I seem to have lost count of the days at some point, as I could swear that this trip was going to be 63 days in total, and my notes only go through day 56. (I have nothing else enlightening to say about this; I just could not help noting it.)
Of my train ride to Ljubljana I only faintly remember the mountains, hills, and serpentine rivers that we passed, though I believe that I noted the mountains’ being unusually verdant in the foreground and balder, grey with rock, only farther away. The most interesting experience of my train ride was a conversation that I had with a Frenchwoman. We got to talking about the differences in culture between northern and southern Europe. I decried the southerners’ laziness and commitment to lawlessness, while my interlocutor praised their independence and relaxed lifestyle and claimed that the only reason for which Germans follow rules is that they get fined if they do not. She complained that one could no longer smoke where one wanted in France and that, while northerners blindly obey laws, if an Italian does not like them—here she showed her middle finger. We agreed that France had just a touch of this southerly attitude, and I admitted that it was the only thing that I had disliked about the country.
When I arrived in Ljubljana, I immediately questioned why I had come. The train that I had been riding was headed for Zagreb; all that I would have had to do was to buy a ticket all of the way through, and I could have escaped Slovenia entirely, the caves be damned. When I looked for the tourist office, I found that it had been moved, replaced by a room that was only for selling tickets and was, bafflingly, open from 5:00 AM to 11:00 PM (trains barely run in Slovenia, and nobody takes them). A couple was waiting next to me for help in the ticket office. When it was their turn to go, they asked if they could buy an international ticket and were told to go back to the other ticket office, which, they explained, was closed; another employee had told them to come here. The man behind the desk was adamant. “Go to other office,” he said, and they turned around and left. I believe that I managed to get a city map at the train station—I am almost certain that I did—as I had an easy enough time finding my hostel and discovered that it was a dump, though it had a nice drying rack for one’s clothes (its being somewhere in the mid- to high-30s did not hurt). All of the men whom I passed, with their square, hardened faces and gnarled forearms, looked like out-of-work mechanics; they glowered, their arms all knobbly right angles, grizzled, as though the Soviet Union had never collapsed.
Ljubljana was not entirely dead, though—even in a place as hopeless as this, one finds signs of life. When I arrived, there was a beer and burger festival going on, and, by the time I went grocery shopping, I was starved half to death. I tried a burger, which was mediocre, then, still hungry (I had not been consuming many fats of late.), ate another, which was worse. I then shopped on a full stomach, which turned out to be a good idea, and relaxed for a bit before going for a run. Again, while I hate to admit it, Ljubljana did not strike me as completely derelict. It has a large public park full of reasonably well-marked walking trails; there was a small exposition of photos near the entrance to the park; I discovered, at the end of my run, that there was a free water fountain in the park; and I passed a couple of people singing and playing the guitar, and others listening, on my way back to the hostel. Even in the most desolate of places, people find a way to brighten their lives.
My bus ride to Divaca (near where I would visit the Skopjan Caves—you can look them up) was forgettable but probably seemed interesting in the moment—I really wish that I could have done day-to-day accounts of my travels so as to write more about my bus rides and train rides themselves, as they were sometimes some of the most interesting part of my travels. I saw a sign that said: “Stop./Shop.”, which struck me as bleakly materialistic (in signalling the emptiness of our lives outside of shopping), and, when I saw a man eating fruit-flavored yogurt, I was stabbed by the memory of eating cherry pie at a friend’s house as an adolescent. The caves themselves were spectacular and looked like one of the dwarf scenes from The Lord of the Rings—I noted this to the tour guide, who said that many other tourists had mentioned it to her, though she had not seen the movies herself; I told her that our view of the caves more or less encompassed them. While I enjoyed walking through the caves, taking the shuttle bus, &c., I did not have any life-changing realizations while doing so, and, since I have to write about Croatia and, eventually, get to my descriptions of the Dolomites, I will say merely that the caves were neat but were, at the end of the day, just caves.
I noted despairing of the cost of visiting the Skopjan Caves. I also noted passing a group of Asian tourists soon after arriving in Ljubljana and pitying them, as they were obviously trying to find vestiges of cultural in the area, and they may as well have been sucking blood from a turnip. While Ljubljana has some interesting and varied statuary along the riverbank, and while food and lodging there are cheap, there is essentially no reason to visit Slovenia beyond living in a country that is even worse. While Wikipedia has refuted my presumption, I would have assumed, while visiting the country, that LeBron James made more money than the whole of Slovenia, which does not appear, based on my somewhat superficial exploration of it, to have historically put much store in the arts, science, literature, or any other area of human endeavor.
