Adriaddicts

11 April 2009. Saturday.

We had one more gelato before we left Split, but you can hardly hold it against us. The lemon flavor was transcendent: we have talked about it several times since we left, and we have conducted several comparative experiments since. It is a serious business, this ice cream sampling, or at least we have made a habit of pretending that it is.

Zipping down the Croatian coast, we stared out the windows as the scenery whirred past us. North of Bosnia, most of the landscape is truly picturesque: the crags are gnarled and gumdrop purple, and peppered with dark, feathery trees. The fields on both sides of the road are rich with these boulders until about 150km south of Split, when the small clusters of rocks give way to impressive mountains with striations of grape crops. The ridges in the east cut across the sky like the edge of construction paper after a pass with those rifled designer scissors. The juxtaposition of the Croatian ranges augments the beauty of the horizon, which turned thirty shades of blue as encroached on Bosnia.

It was time for a swim around 14:30, so we hopped off the coastal road and parked on the top of a hill that overlooked a solid rock beach. Once again without a plan, we sauntered down the choppy hill, leaping from pathway to amorphous pathway in order to reach the rocks 100m below us.We were assailed on several occasions by these large winged insects that looked quite a lot like clothespins. There were no snakes in the hill, but our suspicion that there may be was still elevated enough to make us test every footstep we took before we committed, as if the ground we were stepping on had the potential to be extremely hot, and we kept having to make sure.

Arriving on the rocks was only the first challenge we faced that day. We tested out the shards of coral that lined the shore, trying to determine whether or not they were stable, first, and moreover, whether it would kill our feet to use these as our diving boards. After toeing the water a bit, and bemoaning how much of a shock jumping off would be, we charged boldly into the fray: and yeah, it was chilly. I recall yelping. The water was crisp and a strong light blue, the way you would imagine glacier water to be. We could see maybe 10m down, so we were sure that we in no danger of hitting the bottom. The danger came from a less conspicuous source: the treacherous sea urchins which punctuate the coast like pindots on an Italian silk tie. After our third dive, Adam swam back to shore and clung to the vertical-pancake rocks, scooping his feet towards the platform just under the wave break. I immediately heard a chirp to my left, and saw Adam scoot backwards, wincing: SHARP, he yelped. Shark? No no, sharp! Agghhh!

Back up on the shore, it looked like we had gotten away safely. Three half-inch spikes jutted out of the sole of his right foot, near his pinky toe. Quickly plucking them out and dispatching them into the Adriatic, Adam brushed his foot and examined again. We discovered another 20 smaller spines buried deeper under the skin, only grapite pencil dots now, after the pressure of walking around on the rocks. Over the next couple of hours, and after our arduous hike back up the hill, we efforted to extract as many of the bastards as possible. About 15 still remain, but the pain has greatly subsided. Adam has been an incredible sport about the whole thing, insisting that he can hike with us all day, and leading the initiative to jump of some of the higher cliffs that we have found in Croatia. His pain has, to some immeasurable extent, been abated by a traditional Croatian remedy for sea urchin wounds: an olive oil wrap for three nights consecutive, which is meant to coax the spines from the skin and to numb the skin sufficiently to bear the pain of walking around.

Onwards we sped, then, towards Bosnia, which was an anti-climactic episode: we had truly hoped to receive a stamp at the border, but our passports were not even inspected. Once again, we are victims of the pain often faced by three modestly dressed middle-class white males. When will the prejudices end? Just around the bend from Bosnia, the crayon box of Dubrovnik is visible straightaway. The coast is decorated with houses and beset with very small motor boats for short-term skips between the twelve hundred islands just to the west. We matriculated into the city and found some provisions for the night, located our hostel, and ascended the stairs to down our welcome drinks. In small chalice-type shot glasses, the man who owns the property served us a honey liquor made with grapes from Croatia. To us, and no one else, we said.

