Monday, June 28, 2004

Blog by email? Unstoppable has never been more me. 

Thank you, yes, I'll be here all week, be sure to tip your waitress. (Tipping, they tell me, isn't a city in China.)

That said, after returning from the island and catching up a bit on the technological progress in the meantime, I gather you can now blog through email -- honestly, I can't remember the last time I've been this happy. And by that I mean, poor reader, now I can update constantly from work. I suppose I should probably work on the content angle.

Sunday, June 27, 2004

So there I was when: Togo 

Have I mentioned -- I'm dating a blogger. Oh how the tables have turned.

Sunshine has left the building 

Really, if our political history has taught us anything (oh, come now, how drole to argue it hasn't), perhaps it's that the first hose of the gate is the least false. Hence, the opening salvo in the Josh-Margo struggle to recount our trip to the sea.

My tale goes something like this...

So there I was in eastern Slovenija (ok, fine, I was in Ptuj -- Puh-too-eeee!) a week ago Saturday when the phone rang. Quoth Mother: this isn't good. Not so the blossoming friendship between dear Margo and Mother, but rather that Our Beloved (wait, no, that's Ljubljana -- why are all the good pet names taken???) was delayed in London. So I did what any sensible Slovenija-trapped fellow might: I stopped in the oldest village in eastern Slovenija to eat a pizza covered in a fried egg. And then I went home, defeated, to watch the Prime Minister shut down the main square in Zagreb to celebrate Croatia's receiving official EU candidate status the day before. The response from the good people of Zagreb could only be described as underwhelming -- police prepared for 50,000 but just around 4,000 showed. Including Joshie. So sad.

So Sunday I basically did the same thing -- drove like a maniac through Krapina, Ptuj, Maribor, and finally Graz (Gradec to the Slovenes, it turns out) -- Margo will allege that I was 30 minutes late picking her up. My rebuttal is three-fold: (1) I was not you big liar, I was 20 minutes late (2) I spent said 20 minutes driving around in paint factory parking lots in the suburbs of Graz because the Austrians are just a little too cool for street signs it seems and (3) I mean honestly. Big. Liar. Righto, glad we got that covered. We had thundershowers all day on the ride back -- we stopped en route to walk around Ptuj and to visit the Zagorje castle of Trakoscan right on the Croatian side of the border. We made it back to Zagreb around 8, stopped ever so briefly at home, and headed down the street to Boban (named after the 1998 Croatia championship soccer allstar) for tasted Italian food (a silly amount of gnocchi (njoki to us slavs) for the lady, some variation on meat for joshie). And of course ice cream next door at Millenium (I mean, fruit ice cream is fine in moderation, but really child, I've never seen a human being consume so much pineapple ice cream in my life. And I'm sorry, but if you eat that much pineapple ice cream you will invariably get sick. So pooh.) We actually ran in to a couple of Embassy interns -- yes, yes, fine, don't we have a moritorium on teasing each other, thank you.

Monday it appears Margo spent the entire day attempting -- and succeeding -- to clog my drain. As to criminal intent accounts differ, but when I finally made it home from work (after a dreadful reception with a much of art types and Ministry of Culture folks at the Ambassador's residence) around 8, Margo was lounging on the balcony (in fact, I'm still pulling the hairs out of my patio furniture) reading while I set about fixing the offending drain. Again, accounts differ -- some say I broke down crying about the unfairness of it all, others that I expertly fixed the problem. Suffice it to say I sat there while Margo became MacGuyver. Monday night was the big Croatia-England soccer game -- TVs were up at all the cafes, we didn't even need to watch but just listen to the screaming coming from the street below. The Prime Minister was interviewed in Brussels a few days before and asked about the disappointing tie with France. Apparently, he says, Croatia was holding back in anticipation of a positive EU Council decision on their application -- on Monday with candidate status in hand, England was going down says the Croatian Head of Government. Not so, say the historians. That said, much glass was thrown about. When the dust settled, we surfaced at Vinodol, a quiet expaterie on Nikole Tesle, for nigh-on-the-best kroketi this side of the Sava.

A word about portions -- my body is basically coming unstitched from the sheer about of food we succeeded in putting into our stomachs. From the kick-off gnocchi to pizza in Veli Losinj to (of course) the three-course strukli feast in Bregunje, we ate and ate and then went out for ice cream. And still we explained to deeply hurt waiters and cooks -- "Ah-ha! Is not everything alright?" Growing boy, indeed.

Tuesday we drove down to Mali Losinj -- the highway to Rijeka is *still* not open, though readers of any Croatian daily will know it's scheduled for Wednesday, knocking 40 minutes off the trip. Anyway, we deviated at the Krk bridge, drove down to the ferry dock and sailed for Merag, stopped of course on the way to picnic with fresh mountain cheeses and Dalmatian tomatoes (a staple of our meat-less diet). We visited Cres Town on the way and put in to Losinj that evening. We met Cecilija, our hostess, in front of the Erste Banka as instructed -- sure, it took a few days before she started offering us brandy, but I think we finally hit it off. Not surprising, I know: old Slav woman + Joshie = serious gabbing. Anyway, we rented an apartment that overlooked the main harbor, affording a perfectly lovely view of the boats coming in in the morning and an eeriely leatherly woman hawking plastic starfish on the first floor.