The Croatian border police are mean. What I will always remember before anything else of my bus ride to Pula was the border police’s kicking a young girl off of the bus because she did not have a passport. This girl was part of a Dutch tour group for kids around 16 years old, and they were headed for a beach holiday. This particular girl had been to Croatia many times (some of their exchange was in English), spoke some of the language, and had never, in her whole life, needed more than her identification card to get through the border, but suddenly it was not enough, and, while I admit that rules are rules and they have to be upheld, I doubted that a sixteen-year-old Dutch girl from a youth camp was a likely terrorist, illegal immigrant, migrant worker, etc. She made a show of optimism, even making some sort of joke and laughing, as she stepped off of the bus (with one of the trip leaders, naturally), and, since she and the trip leaders had cell phone service, they were able to start making some sort of further arrangements, some of the girls were in tears, and, given that the girl was underaged and had a piece of identification, her expulsion seemed to me an act of unnecessary cruelty.
I remember nothing, then, of the landscapes on my way to Pula. The bus was hot, I am sure, as I remember closing my eyes at one point and thinking of the early days of fall in Vancouver, when the air is light and cool, the horizon still fuzzy with summer’s moisture when it goes white at twilight, and the year starts to gradually taper down to the warmth and comfort of home in winter’s cold and rains. When I arrived in Pula, I was reminded, by the profusion of cypress trees, of Rome; the city is full of Roman ruins, the crown of which, the city’s amphitheatre, is at least as impressive as the Roman Colosseum, partly for how well it was preserved, and partly for how starkly it emerges from the surrounding landscape (read: ugly, contemporary Croatian buildings). As a rule of thumb, everything in Croatia from at least 2,000 years ago is beautiful, and everything built since then is hideous. That is, everything built in the country’s recent history is ugly beyond description; many of the cities here have excellent monuments from the Venetian Empire, of which Pula was, for some time, a stronghold. It has fantastic beaches, some nearby hills, and, if my memory holds, a great many nearby islands, which are supposed to be quite beautiful.
I spent almost all of my second day in Pula lying in my air-conditioned room and trying to catch up on emails, my blog, etc., as well as not putting pressure on myself to take any day-trips. I skipped the islands for want of energy, inclination, and money to see them—I had started trying to scrimp on expenses at this point—and I decided against visiting Rovinj or Porec, nearby towns noted, respectively, for their Venetian old town and some old monastery or other; Rovinj looked like a poor man’s Dubrovnik or Zadar, and I was not interested in seeing another monastery or similar relic. I went running that evening and discovered an interesting facet of Pulan city planning: there are no trails for running near the beach—in fact, when one gets near the beach, one is relegated to sharing the road with cars—and one cannot run more than thirty or forty metres along the beach without bumping into a hotel and having one’s run interrupted. The Croatians proved not to be interested in contiguous pathways by the water, instead preferring somewhat exclusive sections of beach for different guesthouses. This may point to some sort of exclusionary culture, in which the better-off insulate themselves from the poor, but I expect that it is more closely tied to Croatia’s utter lack of infrastructure, which finds its way even to the smallest details of life here.
I spent my third day much as I spent the second, eschewing day-trips, relaxing, and exercising. I went for a bit of a walk through the city to get some groceries and fresh fruit, which was passable, and I carefully followed the directions to the nearest gym given to me by Google Maps and was transported to Russia in the early 1990s, right after the fall of the Soviet Union. For one thing, buildings here are not lined up on streets, as back at home, but scattered randomly on squares. Imagine erecting a bunch of buildings on the plaza outside of Koerner Library, giving them arbitrary addresses, and declaring that they were all on the same street—say, Westbrook Mall. This is the Croatian address system, which also holds in Russia. I call it Russia in the early 1990s because all of the buildings are broken down and covered in dust and graffiti, and an air of hopelessness, of a total lack of activity, swallows the place up. When I was looking for the gym, I passed a bunch of buildings (a bar, a small casino, a tobacconist, another bar, of which there are many here) that all looked almost identical—all Croatian buildings appear to either have no door or to have a door that is permanently locked, without any front steps leading up to it or anything to distinguish it from the walls around it (as glass, doormats, &c. have not yet been invented here)—and passed only one or two other people on the sidewalk. Finally, I gave in and asked a couple of men who were smoking if there was a gym nearby, and they had no idea, so I gave up and went running again.
