Nursing a thimble-sized cappuccino, I
am huddled over my journal under one of the very few instances of
shade in existence at 11AM on the Croatian island of Brac. Lush but
fruitless grape vines have ambled up the rustic, stone wall next to
me. Just beyond them glistens the Adriatic sea several boats have
saddled up to the shore, simultaneously unloading wares from the
mainland and haggling passersby to accept a boat tour or excursion.
And, in the midst of it all, I find myself smoking a cigarette, or
rather the equivalent thereof, thanks to the two stocky old men
sitting just upwind of my table, deep in conversation about what
appears to be a business contract they have spread on the table
between them. They have smoked at least three or four since I sat
down here a half hour ago for a sumptuous broccoli omelet.
Ordinarily, I would have requested another table long ago, or taken
the opportunity to put The Look to good practice. But in this part of
the world, which (surprisingly even more than Germany) seems to be
unaware of the Surgeon General, one would be walking around all day
to find a refuge from cigarette smoke, possibly up one of the
gray-stoned, brush strewn mountain sides—and by then you'd have the
garish, Adriatic sun to deal with. It took me this long to find some
decent shade around here. So I will stay—at least until the sun
chases me from this tiny haven of shade, too.
WHY CROATIA?
I have “always wanted to go to”
Croatia. I don't say this very loudly, because there are many places
I have always wanted to visit. Due to current geopolitical
situations, countries closer to the top of my list (right now it
would be nearly impossible to even get a travel visa to Turkey,
Egypt, Syria or Lebanon, for example; and, for some reason, Greece
recently suspended international rail services which makes it
difficult to get in and out by train; Israel will never be without
risk, but I'd at least like to take that risk with The Fiance... And
then there's Russia, but two weeks is unfortunately too short a
duration to complete the transiberian railroad...) So, next on the
list were the Balkans, and more specifically Croatia.
It's hard to say when and why exactly
Croatia even came to be on the Places I Want to See Before I Die
list. Perhaps it was all those hot summer days as a teenager
oscillating, with my youngest brother in tow, between swimming laps
at the old YMCA and lazing around the air-conditioned Oshkosh Public
Library just one street over from the Y. It was then that I would
feed my penchant for languages by perusing the generous foreign
language holdings at the library that consisted of countless cd-sets
and phrase books in every language I could imagine, all the way from
Albanian to... Zimbabwish. (That is not actually a language, but I
couldn't think of anything else that ended in “Z”--but if there
were such a language, the
Oshkosh Public Library would probably have a phrase book of it.) For
whatever reasons, the books on Croatia are still the most memorable
to me. In particular, there was a brand new cd-set packed with a
delicious glossy box-cover of a gleaming blue sea and mountainous
coastline dotted with tiny villages. If
I actually committed any Croatian to memory, I don't remember any of
it now. I do, though, remember listenin to the cd's—not to remember
the language, but to comfort myself that other people existed, other
languages and cultures. Sort of like the flagging of faith listen to
beautiful music or the melodic silence of peaceful places in order to
remind themselves of the presence of God in a noisy, distracting
world. I listened to the cd's, too, to connect the dots of the world,
to compare Croatian to the cultures I already knew. To do this, I had
to determine how it was both like and unlike other cultures I already
knew about. The language, for example, was slavic—like Russian—but
unlike Russian they do not use the Cyrillic alphabet (sort of like
the Polish, I figured). Unlike Russia or Poland, though, the
Croatians have a highly maritime culture, thanks to the obscenely
long coastline they got after Yugoslavia broke up (look on a map,
it's absolutely ridiculous. Poor Bosnia Herzegovina, Slovenia, and
Albania). Like Italy, their heritage is predominatley Catholic with
very little influences of Protestantism (or Orthodoxy, as I now know,
despite the fact that all its Balkan neighbors are predominately
Orthodox). And like so many other places in the Balkans, the
Croatians have been threatened over the centuries by marauding Turks,
Italians, and other colonial powers. Yet unlike the rest of their
other Balkan neighbors, Croatia seen less internal civil division.
