Croatia - the Sequel

Cat/Maya/Bill in Croatia 2012!

Yes, I made it to Dubrovnik on March 12. It was a very rough trip, with 3 little planes and 1 big plane. The BORO got me! The Boro is a wind from the north, that blows down the Swiss Alps in little gusts. When the Boro blows, the planes will not land at the Dubrovnik airport. The plane lands at the Split airport, which is a 5 hour bus trip from Dubrovnik (my sister Diana might remember this). Lucky for me, I got on the first bus seat, so I had a view of the Adriatic coast until dark. Someone from the college met me at the bus station and took me to my very lovely apartment.

The apartment is across the street from my last apartment, it is cheaper, but very nice. All new kitchen and appliances, fancy lighting, very comfortable. Bill and Maya will be joining me April 4, and we should all fit just fine.

The students are adjusting well, they drink like fish, beer is cheap. They roam around old town till dawn. Not sure if I will be able to get them to do any film work. They have a lot of field trips for all their classes. Since I have a small group (5 students) we join forces with the Sketchbook Class.

Tomorrow we are going to STON, to film the shellfish farmers. Hope the camera doesn't fall in the water. It is oyster season so I am going to have to down a few, I have never had an oyster in my life. I guess this is one thing I can still try, even though I am almost 60 years old!

E-Gads, who is that old lady peering back at me in the mirror?

GOOD BYE Croatia

Mysteries of Croatia that will remain unsolved:

Why Croatians are all slim but they sit around cafes all day and night eating and drinking, in addition they do not exercise?

Why only 1 building in Dubrovnik is orange and yellow, while all the others have to confirm to strict laws; white buildings, green shutters, no signs, and orange tile roofs?

Why there is a bin of fresh ginger at the supermarket, yet no dishes seem to be made with ginger?

Why the peanut butter is always in the cooler at the grocery store, but the milk is always on the shelf?

Why the Croatian bank does not print lots of smaller bills, so that the clerks do not scowl, every time you hand them a 200 kuna note?

Why all the politicians on the billboards are bald, but I never see a Croatian man that is bald?

Croatia taught me I can live without the following:

Twist ties, rubber bands, and paper clips.

My own car.

Walmart, Target, and K-mart.

Big cups of coffee, fast food, Styrofoam containers, plastic ware, paper ware.

Fruits and vegetables not in season.

Divided highways, 4 lane highways, any road you can drive more thatn 40mph.

What I learned in Croatia:

How to gut a fish, and cook it Croatian style.

That grilled squid is really good.

How to sit in a cafe and make a tiny cup of coffee last 2 hours.

How to drink Grappa (home-made brandy), even when it is offered at 11am.

Venice - We Are ALL Tourists Here!

To see photo stream, go to March entries, Honor's Dinner.

We decided to go to Venice, since it was right across the Adriatic Sea.  But it is not easy to get from here to there.  If you look at the map, it shows a ferry going from Dubrovnik to right below Venice, but not at this time of year.  So we flew to Zagreb, and rented a car at the airport, and drove across Slovenia into Italy.  Slovenia has divided highways most of the way and is part of the European Union. But it is still a 5 hour drive. We left the car in a car park and got on a Vaporetto to go to our hotel. Our hotel was near the famous Saint Mark's Square, and was a converted palace with a very fancy lobby and modest rooms. We only had one and a half days to explore Venice.  The next day we went to Saint Mark's Square which was jammed with tourists (it was May 1st, a holiday in Europe), after walking around we decided to escape to Murano Island which was less crowded.  We loved seeing the glass artworks in the showrooms and Maya liked watching them make the glassware.

The next day we got up early to be at the front of the line to go into the Campanile Tower to see the views all around Venice.  We took a gondola ride and Maya bought a carnival mask, which she wore in the gondola ride. Every time we went under a bridge, tourist snapped photos of the little girl in the Carnival Mask on the Gondola. I am glad we visited Venice, there is no place like it in the world, but after a day and a half, the crowds of tourists and the cost of just being there got to me. It is a hard place to drag a kid around in, especially when it is so noisy and crowded. Back in Dubrovnik the tourists are also making life a bit harder. The bus is jammed, the traffic is slow, the old town is busy.  I think back to those days in March when we had everything to ourselves.  

War and More War

Photo Stream at end of Posting 2:

We traveled to Bosnia last weekend for a 3 day field trip with the students.  The first city we headed to was Mostar, Bosnia. On the way we stopped at our first Turkish town Pociteli, which is also a 9th century walled village but it was very different from the coastal town of the Dalmatian coast. It was our first view of Turkish architecture, with a mosque and slate roofs.

We climbed up to the fort on top and had a beautiful view of the Neum River. In Mostar we saw the 9th century bridge that connected the Islamic side of town to the Christian side of town. It was blown up in 1992, but rebuilt in 2004, using the same technique they used in the 9th century.  We also had a first hand look at the war damage, as many buildings were skeleton ruins, or covered with pock marks from shell hits. We went inside a mosque and climbed to the top of the minaret.  We spent the night in a hotel, and set out for Sarajevo the next morning.

Bosnia is almost all mountains, and there are no highways. We had 2 vans, with 3 seats across, so the middle seat person bounced around on every hairpin curve. Sarajevo is set in a mountain valley and hosted the winter Olympics in 1984. It has since seen a lot of war, with 10,000 deaths in Sarajevo, 1500 of them children.  It has very interesting architecture, a mix of Turkish Ottoman, Austria-Hungarian, and new modern Islamic buildings, with a mosque every few blocks. We started out in the old city Turkish Souk, which was crowded with Saturday shoppers. I took a group photo of my students in front of a Islamic water fountain, and Bill noticed a young man in a t-shirt sitting in front of the students with his girlfriend.  His T-shirt was from The House of Guitars, Rochester, NY.  He was from Slovenia. Small world.  