I have, alas, skipped a great many impressions that I recorded in my notes. I visited an interesting museum about a passenger boat that was sunk outside of Pula at the outset of World War I, and I saw a few memorials (probably plaques) to World War II, again reminding me of its closeness to this area (Zadar was levelled during the war). Restaurant owners here are tremendously unpleasant: they stand outside of their restaurants and accost tourists, hawking their wares. There is nothing, really, to eat in Pula except for baked goods, of which I discovered that the black bread was quite good, and there appears to be no cultural life whatsoever in the town—it is a standard Croatian hick town with a few spectacular Roman ruins thrown in. (This is not entirely true. I saw a free art exhibition in the old town and chatted with the painter who had made it for a bit. He offered me cookies and juice and bade me sit down for a few minutes.) I have noted getting up late for no particular reason and feeling as though I were wasting the good weather and should have been doing something more active on my rest days. And I have noted my very first impression of Pula, when I had just gotten off of the bus and was heading toward the hostel, which was that it was a low-rent, overpriced Italy. Again people scowled; again they drove their motorcycles on sidewalks and parked their cars there; again they hogged the sidewalk and tried to push one off of it; and again there were no traffic laws or street signs to be found. I asked myself, when I had gotten off of that bus, why I had come at all.
I have three interesting cultural notes to make before proceeding to describe Zadar. The first is that the Croatian “language” has been a major frustration to me, as speaking it amounts to speaking hopelessly broken Russian. “Me want groceries. Where find? How much cost? Thank.” I noted (perhaps falsely—one imputes a lot of one’s prejudices to people rather than observing them) that people here have a much different way of sitting and smoking than people in Italy. When people here sit down for a cigarette, they take their time with it, smoking slowly and talking slowly. While Italians smoke compulsively as though it were a race and let forth torrents of unintelligible speech, Croatians smoke as though contemplating something (that is, when they are together), passing an occasional word back and forth and hardly gesturing at all (as I said, one has prejudices). My final cultural note is of one of the stranger and more striking interactions that I have had on this trip. When I got to the hostel in Pula and the owner showed me my bed, I started ruffling up the sheets, a common practice in hostels, to show that it was mine (as a free bed has neatly made sheets). The owner asked if there was a problem, and I answered in the negative, explaining, in brief, what I was doing. The owner took this as a sign that there was a problem, and we proceeded to have such a bitter argument that she suggested, after several minutes, that I find another hostel. When we had both finished frothing at the mouths and I had been successfully checked in, the owner again asked what was wrong with the bed, and I was finally able, the second time around, to explain that I had not doubted its cleanliness but was merely marking it as mine. I was fascinated, as this all happened, by the owner’s insistence on finding out what the problem was despite my having told her that there was none—I was reminded of a study that Bill told me about in which separate groups of people from different countries were, along with experimenters passed off as fellow test subjects, shown sets of images and asked to relate what they had seen. The experimenters passed off as test subjects (it is late at night, and I cannot remember what such people are called) would consistently give wrong answers to try to convince the test subjects to change their points of view—that is, whatever the test subjects said, the experimenters would contradict them. The idea (not spurious, in my opinion) was to see which country’s people would be the most inclined to stand their ground, and which country’s people were most inclined to agree with the false information that they were being fed. It was determined that Finns were the most likely to stick to their guns no matter what the experiments said and that Italians were the most likely to go against their better judgement in order to agree with the experimenters.
While I admit that one should not overextend generalizations from a nation’s people as a whole to every one of its individuals, it is undeniable that the peoples of different countries have different ways of interacting, communicating, behaving, &c., and it would be a failure not to try to understand them. (Norwegians, for example, are known for being reserved. Not every Norwegian is reserved, and not every Norwegian is reserved in the same situations, but the average Norwegian is likely to be more reserved than, say, the average American.) I wondered, after my spat with the hostel owner, if Croatians as a whole (I am not extending one interaction to cover all Croatians in all situations—I merely wondered.) were more likely, like the Finns in the experiment noted above, to stick to their guns when presented with a statement that contracted what their own eyes told them (I was rearranging the sheets—clearly, something was wrong, whether I admitted it or not.) than more reserved peoples, who might inwardly think that something was wrong but not object, hiding their wonder (or indignation) at what the crazy foreigner was doing and at his withholding what the matter was.
