hungry dogs
zagreb
the bus was a little long but nice. not uncomfortable. not smelly. the countryside and the borderland from budapest to zagreb starting with low plains and becoming wooded hills. i snoozed a little at the end and woke up as we got into zagreb. more than a quarter of the population of all of croatia lives here, but it’s still not all that big. its buildings are charming, a blended and diverse architecture. i knew of a half hour walk to the hostel i was about to take and of a few things i wanted to knock out during the day so on arrival at the bus station i hastily snagged my backpack and marched away. i stopped at a little coffee shop for a jolt and had a nice little conversation about the nba and kendrick lamar with the barista. i checked into the hostel, a big, clean professional establishment. but not lacking character. it’s just that eastern europe has been in this game a long time. they know how to accommodate backpackers. when the locker is big enough i frequently pull nearly everything out of my pack upon arrival and stack my clothes. place my toiletries. this does not take long. so few stuffs. it did also not take long for my heart to jump out of my chest when i realized my laptop was not there.
this is not a story of theft/be careful/lots of bad people out there. it’s just absentmindedness and indifferent big companies. this was the first time of all of the busses, trains, planes i’d been on in two months that i acutally removed my laptop from the pack during the ride. i left it in the seatback, along with a not insignificant amount of cash in the case and some cool printed souvenirs i’d accumulated. i ran back to the station to try to find the bus. the ticket counter, through our broken translations, was passionately annoyed with me. and uninterested in helping. and vehement that this was not her field of concern. she sold tickets. lost items were to be dealt with by a phone number that did not answer or an online help center that seemed to me not the best solution considering the timing. i would have happily bought a ticket to the next town the bus went to if she could have told me. i felt we could simply call the driver, since we knew which one i was on. she felt we could not.
i filled out the form on the online help center but i wasn’t so cruel to my self as to have hope. something that is good to do when you lose something of value is convince yourself quickly that it is gone and never to return. that way even if it comes back you can just be pleasantly surprised. worse things have happened to better people.
it’s a half an inch of water and you think you gonna drown.
—
i figured something to cheer me up and get me moving forward would be a stop at the zagreb city museum and then to visit one of the quirky museums of zagreb. i have to admit that the population, from my limited interactions, did not seem all that quirky. they mostly dress modestly in black, white, and grey. they do not come across as unkind but they are eastern-european-stern in the face and handsome.
however, amongst them are apparently freaks of assorted varieties who like to make places for you to walk around in and ponder different absurdities of life. in zagreb there is: the only museum in the world devoted entirely to mushrooms, a museum of illusions where one can go to become dizzy, a museum of hangovers where one can go to learn about hangovers (this must be most appealing to people who have never had them or have had far too many), and a museum of broken relationships (for the particularly masochistic freaks).
i did not feel psychologically suited for an entire museum devoted to broken relationships. that is what sad playlists are for. i also carry a sort of “out of sight out of mind” belief about hangovers — that the myriad symptoms can be avoided by disbelief in their presence. i did not need any ideas planted in the head that often wakes groggy in hostel beds and has only so much time to make a bus. i opted for a place dedicated to croatian folklore, the museum of lost tales.
i got jazzed up on a few espressos and a three ounce splash of rakia, a fruity balkan brandy, and walked into a tim burton-y house of fun little folky horrors. i was delighted, even if i was too lazy to read all of them, to see the illustrations and descriptions of croatian oral lore and mythology.
it was zagreb for two full days but only one night, and a night bus on the following down the coast to dubrovnik.
dubrovnik
one nice thing about travel is it can simplify what brings joy. like i was in need of a little victory then i happened to have a bus seat with nobody next to me for the overnight and i got a surge of happiness. and then i awoke and got chili corn nuts and a trash gas station coffee and i felt blessed by the hand of god.
the primary reason dubrovnik is so popular is that it is an objectively stunning place. massive 16th century stone walls sit right on the adriatic and directly inland begins an ascent of rocky mountains. any direction one looks is pretty. it is easy to walk up a short ways to the hillside and quickly achieve fantastic views of the city and the sea. i spent hours reading just outside the fortress walls listening to the sea splash. i found great joy in wandering the little walking pathways and trying to keep my bearings.
if you were plopped down into old town dubrovnik and were sitting with an espresso looking at the bleach white walls you would think to yourself, “wow, this looks like a movie!” you would in a sense be right. famously this is the sight of king’s landing in the game of thrones. as i know nothing about the game of thrones i was surprised to find just how many people were there because of it.
the small talk i got into with the hostel desk dude put us on the same page quickly. my recent itinerary put a sparkle in his eye. he was one of us, so he felt comfortable telling me “the professionals know this is a 1.5 max day town.”
