Croatian Journal; German Vegetables

January 16, 2008 Dubrovnik, Croatia. Cloudy but nice. Windy. Rain earlier but dry when we were finally out of the hotel. 10-12 Celsius is my guess. Dark at 5pm. We arrived yesterday after an uneventful morning in Frankfurt; up at 7:15, packed, paid and out the door at 8:05, 500 meters with the luggage in hand to the hauptbahnhof (main train station), the S9 to the airport, seamless check in, half full flight, land, luggage, met by Nikola the taxi driver, deposited w/out fanfare at Hilton Imperial just outside of D-old town. First thing I noticed was the clouds and the rock strewn hills behind and above the airport, dominating the inland skyline with little else in view. It is….just rocks, reminiscent of Cortina D'Ampezzo in Italy. Then the sea on the left, with occasional islands as we wound along the coast. Quite dramatic. The hotel has a nice surprise for us, upgrading our room and including free access to the executive lounge, conveniently located practically next door. Our room is excellent, nice sized with a side view out to the ocean, a comfy king sized bed, and a spotless marble bathroom. We can have breakfast in the lounge or more formally downstairs, but also they serve hard liquor and wine from the afternoon and also bottled water is also on the house here. Also, some decent food…..we are thinking of just eating what they offer tonight! Yesterday we wandered the old town for 2-3 hours. Impressions: the old city is mostly very clean and gridded, so easy to negotiate. However, it is hard to describe places and streets because the spelling and pronunciation is so alien to anything either of us know that it is hard to remember. Anja said she was impressing things 'visually' for that reason; it is hard to process them any other way. There are elements of Rome (lots of cats) and Italian hill towns here. Steep little streets to the left of the main drag, with a mix of restaurants and shops to accompany the neighborhood. To the right more residential and more obvious damage from the bombing of 1991. From points of elevation it is easy to see what buildings have been reroofed and which haven't; the old, multi-colored tiles (not many left) echoing the buildings not important enough or not enough damaged in the bombardment. Much of this residential area has another smell sadly redolent of some old Italian homes….that of wet cat, and of cat excrement, which is found quite often underfoot. Not so many dogs here, but the cats wander everywhere. Lots of black, white, and spotted black, white and ginger felines. Since the old city is so full of rock, with few areas for gardens and no fields of note, it is not hard to imagine why the excrement is so obvious….they have very little dirt to hide it in! The main drag and the massive wall surrounding the old city (which we investigated today) are both spotless; the latter is also undergoing substantial work. The wall is wonderful and gives views up the hill, out to the ocean, and over the entire interior of the city. It is also a typical example of Europe versus America; in America the wall probably wouldn't be open at all because of the possibility of accidents, or if it were it would be protected by 8 feet of chicken wire. Here there are innumerable opportunities for a careless adult or child to kill or maim themselves. You have to take responsibility for yourself, something that America's litigious society just doesn't get. Here if you can't take care of yourself or do something stupid and kill yourself, that's it…your whole extended family doesn't get to retire for the next five generations on the lawsuit. It is clearly a Mediterranean climate here; everywhere are orange and lemon trees laden with fruit---some of it tantalizingly close to the wall/former battlement as you wander by staring down into backyards and into bedrooms. The TV here is fun to watch; for example: Friends, with Croatian subtitles. During the day I have caught a little of the Aussie Tennis Open, but at night it is thrilling Polish and Croatian women's volleyball pretty much non-stop, with some riveting English snooker championship thrown in for filler. As an aside, Germany was even worse….day after day of a combination of ski jumping (how many ski jumps in a row can one watch?) and the cross country ski stand and shoot then ski, then lie down and shoot team and individual championships…equally tiresome. The unit of currency here is the Kuna. The Kuna is worth about 20 cents U.S. and is 1:7+ versus the Euro. But the name makes me laugh. It doesn't seem like a serious name for a national currency. Today a girl came up to me in a hotel lobby (we had stopped to look in and at the view) and offered us tea and unlimited side dishes for only….50 Kuna! It shouldn't be funny but it is; what is that in seashells or sticks? Anja and I ask ourselves many of the same questions (after all, we are on a voyage of discovery….to discover new places and in so doing discover where we want to live)…..could either of us live here? We like some aspects of it, but the answer for both of us is a strong no. A little too parochial, a little too 'just touristy'. A little too 'eng' (a German term meaning 'tight' and in this context referring both to the lack of space but also to the dearth of things to do, and that there are only a couple of roads to get back and forth). Which often leads us to add commentary to Anja's vaunted and much bandied 'Alpine' theory which posits that mountain areas are cleaner, have less unemployment and fewer homeless, than the lowlands. A new wrinkle to the primary thesis is that beach communities are usually among the dirtiest areas with the highest number of obvious slackers. Outside