Our time on the island -- for 6500 inhabitants pretty darn remote (cite: the disappearance of the only internet cafe in town) -- was divided between Adriatic beaches and the pursuit of all things squid. We hiked (well, fine, slogged perhaps is more appropriate) to a beach on the south side of the island on Wednesday. We bet $4 that I couldn't find our way back in less than 45 minutes -- fortunately, you see, I am something of an orienteering allstar. Before we knew it we were navigating forests and cliff faces like it was our job. Because, you see, for that 45 minutes it was. Much punching and cursing ensured, and yet, the sad fact remains: I am a super-star.

On Thursday we walked around the western shore of Losinj to the small port-let of Veli Losinj -- home to some cute pink houses (are there any other kind?), preternaturally large pizzas, probably even a squid or two. We waded in the waters just off the harbor for a bit, eventually returning to Mali Losinj to investigate boat trips to neighboring islands. We eventually settled on a nice pirate-esque fellow to take us to Ilovik the next day. Wait a minute, I'm pretty sure I'm leaving stuff out -- well, there was Zanzibar's at least one night that I'm aware of, let's not forget Pizza Cut Duck while we're at it. And somewhere in the whole mess I even managed to pay my phone bill. Really, Croatia, for all the wacky things you do, you really do run some great post offices. And for that, we thank you. But righto, our boat trip was a monument to all things kitsch -- and by that, I mean a lot of fun, we spent the afternoon swimming on deserted beaches around Ilovik. My ears are: silly sunburnt, really, like in pain. My pursuit of aloe thus far: all but fruitless. Did I mention somewhere in there that Cecilija sat us down for at least an hour one night to talk about growing up in Sisak, the war, trying to purchase fruit on her government pension, her love of the young people. For someone who didn't do much of the talking, Margo was much more pursuasive than I when we got to debating public theology. But that's neither here nor there. Can I tell you about a few of the problems Croatia's tourism industry has???

So. On Saturday we woke up silly early and drove to Porozina at the northern tip of Cres where we caught the ferry to Istria -- more specifically, Brestova. We walked around Pula for a while, visiting the Amphitheatre and getting my picture taken with the famous #11 (don't worry, forthcoming). We stopped in my favorite Istrian stationary store to purchase a blue gel pen for postcard writing purposes. Our next stop was Rovinj -- which coming from the island actually seemed like civilization. And by that I mean it had an internet cafe. And some excellent ice cream, but I suppose that goes without saying. We walked around the old town up to the Church of St. Euphemija and sat for a while, half avoiding the German tourists, half admiring the architecture and placement overlooking the sea. And then our course turned inland.

Now. Margo may tell you I periodically flipped out while driving, perhaps even muttering such things as: "You see, Margo, you need to spend more time in this part of the world so you developed a healthy hatred of the Germans." or "No, we can't ask Slovenes for directions, they're too busy being mean and defaulting on debt to Croats." In practice, however, I did get slightly frazzled on our drive from Rovinj to Buje and then on to northern Slovenija -- at least until we stopped at a charming roadside restaurant just outside of Kopar wherein I (1) washed my hands -- hooray, (2) drank apple juice -- hooray, and (3) even found out from a nice Slovenian man where the h$ck we were going -- north. Righto, we skirted around Ljubljana -- which while fun to say is barely on the way to Lake Bled -- and turned off into pitch blackness north of Kranj around 10pm. We drove past little shrines to Mary for about 10km in near complete darkness before a beautiful mountain inn appeared in our path. Ana, the proprietress, was nothing if not glad to see us, and once we negotiated our way through all the Austrians in the dining room (watching the Dutch beat the Swedes 5-4 on a staticy TV playing Croatian news), Ana prepared us a delicious but agonizing large dinner of wild mushroom soup, tomato salad (a theme of the trip to be sure), and strukli (the Slovenian answer to pierogi, but stuffed with cheese and over-baked with crystallized brown sugar on top). Did Margo kill me? Hard to say, though I mean certainly not for lack of places to hide the body.

Righto, so Slovenija, it's lovely you should go. The temperature dropped 35 degrees in the 3 hours it took us to drive north. The Austrians were covered in mountain gear -- no, no, they were *layered*. We, on the other hand, had sunburnt ears and no socks. So clearly something was going right. (Though the lack of gear kills me -- kills me!)

And then this morning we made it to Klagenfurt (which apparently the Slovenes call Celovec. And now, so do I.)

Did we solve all of the worlds problems? Did we photograph local infrastructure? Did we stop to admire pretty much every post office we passed? Did Margo turn in to a tomato? All these are questions. You have heard; tell the others.

Saturday, June 26, 2004

It's my party and I'll blog if I want to. 

Look, ladies: you want me to blog more frequently than once a month? I assure you so do I. Perhaps you'd like to have your own tete-a-tete with the {good, inefficient, Mother-less} people of Hrvatski Telecom about the prospect of getting internet service installed in my house. Really let's not lie: we're still debating whether or not they believe my house exists. Odds of success anytime before I leave this country: nigh-on-slim. So really. I'm doing the best I can. Because I do want to blog. Deep down. Where I'm soft. Like a blogger.

Danas je . Čitate stalno Joshievo izaslanstvo.