The trip to Zadar must have been quite beautiful, as my notes suggest that it reminded me of Gibsons. It started, naturally, with frustration, as I had to pay the bus company for luggage storage—people in Croatia are always looking to scam you. The bus was comfortable, though, and its air conditioning reminded me of the trip that I took to Cesky Krumlov a couple of years ago, when I felt as though I were going on a real journey, as they pampered us a little (making the bus ride feel almost like a flight). The bus driver drove on the right and wrong sides of the road depending on whether or not there were cars coming the other way, and I was nervous, as the road had no shoulder, that we would roll into a ravine, but we soon found ourselves on the coast, and I accepted that I had no control over the situation. The hills in Croatia are much different from those in, say, Salzburg, as they have only scraggly patches of vegetation and, unlike those in northern California, no grass. Instead, they are bald, grey like the mountains in the distance in Salzburg, with dry, shrunken shrubs like little tufts of dessicated hair. The coastline itself is, like that of B.C., marked by wooded peninsulas jutting left and right into the water, and there are pale blue mountains in the distance, like when one looks out at Vancouver Island. The day was clear on my bus ride to Zadar, the water endlessly blue, and a thin, white mist licked at the foot of the mountains. The hills sloped gradually down to the water, in which one saw a steamer here and there but hardly another boat—all was still. I was reminded of summers in Vancouver, of the view of Lions Bay from Mount Brunswick, of crossing the Burrard Street Bridge in the scorching heat of the early evening and biking along the beach. I was startled when the bus pulled into a beach resort, as I had not realized that we had been going gradually downhill. We started the upward climb and were soon high up in the hills again.
My arrival in Zadar was, of course, unpleasant—as soon as I stepped on the bus, I was surrounded by touts offering taxi rides and accommodations. (I recognize that touts are traditionally people offering fake help near major tourist sites, but these people are doing more or less the same thing, to my mind.) I thought of the importance, again, of basic honesty (my luggage had not been stolen from the hold) and I saw a sign that said, “Natural fruit. Best taste.”, which reminded me of all of the advertisements for “natural water” that I had seen; there were ocean liners, fast food joints, and exchange offices everywhere. Zadar brought San Diego to mind with its down-and-out-houses, cicadas, and palms. The map that I had printed from Google was wrong, but, as I soon hit the water, I was able to orient myself, and I started clambering toward my hostel. I wondered if I could ever return to southern Europe given how much it sucked.
Zadar struck me, as a whole, as much more cultured than Pula—it had museums and an art gallery or two in the centre of town. It had fantasatic, if not spectacular, Roman ruins and a beautiful waterfront, and it was close to a great many national parks and islands (this was to become a theme in Croatia). I tried and failed to find a gym again but came across a couple of chin-up bars, and I took a very expensive trip to the country’s most famous national park, Plitvice Lakes, for which I was glad that I had shelled out the money. (I was, at this point, scrimping on everything and forewent trips to museums that would have only cost a Canadian dollar or two.) I also began, since restaurants in Croatia were overpriced, I was uninterested in Croatian cuisine, and I wanted to save money, to simplify my diet. While it would not have made nutritional sense to do this for more than a week or two, I was interested, as in a game, in trying to eat healthily for as little money as possible: my diet featured milk, cereal, fresh fruit, canned peas, mozarella cheese, and enormous amounts of black bread (it was, in fact, fairly healthy, lacking only in variety and, perhaps, a bit low on protein). Mozarella keeps well enough that I could take it on day-trips, fruit was everywhere available, and black bread is sustaining and surely healthier than white bread. I decided to forego pastries in Croatia, which feature doughnuts, strudel, and layered cakes with custard heavily (it was hard to pass up on them), and I did not, in the hostels in which I stayed, have the cooking capacities for eggs or pasta, nor did I want to spend much time cooking at this point.
