pear-schnapps is called "Viljamovka" in Slovenian. It is named after a sort of pear. Usually inside of a bottle there is a whole pear. The pear is put in a bottle when still growing and is small enough to slide inside. Then it is left to ripe inside the bottle until it is cut off from the tree.

On the first photo bellow there is a captured moment from the Franziskaner beer drinking, the second shows a bottle of home made Viljamovka schnapps (with a pear still inside). An ice-bar with various kinds of temptations for the Thirsty traveler/skier can be seen on the bottom two photos.