After some warm-up exercises on the hostel patio, we ripped into Old Town. Along for the ride is a lovely French Canadian girl called Stephanie, who has been here for several days and had already received a tour of the city. We sliced through the castle walls which were modest and beautiful, and dotted with bullet holes. The ramparts are entirely lit in a muddled orange light, so the entire castle looks haunted and ancient. But just below them, the Easter parties raged with great fervor, especially at the gay bar and the pub just next to it. The chair cushions here were purple and pink and orange, cow-print and leopard-print, fluffy and welcoming. We had travarice, several more pints, and some pretty intense laughs about our surroundings. The end of the night wrapped up with a compliment about my shorts–or shirt, depending on how you interpret the accent–a lesson about Croation pop music, an interjection about Michelle Obama, a Facebook request, an ironic hi-bye interchange across the way from the parking lot, and a great deal of fatigue. Good morning, Dubrovnik.

12 April 2009. Easter Sunday.

Religion: the enemy of commerce. It turns out that there are no shops open on Easter, which we knew, but that there are no…things…open either. This set a fantastic opportunity to go to Lokrum, the island about 4km from Dubrovnik. Of course, to prepare us for the journey, we felt that one more helping of gelato would probably be a wise investment. Lemon, please.

A 40kn boatride later, we rolled into the docks in front of Lokrum’s park, and were greeted by some shrill coos from the peacocks housed there. The F.K.K. awaited us, so we veered north around the island and found ourselves on a rude beach made of enormous boulders and canyons. Water sucked into the alleys between the sunning spots, spraying our feet and misting the air. We skipped the beach. Around the bend and totally secluded, we found a natural cove with the clearest water I have ever known. It was a 50 meter expanse made of blue marbles, at least 30m deep and pummeled by waves. Cliff diving, ladies and gentlemen.

We, uh. We..don't know.

8 April 2009. Wednesday.

The day started off a bit later than we had supposed it would, mostly for the reason that we had failed to account for our propensity to screw around for inexplicably lengthy periods of time. One of our favorite pre-departure diversions was a mashup game of soccer and baseball, which ended with a sharp line drive into the middle of the lake, and a failed attempt to rangle the errant ball with a bit of a lakeside branch. We were not fazed, and were indeed encouraged by the advent of a particular finding: nutella and bread from the Schloss kitchen. We also took three packets of jam.

Just before we left Salzburg, I suggested that Adam and I might give our manual car a try. After all, having grown up in the States, we were relatively new to the idea that driving could not be done whilst eating a cheeseburger and texting for sports scores, and that one should indeed need to pay attention to shifting gears and tapping a troublesome third pedal. Right around the time that the clutch started to sound like someone was running a roll of quarters through a paper shredder, I decided to switch spots with Daniel and let him drive the ten total hours to Split, bisected on our first night by a short rest in Rijeka. Having thus ceded the driver’s seat, I took up the passenger spot, and Adam sprawled in the spacious (read: miniscule) backseat. He and he alone was to be the guardian of our snack cache, which was comprised largely of the sorts of things that mothers get mad at their kids for eating too much of when they’re 7.

Our plan was to have left by 2pm RST. Given the gracious buffer between our planned time and our probable time, our 8:06pm departure was about half an hour early. We commended ourselves by eating Austria’s version of the Gala apple, a pink and sunburst-yellow beauty of a fruit which, while it lacks crunch, is nonetheless the size of a softball and was thus sufficient for our dinners. Onwards then, we sped towards Hallein and Villach and Lublijana, making good time and fighting back the stinging urges to sleep. We were sustained by 80s rock, several Beatles discs, window breeze bursts, and open-ended questions.