That
is what the glossy cd-set taught me. My knowledge of this part of the
world has expanded somewhat over the years, through my BA in
interntional studies as well as preparing for this trip. But as I sit
here, sipping my tiny little cappuccino and gazing out from
underneath a giant restaurant umbrella and whithering pine tree over
the rippling little waves of the sea, for
a moment I wonder if I am really here, or if I am simply back in my
fifteen-year-old self, gazing at an obscure box cover in the cozy old
public library. And then the moment ends, when I realize I must
be n Croatia—the Oshkosh
library, after all, used their air conditioning liberally. Even if it
was ten or fifteen degrees fahrenheit cooler than it is in Croatia.
A
CHANGE OF PLANS. As is
usually the case, living out a childhood dream does not often come to
pass without any number of struggles and trials along the way. What
should have been a 13-hr train journey here turned into a three day
debacle that began with a surprise downpour at 5 AM, only a 10
minutes after leaving my apartment to get to the Wolfenbuettel train
station. Apparently, the cheap duffle bag I'd bought for the journey
is made of biodegradable material, as I deduced when the whole thing
appeared to dissolve and fall apart three minutes after it started
raining. In total, the
otherwise pleasant train trip to the Adriatic coast ended up
consisting of missing one train, getting on the wrong train and
realizing it three hours later when we arrived in Ulm instead of
Munich.
MUNICH.
Due to
my disembowled luggage, missing a train, and getting on the wrong
train, when I finally made it to Munich, the German rail company
totally rerouteded my traveling itinerary to get me on my way to
Croatia. What should have been a 13-hr, pleasant train trip all the
way from Wolfenbuettel through eastern Europe and over the Croatian
border turned into a 3 day journey laced togetehr by two overnight
trips (#1 from Munich → Zagreb and #2 from Zagreb → Split,
Croatia). In between these train trips, I
got to work off my
over-exhaustion by exploring
Munich, Zagreb (Croatia) and
Split (Croatia).
Munich,
I discovered, is the dirtiest, most touristy and overpopulated city
in Germany. Having come from tiny old Wolfenbuettel, I felt like
there were people and noises EVERYWHERE, and green space NOWHERE. I
spent most of the day walking down side streets and wandering in and
out of the many churches and Cathedrals there. I also found a new
duffel
bag (this time with wheels!) for 20 Euro in Munich, whose streets
were lined with import stores, mostly owned by Muslims of various
nationalities. I especially like the Turks, they can be a lot of fun.
In the end, my Euro ended up going to a particularly peristant and
burly Turkish man, who boasted about the biggest handlebar mustache
I'd ever seen before.
I nee
“I
am on my way to Croatia, and my first duffle bag has already fallen
apart,” I told him sourly. “Will this one fall apart, too?”
“No,
no!” He waved his hands passionately. “No, not dees bag. Dees bag
very goo—ood! Llast forever!”
“Then
why is it only twenty Euro?” I asked him.
“Because
I no cheat my customers. I geeve you lifetime warranty. You no like
bag, you come back and I geeve you new.”
“But
I can't come back, that's why I said—I'm going to Croatia,” I
pretended to be angry. He seemed to think about that for a while,
then smiled.
“Ah,”
he smiled, his white-handle bar mustache brimming with pride. “Then,
you keep. Have nice trip.”
St. Paul's Catholic Church with Subway, Munich
MUNICH
→ ZAGREB, CROATIA. After a long, hot day of haggling with Turks and
finding side streets to rest from the crazy tourists of Munich, I was
looking forward to what I'd hoped would be a restful night en route—I
almost always sleep well on trains, with that luring rhythm of rail
on rail. Alas, God must have had other plans, that evidently had
something to do with strengthening my moral character, because I was
granted the extreme pleasure sharing a six-person cabin with seven
other people, including a
screaming, old Croatian woman who kept trying to speak broken Italian
with everyone at the top of her lungs. When
this strategy of making friends failed, she
moved to another: waking us
all up at 3AM in order to disseminate a shopping bag full of
dubiously half-melted German
chocolates.
My
first day setting food on Croatian soil was not only the first day of
a fast in our Orthodox calendar, it was also the one month
anniversary of Croatia joining the EU on 01 July 2013. As
I pulled my bag off the train, I was greeted by the friendly
light of the sun and
the dirtiest train
platform
I'd ever seen—a
juxtaposition the intrigued me. Juxtapositions just followed me, for
as I entered the station, I found walls plastered in graffiti,
and in the center of the main
hall an immense bazaar of
used Croatian books.