in dubrovnik the european equivalent of frat boys are excited for the all night party and the sweater wearing professionals are very excited to be served by white button ups. perhaps they imagine themselves nobles at the time the walls were built. people posing everywhere. hardly doing anything. just getting pictures suggesting they might be doing some thing. one guy standing near a picturesque, but busy, archway told me he was “waiting for less people to be walking out. less work i have to do in post.” what he was talking about was removing what the actual experience was like so to better serve his illusion of what it ought to have been. you get the sense that a lot of the people you run into are hardly ever aware they are actually there.
which is fine. it is just nice that someone checking me into a hostel can so quickly assess that i am on the same page with him on these matters.
split
sticking to the adriatic coast i found myself in split, and i’m very glad i did. the biggest city in dalmatia it has much of the old world charm of dubrovnik but far less of the smugness. the city center blends centuries of architecture with the present. those overlapping features that result from thousands of years of being a geographically important coast town that everyone wants to conquer and takes turns doing so. the beaches are close by and fun. there are bars that show nba games. i took a very easy bus for a day trip down the coast to a smaller town where i could hike straight from the downtown up into the mountains and spent hours wandering the trails with meandering views of peaks and the sea.
—
in haste i stayed one night in split somewhere that had the aesthetic appeal of a hospital. entirely sterile. it was a place to sleep. it was not a hostel. the good ones have a personality. stacks of books. art. common spaces that had some thought and heart put into them. on the second day i knew i found a gem as soon as i dropped off my pack. any more beds and it would have been cramped, but as is it was cozy. a book exchange with a wide range of titles. a resident dog. a daily happy hour to share beer and talk about things to do. talk about homes. trips. wishes.
compared to southeast asia the daily strategies change in a country like croatia, where it is certainly not cheap to travel. some more attention to thrift. always checking the hostelfree box. at a good hostel this too tends to be a more fruitful experience. ooo someone left sunscreen. basket of food left unlabeled yes sir i will have a bowl of cashews, an orange, a chunk of cheese, and a bottle of wine for dinner. i couldn’t afford not to.
—
“look i’m going to insult you now. i saw someone who i thought was you for just only a split second. but it was not you. and if you would have seen who this not you was that i mistook for you, if only for a split second, you would not be so flattered.”
a benefit of having a friend who is a pilot is that it’s easier for him to come find you halfway across the world for a handful of nights than for your other friends. chan arrived at midnight in split and with the hostel full he was not sure where to stay but we had other matters to attend to first.
we simply bounced around. at one point sitting with beers in front of a couple thousand year old wall that half a day later we’d be sitting in front of with coffees. in a classic case of blind (drunk) squirrel (american) finds nut (room), an entirely unpromising alley we found ourselves in ended up having a fella roughly our age smoking a cigarette that we talked to and he had a little apartment upstairs he gave to chan for a killer price.
mostar
you are now in bosnia. a few things make this clear. free palestine signs are abundant. muslims make only a couple percent of the population in croatia but about half of it in bosnia. things are significantly cheaper once you cross the border. your debit card probably won’t work. this is something i was able to plan for because i was in serbia not too long ago. on a short walk we saw bullet holes on the walls of a five hundred year old mosque. bullet holes are common here, reminders of how violent the 90’s were in the balkans. reminders of how displaced recovery has been.
there is an undeniable tension. at least i couldn’t deny it. tensions may be understandable when just a generation ago tens of thousands of your people were ethnically cleansed and another tens of thousands of your women were raped, and now you’re forced to live side by side with the fuckers who did it.
mostar is divided by neretva river and connected, ostensibly, by stari mos (old bridge). the name of the town itself comes from the name of the people responsible for guarding the bridge after the ottomans built it in the 16th century. however, “connected” is doing some stretchy work here. as a tourist you’re free to go back and forth and it is recommended. if not only for all the beautiful views. bosnian food, beer, and coffee are cheap, and the walkways of mostar are great places to enjoy them. it becomes quite clear though that for much of the population there are sides of that river and a bridge is going to do absolutely nothing to change that.
—
a slow late lunch of beer and cheese and cured meat with a view of the mostar bridge. tried to relax a bit in a hipster craft beer joint but anywhere in the world it’s possible to run into dirty hippies that are too enthusiastic about their conga drums and we were chased off by them. had a classic nighttime backpacker hang with a handful of countries represented around a table. some crazy irish dude spending his life doing huge bike trips all over the world. couple months previous he was crossing afghanistan and sleeping at taliban checkpoints and having a couple close calls on account of difficulty communicating, but on balance he said the locals could not have been nicer. you meet the coolest people out there in the world.