Daniel was a bit sick, so we decided to blitz to Rijeka and knock out in a hostel. Yeah, it’s that easy, we thought: navigate to a country which we have never seen or studied, linguistic fluency for which we do not possess, a map for which we do not have, and with zero idea about how to locate a place to sleep. Foolproof, yeah? We thought so. Well, the darndest thing happened, to tell you the truth: we ended up on a one-way street between a shipyard and an abandoned garage, small matchbox cars zipping past us, staring at an insufficient GPS tracker, and confronting groups of teenaged Croatians about the direction of a suitable hostel. Each of these is a circumstance which is, on its own, less than desirable: together, they are at least formidable, and when it’s 6 degrees outside and you’re wearing madras shorts, they’re nearly unbearable.The young man who offered us directions while the other chatted in Croatian was pleasant enough, but he had an extremely low opinion of the district:

Daniel: We are looking for this place, the Hostel Rijeka.

Croatian: What’s the..why do you come to this shithole town called Rijeka?

Daniel: We, uh. We..don’t know. But we would like to sleep.

Croatian: Yes, that is the good thing to do here.

We plodded down a graffiti-checked street to the hostel which we’d discovered, and then to another, because the poor man’s Rivers Cuomo who ran the hostel said that he was completely booked. Three hostel options later, we decided to park in the lot adjacent to a small lodge off the highway, and to contort ourselves in such a way that sleeping became possible, although not familiar.

The sun comes.

9 April 2009. Thursday.

The next part of our marathon journey started omniously: a bottle of John Jameson Irish Whiskey was left outside the car during our morning tooth brushing session, representing our first casualty of the trip. It will surely be accompanied, although we will try our hardest to make sure that this is not the case (so far we have been successful in this regard, having cleanly polished each soviet red can of the pint cases which we buy daily). Point in fact, there were many ominous symbols on the way to Split, which became our destination on Thursday night when we figured out that Dubrovnik was farther to the south than our wafer cookies would last us.

First, on the side of the road around kilometer 278, there was a massive fire in the center of a rocky expanse to the west. The plume billowed out across the rocks as if it had no origin whatever, but instead engendered itself from amidst the ruby stones and tilted huts which polka-dotted the Croatian landscape. It rose maybe 70 meters in there air, and eclipsed the sun when we laced back towards the coast, temporarily darkening the road ahead. We speculated that it may have something to do with the Easter festival which is taking place this weekend in the devoutly religious country. None of us being a particularly religious man, we did not have any way to justify this supposition, but we felt satisfied, and we celebrated our detective victory with a bit of a baguette which we had bought before leaving Salzburg.

Arriving in Split was simply the first of our tasks before finding the hostel which we had reserved for the night. Our GPS navigator, which we refer to exclusively as “TomTom,” lead us in concentric circles and mobius strips for not less than an hour an a quarter, before we found our site: Silver Center Hostel, affixed just in between the main square of the town and the sleepy marina to the south. The place is on the second floor of one of the set pieces that is used in Saving Private Ryan: an entirely cement building, the ground floor of which is home to a pile of thirty lunchpail-sized oblong stones, broken wall lamps, deteriorating stairs, and exposed electrical wires. On the second floor, we found ourselves in the middle of a delightfully confined makeshift hostel, four rooms and twenty-six beds in total, with the nicest hosts you can imagine.

This city is a very nice one indeed, but it gives you the impression that it is constanly undergoing an identity crisis. It is as if the entire port is the product of a architectural equivalent of some culinary experiment in which Roman columns and facades were thrown into a salad spinner alongside modern docks, cabanas, cafes, and promenades. The resultant city is our lovely Split, whose name fairly accurately reflects the personality of its scenery. It’s a strange thing to swerve through the cobbled streets and to see tagged walls across from massive designer shopping malls, question marks and famous faces painted all over the place, like a city-wide public art display.