the Old Town this does indeed seem to come into play, with more garbage and graffiti and less attention to cleanliness. Why so? The Old Town is largely an exception given it has to be clean to attract the tourists (and there aren't many of them to attract this time of year), but warm beaches attract people of all stripes who want to relax, and people who want to relax don't concentrate on being clean but rather on relaxing and so they leave things lying about while they are sunning themselves. Or so our theory goes. Neither of us is a beach goer (for long) and we both like things pretty clean, so it is the mountains we are most interested in; plus, the hiking is better. While we push forward on our journey the stock markets around the world are tumbling at a pretty alarming rate—the U.S. indexes off to their worst start, according to some news reports I saw, since 1931. I am not surprised, but also not alarmed (though maybe I should be, I have taken lots of risk off the table in order to be ready for what I hope to be a once in a generation type of opportunity when the excesses have been beaten out and some blood trickles into the gutters). Oh, joy. January 17, 2008—Dubrovnik—Thursday More of same. In the markets and here with the weather. We sleep in late, which is just as well since the sounds and fury outside make it seem like Dubrovnik is being shelled again. Rain and wind and lightning and thunder, and some of it pretty damn close. Fun. We toddle roadside at noon and take a bus up to Babin Kuk to check out times for our bus to Split (no ferries this time of year) and connection to Brac (say it: Bratch). Then we wander, out and around the marina/port, then back around Lapad (say it however you like; it won't be 100% wrong or right….just don't put the emphasis on the last syllable…ever…or so I am told). The Italian hill sea side town resemblance grows on closer acquaintance with both good and bad connotations; good: the views of the sea and sense of timelessness. Bad: time isn't standing still, and the ugly modern boxes on some of the hills are an alarming eyesore. Also, the many scooters and their 'rice rocket/zanzare' buzz ring bells at both ends of the spectrum (I love them but hate the sounds and smell that come with them). In addition, some of the new hotels going up are massive and massively out of place. It ain't the Spanish coast, yet, but they need to be careful. The sky threatens all day but never opens up after the morning's onslaught, so we just wander and wonder. Discuss the future, the world's business climate and all the usual stuff. Meanwhile the islet runs out to the ocean and we see some of the islands in the gray distance. Daily routines: well, here in Croatia we don't have any. In Germany they were 'misty'. There are a myriad of excuses why so few mornings had a 'plan' but the mitigating circumstances include: it is cold (really fucking cold, and dark) outside, and there is no pressing need….to do anything on any individual day….so we don't sweat almost any of them! There is guilt on my part, because I am not on vacation, and even if this were some (very) long term vacation it is not the way I 'work'—I need some structure in order to feel good about myself, and so far this is mostly lacking. By the bye, sun rise here is around 8:30 and sunset at 4:15; it is night after 5pm. Back to Germany Kohl: and I don't mean Helmut. German is the land, as Adin puts it, of breakfast meat. Here in winter it is also the land of Kohl…Rotkohl (red cabbage), Blumenkohl(cauliflower), Weisskohl (?-the chief ingredient in cole slaw/Kohl/Kraut Salat ), Rosenkohl (brussel sprouts), Grunkohl (some kind of weisskraut). Kohl = cabbage = kraut. Two Krauts make Krauter (rhymes with goiter). One harvests different kinds of Kohl, which are basically cabbages, and processes them into cold salads and warm (Sauer)Kraut. But Krauter, meaning for instance a salad made from two different kinds of Kraut, is also the name for herbs. So, be careful what you ask for. The most important thing to know is that all forms of this winter vegetable, and make no mistake Kraut in all its redoubtable forms is the quintessential German winter veggie, give the imbiber tremendous wind…as in, intestinal gas. You are warned. As a last aside, in the hands of good cooks it is also really tasty. January 21, 2008—9:20 am. On the Croatian island of Brac, off the coast from Split. Just awake after almost 11 hours of interrupted but mostly not uncomfortable sleep. Yesterday was bright, sunny and in the teens, as they say hereabouts. We got a late start (well, Anja did) and left our 'efficiency' at 11:30 after experiments in making coffee and toast on our 2nd world appliances. So far today it is a 'white out'; I can see the water just now thru the window but it just disappears into nothingness. Maybe they changed the rules whilst we slumbered. We arrived on the 19th at 6pm to discover we are virtually alone in our sprawling complex of hotel, resort and fractional ownership establishments. It is extremely weird and more than a little off-putting; think Lady in the Water combined with Hitchcock and Tom Tryon…..looks somewhere near idyllic but who knows what is underneath all those glances and impenetrable grunts. Paranoia is inevitable when we don't understand almost everything. We don't know if they are talking about us right in front of us. Every laugh we can hear is ever so slightly chilling. Perhaps they all want to know how we'll taste. Friday was: pack, taxi (leaving Federer on serve in the middle of the fifth set of a terrific match against Tipsarevic), 4 hours of sparsely populated bus, ferry, taxi. The ferry was best as we got to watch the sun set slowly in the south west