My bus ride to Split must have taken me along more spectacular coastline, I would assume, but I do not seem to have any notes about it. I remember arriving at the bus station, again being accosted by touts, and passing store after store, as though the station were more of a commercial hub than a medium for public transport. Of the city itself I have few notes. Split has a large public market and is the former site of Dioclysian’s Palace, an extraordinarily large residence that was mostly torn down as the city developed in the Middle Ages, but which has left us some spectacular ruins. It has a gorgeous waterfront (marginally developed, unlike the coastlines of Zadar and Pula), more picturesque islands, and, most interestingly, some nearby hills, heavily wooded and good for walking. I went for a run through the hills and discovered that they were full of churches that had been pilgrimage sites since, in some cases, the 13th century. I passed one church with a tap for holy spring water, from which I drank, and arrived at another that was hewn directly into the rock of the hillside. It would have been a good time to have my camera. The horizon was just starting to turn golden. I was several hundred meters above the water, as far from civilization as Bowen Island. There was a beach down below with buoys like little beads in the water; I could make out the shouts of children and the buzz of other voices. In the distance, the water met the sky, but closer, wooded hills grew out of the water. The sea was white on blue, what I have always thought of as sapphire white, when the evening light coats its deep blue in sheets of white that slide gently over the water’s waves.
I was very hungry, so I did not enjoy the view for very long, but I tried to imprint it in my memory, knowing full well that it would be gone within weeks. I ran back past the dapper and modest cypresses, their foliage as straight as though they stood in evening coats with their arms at their sides, past the same church with the holy spring, where I drank again. I passed other runners and dogwalkers; I passed tourists walking up to the viewpoint. When I got back into the city, the air changed seemingly instantaneously, as though I had passed through a barrier from the fresh hill air to the smell of cigarettes and exhaust that so characterizes Croatian cities.
I have to stop my narration for a few quick notes. Firstly, I forgot to mention that Pula smelt of urine and rotting compost, which contributed to my questioning why I had come at all when I arrived there. I forgot to note having been in a bit of a rush to get to the bus station in Zadar when I was leaving for Split and wishing that I had taken some photos of the street along which I walked. There is something oppressively hopeless about Croatian towns. Their sidewalks, when they exist at all, start and stop at random, leaving one to walk on the road. Cars park willy-nilly on the streets and sidewalk, and the Croatians have an unusual lust for grey, featureless apartment blocks. When their apartments are colored, their siding is crumbling, and they have small, almost nonexistent windows. Their balconies stick out like armies of underbites, and even the clothing drying on the lines outside seems somehow hopeless and dead. Croatian cities are not devoid of vegetation, but something in the hot, still air makes it feel as though everything were being baked and rendered motionless. Everything is cracked, crumbing, or falling apart, and one feels that it will never change.
My other note is of a funny exchange that I had with some Croatian travellers who were waiting to cross the street. Two women, huffing and puffing, were standing with a child and some heavy bags and saying, in their pseudo-language, “I not take any more.” I offered to help them, and, when I bent down to grab one of their bags, one of the women grabbed it as well, as though she were taking it away from me, though I discovered that she was trying to help by grabbing one of the two handles. While I meant to help them cross the street, I realized that it would do them no good, as they were on their way to the bus station, and they assumed, in any case, that I meant to help them go there, so off we went, pouring sweat, past the luggage storage kiosks, bars, and sandal shops lining the road. We stopped a few times so that they ladies could catch their breath, one of them turning, when she realized that we had a ways to go, and saying, “We will drink vodka.” A few minutes later, we got to the ticket office, and the older woman, who had studied Russian in school but forgotten it all, went inside with the child, leaving me to wait with the younger woman and the bags.