I bought some examples of "trench art", which are hammered decorated vases made out of bomb shell casings.  You can buy anything in the Souk, much like a Moroccan souk, with narrow alleys and wares piled high.  Eating was tough in Bosnia for vegetarians, they are big meat eaters. Not much English is spoken here, so it was hard to figure out what to order. Maya did well as she survived on kabobs and civapis (lamb sausage in flat breads). We saw the Assassination Bridge where the Archduke was assassinated and WWI started, and went inside a Serbian Orthodox cathedral. 

The next day, we took the rode less traveled, 5 hours of hairpin turns to get to a National Park and the last remaining virgin forest in Europe. There a huge monument stands to honor the WWII battle (Sutjeska) where 3000 troops died fighting the Germans in a battle that was the turning point of the war. Back in the van for another 3 hours of bouncing around, going through Serbian part of Bosnia, where Zoran said we couldn't even stop for food. Why? Because if they see the Croatian licence plate, they will spit in our food. There was a concentration camp at Bileca, where many Serbians died at the hands of the Croatian.  We are all getting a little weary of war, imagine a history where there is no war. When we finally arrived back in Dubrovnik, it felt like home.

Traveling With Maya Doolittle Miles

See photo stream at end of BLOG 2.
We had a scheduled trip to the tiny country of Montenegro on Saturday, but ran into problems crossing the border.  We had a van with 8 students and a rental car with Maya, Bill and myself. But one of my students is from India, and despite trying to have all the proper papers, they would not let her cross for the day. So Bill, Maya, and myself drove her back to Dubrovnik, and sent the students ahead to Montenegro.  We will have to go there for a day trip later. It was kind of cloudy anyway, so we stopped on the way back and drove up to the fort on Mount Srg. Maya was happy to find a herd of horses to tame. Everywhere we go, that child finds animals. Mount Srg is the big mountain behind Dubrovnik, there is a fort on the top that was used in both WWII and the recent 1991 war. From Mount Srg you can see Bosnia (only 4 miles away) and Dubrovnik. Dubrovnik was very hard hit during the war, and most people left for Canada, Germany, and the US. Some have returned. My landlord, Dado and Katja, spent 5 years in London. Most people I meet have been in the US or Canada and returned here.  The people who stayed all had a rough time. They lived in the hotels without running water. The soldiers who stayed and fought from the fort on Mount Srg are called the Defenders of Dubrovnik. If you saw a map of this area with the number of bomb hits you would cry, over 300 bombs hit the Olde Town directly.

Today Bill had a bad cold so Maya and I went to the island of Lokrum, which is just off shore from olde town.  The island has a botanical garden, a fort, monastery ruins, and wild peacocks (which Maya fed her lunch to). Croatia is a kid's playground. There are no rules, lots of rocks, ruins, and walls to climb on, and Croatians are fairly tolerant of children. Zoran, the culture teacher at the college, warned my students; "Croatia does not have litigation, people expect you to use common sense."  Unfortunately Maya has not made any Croatian friends yet, I will have to help her connect with some, perhaps she will need to go to the local school for a visit. She has found a kitten she is quite attached to and feeds every morning. It lives in some bushes near our apartment, she has named him, he is very tiny. She tried to sneak him into our apartment in my purse.  Trouble.

Church of Sprouts and Brotherhood of Korcula

See photo stream at end of second BLOG. See Maya's BLOG at http://mayaincroatia.blogspot.com/

Easter is really a BIG event in Croatia. It lasts from Palm Sunday to the Monday after Easter. There are decorated eggs in the market, dyed in onion skins to a deep red, with fine wax designs. Maya and my students tried dying eggs Croatian style, in our kitchen. We lost something in the translation (like when to hard boil them, before we dyed, or after?).  If I was in the U.S. I could go into a Target, and get a little kit with everything I need.  But in Croatia, everyone told me, get a stick from a tree, stick a needle in it, melt wax with a candle, and draw the designs on the egg. Throw the eggs in with the onion skins to dye. Much thanks to Bill for cleaning up the wax mess we all made. 

We went on a day field trip, up the winding coastal road, to a town called Korcula, that has a Stations of the Cross procession on Good Friday, that dates from the 9th century.  Another thing about Dubrovnik, there are NO highways. The only way out is winding coastal roads. To fit all the students we had a van (with driver) and a rental car.  I drove the rental car, and I am getting quite good on coastal roads with no guard rails and no passing lanes.

We stopped on the way up at the wine area of Peljesac.  They grow grapes along the Adriatic coast that makes 3 kinds of wine, depending on which side of the mountain the grapes grow.  We even went through the tunnel that was dug to the coastal side, so you don't have to carry the grapes over the mountain.  My students had lots of fun at the wine cellar tasting wine, while Maya discovered the most beautiful dog in Croatia, and she had PUPPIES!

Korcula (alleged home of Marco Polo) is a mini-walled city on an island. We took a short car ferry to the island.  All the churchs were open and decorated for Good Friday.  My favorite was a small chapel that had big bowls of bright green sprouts everywhere (along with Jesus on the cross).  After waiting hours, the procession finally started, all the Brotherhoods of Korcula marched around with big candles and crosses, many men carried their baby sons.  All wore white capes with red crosses on the back, and sang holy songs.  After rounding up the students, we made it to the last ferry off the island, and drove home the long and winding road.