as we departed Split; it was completely dark as the Jadrolinja ship Marjan pulled into our new home port. The 80 Kuna taxi ride from Supetar port is forced, because the driver has to take a giant detour around the outside of town to drop us at the Waterman complex, also in Supetar, because of some local ordinance which seems designed - inasmuch as there are plenty of cars lying in the direct route we walked back to town – to separate us from most of the 80 Kuna. Yesterday I got up pretty early, after a hellish night. Some part of the previous day's journey had done something to my back and nothing was comfortable. It was a combination of sharp pain and then a spreading ache and then more sharp pain for 7-8 hours. I walked completely alone to the local not so supermarket where I obtained part of a loaf of bread, a months worth of butter, jam, coffee, little disks of sahne for the coffee, some joghurt, fruit, and other essentials. It was Sunday but some men were working on the little road just making a stone fence/wall on the property. As Anja says, this time of year basically seems just prep work for the summer orgy of tourists. Even more so than Dubrovnik, there are a lot of shuttered businesses…..and nobody like us. We have hardly heard any German or English, or anything but what we assume is Croat. Assume because none of it is familiar or makes any sense. There is no internet access here (well, in the office, for $10.00 and hour, there is some connection) in the room, which is why this is currently being written on Word. There is quite a lot of difference between 'getting away' and being 'cut off' (and here I don't really mean the internet, just most of the day to day things we are used to and find really convenient). It is also true that we exchanged for this room and everything that it is and that it is not….we exchanged a two bedroom two bath luxurious accommodation in Newport Beach that sleeps 8 in comfort instead of no one comfortably, which has a full kitchen, handy barbeque equipment, three plasma TV's, a state of the art wireless internet connection for free and too many other conveniences to mention…..and also a balcony overlooking the ocean to boot. There is 1200 square feet of ten time's higher quality and more comfortable space as opposed to what we guess to be on the order of 550 of….not very much at all. Blocky furniture, 7 channels of mostly Croatian gibberish (actually hilarious to watch…when I watch German or Italian or French I know I don't understand; here, while hugely unfair, I can't be sure they are making any sense in the first place. No single word has any meaning). I love to talk with everybody and here, even though I have read, and asked the few people who speak English, I can not for the life of me get anyone to respond to my version of 'hi'. Anyway, yes I am disappointed. And while it's nice to not be overrun by other tourists taking all the space on the beach (which I don't want in any case) it is eerie to walk thru the complex without meeting anything except the usual cadre of 'watch cats' (and who knows what they are saying….at least I know they'd eat us given the chance). There are about 20 relevant activities or services listed on the Interval International sheet and just about the only one that we will use is the Coin Laundry (which we are not even sure includes a dryer since all over the island and Dubrovnik hanging to dry seems to be the mantra). As one for instance, there is a swimming pool listed but the only pool gives off the appearance of having been used as a pissoir by the locals since it was closed for the season. And it is weird to come home at night in silent darkness…it wouldn't take much or many to whack us, steal our shit, and use us as the main ingredient for the community bbq night. There are 'bikes' listed, but the only bikes available are in town and there don't appear to be any bike trails (also listed), so unless we want to play dodge ball with the local buses we're screwed. Cell phones work, though. We might be able to call for help. But who? At whatever cost I talked to Jaime and Frank yesterday; Jaime is excited about her new classes and Frank is without his best friends again and bored (as usual). Rocks and Quarries. We decided to set off and see if we could find a hill town called Skrip. But the tourist office is closed for Sunday so we took our best series of shots (all signage here is pretty useless) and ended up in Splitska (kind of what we're thinking of doing in general) after wandering in a quite beautiful wilderness (after being given directions by a snaggle-toothed local) and then along the shore. Nothing was open in Splitska so we continued to Postira. These are both little 'up from the port' communities with a church or two and locals sitting along the marble quays sipping coffee, beer and the local slivovitz equivalent. And talking about eating us. I just read this to Anja and she smiles and says 'yeah but they're all so friendly and they speak English'….she is so naïve. Everyone knows they used quarried rock from this island to build Diocletian's palace in Split and also the White House in D.C. And, eventually after feasting on a mystery meat goulash in Postira (this was precisely the only dish at the only restaurant) and taking the not so secret way back to Splitska we decided to try to find our way uphill…… Interruption: it is now 9:40 am on Tuesday. Monday was overcast all day which was fine as it turned out for us but not for world stock markets---virtually everything more or less crashed, with the U.S. 