Up to this point, I had only once had an extended interaction (that I can remember) with someone with whom I had no common language whatsoever; this had been with a friend’s stepfather, who was driving me to some bigger train station than Friedrichshafen’s and announced the names of towns that we passed, laughing in his ruddy, jovial way. I tried, at the bus stop in Zadar, to engage the young woman in conversation, but with no luck. “Where are you going?” I asked. “We’re from Serbia,” she said. “Yes, but where are you going? To Pula? To Zadar?” She did not understand. “You go to Pula?” she asked. “Split? Dubrovnik?” I shook my head, ’No,’ and we laughed at our predicament. “Do you speak German? French? Italian?” She answered, ‘No’ to every question; I had already asked if she spoke English or Russian. I had seen the older woman talking to someone at the ticket counter, but, over the course of my attempted conversation with the younger woman, the older one had disappeared somewhere, and several minutes had passed. “Where is the other woman?” I asked. “What other woman?” This answer surprised me, as I thought that my question had been clear. “Your mother. Mom. The other woman.” She looked blankly at me, and I repeated the words ‘mother’ and ‘mom,’ assuming that at least one of them would be common to Slavic languages, without success. Finally, I said ‘sister.’ “She is not my sister,” the woman said, and I exclaimed, “Yes! Yes. That one! Where is she?” The woman was about to answer when the older woman stepped out of some room or other and began talking to someone else at a ticket counter. Eventually, she and the child emerged, and she explained that they would be leaving for Osijek, an 11-hour journey, in just over an hour. “Would you like a beer? Coffee? Come sit down with us.” I explained that I was about to go running, mimicking the movement (this is why I did not have my phasebook with me). “Water? Ice cream? Something” she offered. I refused again and, with her help, once she understood what I was trying to say, wished her and her family a safe journey. When I got back to the bus station just over an hour later, having finished my run, I saw that the bus was full of people and everyone’s bags had already been loaded—for once, a bus was on time in Croatia.
I am now nearing the end of my tale. I am having a rough go of it today: the idea of flying from Dubrovnik to Paris and from Paris to Vancouver instead of flying into Paris and out of Dubrovnik (or some nearby place) was harebrained to begin with; I thought that I could save money by flying into and out of the same city (for the trip as a whole), but the cost of getting to Paris has been at least as much as the added cost of flying straight from Dubrovnik would have been, and I was slapped with a 30-Euro fine for having oversized luggage, since, while Czech Airlines allows checked luggage of up to 23 kilograms, I booked my ticket through some other agency (called “Smart Wings,” which I found on
vayama.com), and they only allow checked bags of 15 kilograms. I suppose that the moral of this story is that paying a bit more up front can save you a ton of hassle, and even money, in the long run, and that a deal that seems too good to be true really is too good to be true.
My arrival in Prague—as long as I am writing about this—was actually fairly interesting. I came, as some of you know, because my flight from Dubrovnik was moved a day earlier, forcing me to spend the night in Prague, and, while I was initially upset at this change, it worked in my favor, as Dubrovnik was over-the-top expensive, and I needed a rest. My hostel in Prague (near the airport—thank you, Kathie) was easy to find, and, when I had paid for it, I found that I had changed more money than necessary (for fear of having too little), leaving me with a pull 250 koruna, or $13 Canadian, to spend on groceries. The day was pleasantly cool; I saw what looked like a chin-up bar but turned out to be part of a strangely shaped bench; and I was looking forward to a night with a room of my own. When I got to the grocery store, a mild euphoria came over me when I realized that all of the food around me could be mine. Carefully calculating costs, I bought enough food for three people with, as it turned out, 22 koruna (to be donated to charity) to spare, and, walking back, I felt a light breeze and thought of airing out my room and going for a walk the next day. I did not, in the end, take that walk, as leaving my luggage in the care of the hostel employees would have been impracticable; instead, I waited downstairs, despite the employees’ wanting me to leave, and met a Ukrainian dancer, who made $67 (in Canadian currency) back home in Kharkov and was travelling with another choreographer for work. She talked about people’s having to work multiple jobs just to get by due to massive inflation on account of the war and said that she would not be unhappy if Kharkov were swallowed up by Russia, as life is better there.
Alas, I should return to Dubrovnik, or to Croatia broadly. My trip to Dubrovnik took me, like my previous bus rides, along the coast, giving me an excellent view of the Adriatic Sea. Like much of Croatia’s coastline, the area was mountainous, and on some curves it looked as though the mountains were lining up, one after the other, and looking over one another’s shoulders as though waiting their turn at something. Ocean liners cut occasional swathes through the sea, but it was otherwise calm and broad and met the land far below, where the cliffs’ white rock dropped into it.