10 April 2009. Friday.

We did a bit of the ocean today. About a kilometer to the southeast, Split’s only sand beach is the playground of the speedo-clad and muscle-bound. On this eyelash of a sandbar, they play this game with a little racquetball which roughly resembles catch, except that no one ever catches the ball; or volleyball, except that no one erected a net; or dancing, except that someone brought a racquetball. Adam and I ventured into the ocean while Daniel tuned out on the beach. We had shuffled about 80 paces into the sea, and the water took its time to creep slowly past our knees. Adam, the more courageous, heaved himself into the water as I riffed “Final Countdown,” and I doused my head in the tepid crystal clear water. Back to the shore we strode, kicking the water which started to slink back towards our ankles. On the shore, we played question games as we fell asleep in the afternoon sun: if you had to pick a president to come with us on the trip, who would you choose?
Jackson. Eisenhower. Teddy Roosevelt, we said. Daniel wants Senator Joseph McCarthy, for meddlesome reasons..

This Is What a Travel Journal Looks Like

I have heard from a couple of people, most notably and persistently my mother, that she figured that this blog would be more of a journal about traveling. It has become something very different from that: right now, it isn't much more than a portfolio. So, for the six people who have ever read this blog, and principally for my mother:

Alright, already. Here it is. Dublin, Amsterdam, and Marseille.

My City Tour

Dublin Blues

I have always had reservations about caring for people, or maybe ‘difficulty’ is a better word for it. It seems to me that some folks just flatly do not appeal to me, or that maybe I am acting in self-interest in not expanding myself too broadly. I have always been better at keeping a close group of friends who are very dear to me, and quite a bit worse at keeping up very many relationships at once. Maybe a part of it is, I feel like I am able to be more of a part of my family if it is relatively small.

I care for cities in sort of the same way. Whenever I travel anywhere, I sort of identify with some part of the city I visit which is in a small way the same as I come to love a friend. Dublin is one of the chief representatives of the group of places for which I care very deeply, at it has been for several years, since the epic union. There is something about the way that the roads there are built, that the people cover up with their collars, that the bars push out string music. Dublin has a unique quality for me, which combines the fantastic and modern with a quaint and noble past. I wince when I think about the way in which cities in the States could never be this way, and moreover how the people are just not designed for it to carry the kind of charm that pulses in Ireland. The sadness here, which I cannot separate from even my fondest thoughts of a nation, is that sometimes the city that you love rips into you in the same way that a person can.

The latest round of political action in Ireland is largely divisive and tremendously violent. Several of the splinters of the Irish Republican Army have taken responsibility for shootings which have rippled through the country over the past couple of months. These attacks, which take place largely in Protestant communities, are being forged against the members of opposing religious factions, and especially against members of the garda or other representatives of the state.

I can understand the appeal of rebellion and of uprising, and even of widespread and enduring angst. I very often fell the desire to react in a more extreme manner towards an opposition which seems to me to be domineering and mislead, including having my interests far from its focus. I cannot tell how often I have my most extreme emotional reactions to these very relationships: it is rage, and frustration, and restlessness, and contempt, and it has to burn itself out every time I get to thinking. In all cases, it seems to me that the problems that I face, when laid against the problems which brew between Irish factions, are not close in duration or in degree. However, I do identify with the climate and the emotion, and my complaint is this: why is war your solution, my rebel brothers? I cannot imagine a world in which one group can strong arm another and produce a better world as a result.

Now, I can conceive that a person or a group could be a rightful or desired winner, and that that group can dispatch an evil or maleficent one. Surely this must be the case, from time to time, or even very often. But the strain which is persistent is the foolish and dangerous axiom that violence solves problems, and any instance in which this is true simply propagates a world in which the eil group continues to persist, and for the very reason that others were defeated. Groups which lose wars of ideology do not go away when they are put down. Indeed they are emboldened by the idea that they might have success the next time if only they can be even more lethal, and how can this breed a better people?