'spared' only because it was on holiday (MLK). Today everything is again getting buried and to say the world's economies have 'decoupled' looks to be as much bullshit as I thought. …..to Skrip. According to one local it was 5 klics uphill, and there was a local's way but it was too tough to find and impossible to explain. We find that a lot, along with an appalling lack on the islander's part to really know how far things are. It is a bit more than 3 klics, and though indeed uphill hardly a death march. It took us by two played out quarries and we did find a short cut and at the top a clearly marked pedestrian path down to Splitska. Meanwhile, lots of rocks…underfoot, made into walls and formed into cairns or looking like the huegelgraben in and around Marburg. Also reminiscent of the catacombs of Paris where large bones are stacked next to the path to form a kind of wall and the smaller bones are tossed over them to molder in stygian darkness behind; here the big rocks are laid to form somewhat circular barriers and then the smaller stones are thrown inside….when internal pressures or time force the issue the barriers bleed out like water. We often stared up hills and across valleys…..rocks everywhere. More rock in Skrip (you get the idea), a small town with a kind of causeway with no verges on the road to the church. Groups of men having beer and smoking (yes, they all smoke and still do in bars and restaurants…..an unwelcome reminder of how it used to be) and up under the lee of the church a throng competing on the parish bocce pitch. They all stared a bit and muttered, but what it was they muttered would have been unintelligible in any language. Behind the church we did have one grand moment, walking out to vista point (unmarked, just lucky) that gave a panoramic view way down to a cultivated valley, across that to more olive groves and impossible rock walls and formations, and back over our left shoulders across the strait to the mainland and Split or the towns leading to it along our previous bus path. This was a short visit as, nice as the day was, it was getting cooler and the sun was going down and we had miles to go. So, back down the hill, forsaking what I think would have been a likely shortcut for the surety of a known path (getting lost in the darkness on ankle unfriendly country goat paths was unappealing to both of us) to within half a klic of Splitska and then left along what rapidly became a dark road with no lights for the last 5 klics to Supetar. Which in itself was quite dangerous because the cars came very quickly and were all over the completely unlighted road and it was not safe for us to move all the way over but also not safe to move off the road because often as not there a drop and no way to see it. We were quite happy to make it back to 'S' unscathed. We dined at a restaurant Anja had remembered reading about, and walked home, in darkness and dew, a bit after 7pm, having completed something like 25 klics in all. Showers seemed in order. Anja got things going, but they didn't go long. I had hoped we were plugged into mains, but sadly this was not the case. There is, now we noticed it, a tiny water heater over the toilet and when it's gone, all too fast, it doesn't come back for hours, if ever. After waiting half an hour with the meter not budging and me getting even colder, we called our lifeline, Sabina. There wasn't much she could do so she ended up giving us the key to the unit next door and there I went for an equally unsatisfactory wash after locking Anja in, peeking in every cupboard in my place and then locking myself in, then showering while imagining scenes from Frenzy or Psycho and eventually running out of hot/warm water before the meter said I would so by the time I was done I was pretty miserable. But, at least we had had some good exercise and, fitfully, we slept a very long time. Yesterday was Monday and we got up late and strolled into town while trying to formulate some plan for the week. We asked enough questions to make ourselves unwelcome at the mostly friendly but useless tourist info office, then looked into renting a car, then grabbed some sandwiches for lunch, got some food for dinner (having decided to try to eat in) and set off along the coast the other direction. Our destination was the little, and unmentioned, town of Mirca (Meer'-tsa). Getting there was uneventful (coastal path, lots of trees and rocks, Split visible across the gray water), the town presentable by the water and more interesting across the 'big' road uphill with more of what we had seen elsewhere with the locals burning brush and sprucing up the olive orchards, repairing rock walls and generally puttering and building. Not bad. And then we got a break when some workers asked us in passable English if we wanted/needed 'informations'. So, we chatted the three of them up and got some directions for our next big hike, to Milna via Lozisca (Lo-zhish'-cha) and Bobovisca (Bo-bo-vish'-cha)1 and 2 (there's a coastal 'B' and an uphill 'B'). Of course, earlier in the day the less than useful tourist info person had opined there were no country paths possible in that direction. We thanked them profusely and wove our way along another path thru town, back in what we correctly perceived was the right direction to 'S' and the coast and back to our apartment. To have wine and cheese and grapes and prosciutto and coffee and the last of the Ritter Sport 'Dunkle Voll-Nuss'. No Michelin stars but not bad at all! That was all done pretty early so we watched our one English channel/lifeline (CNN) give us the Monday market meltdown news and OZ open updates (Federer thru to the quarters in straight sets). Then it was off to bed but as was the case two nights earlier not much sleep, both of us tossing and turning and alternately getting up and reading, drinking a bit of water and visiting the loo.