—
one reason chan came to visit was that i had to get older and as a good pal he didn’t want me to do that alone. the way i wanted to start my birthday was a hike up the mountain, which went well enough considering the pelinkovac and cigs still sitting in my blood from the night before. good views, good times.
the way down proved to be a little less smooth. maps.me showed what looked like a good shortcut, which we seized in the hopes of making a good mid-day bus to sarajevo. what the shortcut actually led us to were some narrow roads and broke down homes and all the sudden one of the biggest angriest mastiffs in the league tearing towards us. stopped thankfully by a chain that was not itself providing much confidence. we turned around only to realise a similarly testy mastiff blocking the other direction. they wanted blood. they smelt fear. this is a part of the world where it is suggested to not wander off of trails. there are still landmines. we tried anyways but the brush was thick and it was steep. chan is not an easily rattled fella but at one point he just looked at me and said, “i don’t like this.” i also did not love it. we escaped narrowly with diversions and thrown food into bushes and prayers to any listening deity.
speedwalking to the bus station because at 11:49am at the hostel we decided the 12:15pm to sarajevo was a good idea and it’s a 19 minute walk. the ticket seller doesn’t take credit cards (of course) but also not euros (maddening) and the atms haven’t been easy for us here and a danish woman says she can give us fifty marks for 25 euros. we board just in time. i’m haggard as. i’m 35 now so god damn. three nights of laughing into a five night hang. the hike was a good idea. the veins needed some clearing. adrenaline from the dogs ought to have pushed some stuff around too.
sarajevo
sarajevo is fun. we found a cool middle aged rock band in a medium sized bar. i ate a massive platter of assorted grilled bosnian meats for a birthday dinner. at the oldest brewery in bosnia we had a chuckle over the confounding fact that there is a beautiful bar and there are bartenders but the establishment seems to not be sure why they have either. the server comes up from behind you and takes your order and then rings it up and the bartender pours it and sets it down in a service well and the server then brings it over to your bar seat. that is objectively funny. bosnians love affogatos, and so i treated myself to multiple per day. a better breakfast than an affogato and a cig on a busy city center patio is difficult to imagine.
however, as a traveller, it is difficult to get out from under the weight of the place. fuckin bullet holes everywhere and i thought mostar had evidence. there’s a stretch of the city that got the nickname sniper alley because of how dangerous it was for civilians to walk there during the war. over the course of a few years, snipers wounded 1,030 people and killed 225, including 60 children. a short time after i returned from my trip i learned from an article in the bbc that a prosecutor’s office in italy opened an investigation into “sniper safaris”, where truly sick bastards paid money to go snipe bosnians off the streets. hell could not be hot enough.
the museum of crimes against humanity and genocide is one of those things you feel you’ve done that is important and right to do but that is not enjoyable at all. through 12 thematic sections, written testimonies, artifacts, photos, documentary films, and official documents the absolute horrors of the 90’s are driven home. the rapes and the mass graves. toddlers sniped in the streets. i’ve been to the holocaust museum and was certainly affected but what hit perhaps the hardest here is just how recent it all is. how though the videos are a bit dated it’s obvious they came from my lifetime. i’m of the 90’s. many of the people in those mass graves would still be alive. many of the rape victims are. many of the people responsible walk the streets of sarajevo with the families of the people they tried to wipe off the face of the earth.
—
the concrete has footprints where gavrilo princip stood and at age 19 assassinated franz ferdinand and set off world war one. i was perplexed to realize that princip was alive for most of the war. one has to wonder what it was like to receive news of the world taking off in flame day by day after you, yourself, shot someone.
the call to prayer hasn’t been this prominent since istanbul.
—
“then i got married to an irish woman.”
“is that better?”
“same shit.”
—
my liver is in a harsh state of rebellion and i’m staring down the river at a mountain peak down the way and where world war one started is a couple hundred yards away and i been on the move so much i don’t know which way is up any more.
malaga
i went to malaga because a very interesting retired teacher from england told me to do so over beers we had at the oldest bar in belgrade, serbia. i think he was a paul. paul was biking the length of the danube. paul said if you’re going to go to tangier (which i was considering then, and now was certain) then it’s silly to fly straight there. one should fly to malaga, spend the night in a sunny spanish city and then take the ferry across the straight of gibraltar.
one layer of the smell in the morning walk is fresh — it rained last night — another layer is something else. soiled. maybe it’s drunk club dudes pissin in the doorways.
—
there’s a muslim fortress from the 11th century on top of a hill in malaga and the spanish people living there didn’t know there was also a 1st centry roman theater at the bottom of the hill until the 1950’s when they were digging for somewhere to put a library. there’s some metaphor there about what gets lost or what can be found with a little effort.