We crossed the Bosnian border twice, but nothing interesting happened, except that I found free places to urinate, since I did not want to have to pay to do so (and only had, besides money for my hostel and the airport transfer, eight kuna, or roughly a Euro, to my name). When I arrived in Dubrovnik, I decided to change a few more American dollars (as I was saving my Euros for my transfer in Paris) so as to go shopping and see the city walls. The walls themselves are one of the more spectacular architectural works that I have ever seen—Dubrovnik reminded me of Venice, in that it was an overpriced, exceedingly popular tourist destination that deserved ever bit of its popularity, for it was stunning. It was very hilly, which could partly explain its historical importance (as it would have been tough to attack); it was, to everyone’s surprise, near a bunch of gorgeous islands; and there were lots of interesting possible day-trips to somewhat nearby cities in Bosnia and Montenegro. As in any of the cities that I had visited, I could have happily spent several more days here if I had had the time, money, and tolerance of the country’s lack of infrastructure and industry.
I walked through the old town of Dubrovnik on my first evening there, passing multitudes of overpriced restaurants in addition to candy stores, currency exchange offices, and giftshops. Of my walk I have little to say except that I finally saw a couple of Dalmatian (or, more broadly, Croatian) churches, of which I had only seen one, and that by subterfuge (I slipped in with a group of Korean tourists—it is a long story.); and I found that the churches were, on the whole, smaller and more restrained than those of Rome (though one could say that of any churches, I suppose). There was a concert of some sort in front of the cathedral—I forgot to mention that a group of men had been belting out throaty, traditional Dalmatian songs in Split. I think that that is about it. I wondered how any of the poor Croatians ever made it home for the number of steps in the old town; the city was clearly developed before the widespread introduction of tobacco products to the area. I spent my second day, or, rather, morning, not being allowed to walk the city walls, as my student card (like all North American student cards, as far as I know) had no expiry date; in a foul mood, I walked up one of the city’s hills to get a panoramic view of the old town and got to see tiny people walking the walls. From there I took the bus, which was twenty minutes late, to the airport, which turned out to be almost as sleepy as that of Northwest Arkansas—it was much smaller and less busy than I expected. Check-in was very quick, and the lady working at the counter, having explained that my bag could only weigh 15 kilograms, let me check in anyway without a fee when she saw the look of surprise on my face.
I am now just twenty-odd minutes from boarding my flight to Paris, and I still have not yet written my account of the Dolomites. Every piece of writing on this trip has taken longer than expected, and I have always found a way to put off writing, for some reason. While I still intend to take a trip around the world after my year in Russia, I wonder if I could survive less developed places than Italy or Croatia given how much I despised them; I may have to change my itinerary, seriously adjust my expectations, or change my mode of travel, perhaps seeking a second person for certain legs of my journey. Whatever the case, I have found the notes that I made en route to Ljubljana, and I remembered a funny anecdote. My notes are, as expected, that I liked the train ride and the verdant mountains but that I wanted to hike them, not just look at them. I saw a castle with what looked like a bunch of wooden attics, a church at the top of a hill, and forests of larch and dark firs on the nearby, wooded mountains. I also noted, probably because of the heavy, honeyed light filtering through the train’s window, thinking of June days in school as a kid, when the year was winding down and the afternoon sunlight made one want to fall asleep or burst outdoors.
It must be obvious, from the account above, that I never found a gym in Croatia. On my last day in Salzburg, I decided to go to the gym, and, while I was unhappy to have to pay $10 to do so and unhappy that I considered this a somewhat fair price, I was glad that I had chosen to work out there rather than in Slovenia, as, while it would be cheaper in Ljubljana than in Austria, the gyms there could have been in God knows what condition (if they even exhisted), and going to one might result in one’s being mugged. The gym in Salzburg was plenty modern but very strange. When I said that I would like to pay for one visit, the woman working there asked if she could see some ID. I told her that I had nothing on me—I had come to work out—and she gave me a sheet of paper to write my name and address on. When I had given her my money, she asked if I wanted a towel. Since I never use towels at the gym, I said, “No, thank you; I’ll be fine,” and she said, “Actually, it’s a policy we have—you have to use a towel.” Having never used one before in a gym, I asked if I should lay it on the bench when I worked out on it. She did not understand. I asked if the towel was meant to be lain down on exercises in which one was lying on one’s back, and she said, “Actually, I don’t know; it’s just a rule.”
No comments:
Post a Comment