The
first goal was to exchange my Euro for Croat Kunae. I found a desk
the station with a picture of Euro, Dollar and Kuna signs and had
something in Croatian that looked like a currency exchange. But when
I got to the front of the line, the woman explained they no
longer—she pointed through the large windows outside the train
station, to a green park across the street.
“There.
Shopping center,” she explained. “They change your money there
now, in shopping center. Not here.”
After
locking my luggage in a locker, I brought my Euros and a change of
clothes with me. I walked around the park for over a half hour,
looking at several vendors selling berries and about three kiosks
selling newspapers. Unless the Croatian kuna were code word for wild
blackberries, none of them looked like they were equipped to change
Euros. I needed a coffee and a piece of breakfast bread, I couldn't
think straight. Back in the trainstation bakery, I explained my
predicament to the clerk as she made me a cappuccino with plenty of
froth. She smiled, and handed me my coffee.
“Yes,
across street. In shopping center,” She said.
“You
mean, in the kiosks? All I see are newspapers and berries. And a
park,” I explained, grasping the coffee with true gratitude in my
heart. The lady chuckled. She thought of how to explain something in
English.
“No,
you no understand,” she gestured with her hands towards the floor.
Had she dropped my bread? “The shopping center... On the floor! No,
under the floor.”
I
looked at the floor.
“Oh,
underground!” I
said. She nodded, as though all shopping centers were underground.
“Go, walk around park. You find the way there. It is under park.
You see. VERY big.”
Well,
I walked around the park for nearly an hour, not quite sure what I
was looking for. A sign of some sort would have been a logical guess,
but none of the signs seemed to say anything about a shopping center.
I wondered if it would be something like an intergalactic portal,
because I didn't really know what those looked like, and I probably
would miss it even if it slapped me on the face. I asked two people I
heard speaking English, but they were looking for the same thing. I
asked a beggar on a bench, but he didn't know English. Finally, I
stumbled upon a set of stairs—no sign, no markation of any kind,
nothing in its appearance that would suggest that beneath these
stairs lay one of the biggest and most modern shopping experiences I
ever expected to find underneath a picturesque, baroque park.
When
I finally located the exchange booth, I experienced an even greater
miracle than finding the shopping mall: my Euro were exchanged at a
rate even more favorable than the one online, for no fee. I loved
Croatia already.
The
second over night train found me in a cabin with a much more pleasant
crowd; directly across from me in the cabin sat a woman who was
probably about my age but who had a wise look about her eyes that
made her seem older, and though she never spoke to anyone, everytime
I startled in my sleep, I could see her face in the moonlit cabin,
smiling at me with a comforting and motherly look that made me fall
back asleep. Next to me was an old, tanned skin Italian? man who had
brought his young grandson on a trip. At the beginning of the
journey, he blew up a tiny inflatable pillow and made a bed for the
grandson out of both their seats. Tucking the boy in for the night,
he chirped a little song in a melodic Italian dialect, said some
prayers, and crossed his grandson with his own hands just as the
boy's eyes were drifting shut into sleep. He then stood the entire
journey, pacing in front of the open window in the hallway, and every
five or ten minutes sat on the edge of the boy's “bed,” and just
stared at him lovingly while he slept.
Had it
not been for a highly
expressive and disgruntled poodle
in the cabin next to ours, and the even equally
expressive and disgruntled
Croatians of various other cabins (who
felt the need to bellow
obscenities at aforementioned poodle periodically throughout the
night),
and the even MORE disgruntled train security guard (who,
by the ominous force of his
own loud voice, frequently
attempted to stifle the
breakout of civil war between
aforementioned Croatians and aforementioned poodle),
this second overnight train ride would have probably engulfed me with
the simplicity of human love and care that can be observed in simple
strangers. In a lot of ways,
I witnessed the best and the worst ends of the human-compassion
spectrum. I decided I hated
overnight trains, but that I wouldn't stop taking them, because where
else can you witness all of this weird loveliness.
And,
finally, yesterday, I got to the city of Split—on the coast of the
Adriatic sea. All that was left was an evening ferry ride to the
island of Braç,
where I'd be staying.
For now, though, I had the whole day to explore the ruins of
Diocletian's palace, built in the 4th
century, and boil alive in the positively indescribable Croatian
heat. Speaking of heat, it is really picking up here. The burly
Croatian men have long taken their business dealings and cigarettes
elsewhere, my cappuccino has long been sipped to emptiness, and I
haven't even gone swimming in the sea yet. So, goodbye for now!