This taste for distaste is a terrible thing, and the worst bit of it, philosophically speaking, is that it works if you look only at each case individually: you see a victory and a loss, and this is a normal thing in any contest. In the loss, of course, you can see shame, or guilt, or anger, and there is a regrouping effect after it. In the victor, you see thrill or relief, ego, and sometimes you are thankful for that party who fought and who succeeded. But you never hear the airy peal of the violins. You see the bundled up street crowds glance away from each other, and the stones in the cobbled streets look just a little more cracked, dirty, and farther apart.

I Amsterdam

We all know the exploits of the political scene in Amsterdam. The social allowances, lets say, such as the government sanctioned sex trade and the relaxed rules on drug enforcement. These and other norms are famous among travelers my age, and are indeed most of the reason that anyone I've met along my way is interested in visiting the city. And fine: it seems that the Red Light and the coffee shops are tremendously popular for the locals just as well as the tourists, very likely for the reason that there is no great hang-up about either of those earthly delights. Both of these practices are freely viewed and, in fact, smelled. Actually, it is marginally difficult for an unfamiliar wanderer of the city to choose just a regular coffee shop instead of one which purveys drugs, and in some districts, the windows go dresses-dresses-shoes-chicks-purses.

At home, you get two kinds of people, basically. One sort will call himself "morally and ethically opposed"--whatever that means--about the sorts of liberties that Amsterdam boasts. The other is into both of of those trades, and is in favor of them really because he'd like it to be easier for him to have access to sex and drugs. I find it difficult to blame the second guy. But there is a better reason to support such liberalism: the city works perfectly. The violent crime rate is extraordinarily low, especially compared to our land of the self-proclaimed free. It is wonderfully clean, and more than that, it is beautiful and manicured with rolling hills and lawns. The people are friendly, giant, extremely well-educated, and distractingly good looking. There are more bikes in Amsterdam than prayers in the Vatican, and the whole nation is one of the world leaders of the environmentally conscious movement. The public transit is safe, and logical, and efficient--look, the whole place is pristine. Every adult is allowed to behave as if he were an adult, and they do with a much higher frequency than they do in the Silicon Valley. The economy also benefits tremendously, as does the populace, I would imagine, from the industries which are strictly maligned in the States. But why are they? They clearly do not hurt the morale or the general spirit: everyone here is extremely gracious and openly welcoming. The quality of the education and the intellect of the average Dane are certainly not lacking: everyone I have met speaks Dutch and perfect English, and very frequently either German or French or both. Interestingly, the most notable negative wave I am aware of in Amsterdam is one that is made possible by their overarching principle of understanding: religious fundamentalism, which indeed conflicts with and forbids the famed practices of the city, is certainly the leading cause of violent crime in the region.

The only regrettable facet of the culture which I have internalized is, how terrifically impossible it would be for our nation to adopt anything like this. The amount and persuasion of tolerance that the States offers is absolutely absurd: it is the truest definition of an illusion to announce that we are founded upon an emphasis on civil rights and liberties and that we live up to this credo. Each European city I have been in, including Amsterdam, has been an occasion for a conversation about the invasive extent of the American legal system. Is that not shocking enough? Students from other countries are aware of and concerned by the degree to which the United States restrict practices and views which they commonly view to be inalienable, or the way in which it similarly mandates things which are so obviously inane and unnecessarily complicated. We permit very little, I have come to realize; we are decades behind many countries' efforts to extend rights to citizens and, notably, their environmental practices. We are laden with war and fundamentalism, shouting and emotional outbursts, celebrity gossip rags and dating trivia. The daft is the easy, is the accepted, is the appreciated. This unfortunate link makes progressive liberty not only absent, it makes it impossible.

Marseille

This place sparkles like San Francisco, and it smells pretty similar too. I can never quite find my way around by way of actual street familiarity, as I am eventually able to do even in towns which are short-lived. Instead, in Marseille as in San Francisco, I generally point myself in the direction of the thing I am looking for, and move that way until I find a landmark or, better, a sign. The streets are polka-dotted with gum and cigarettes, and the homeless population is as abundant, aggressive, and aimlessly talkative. The attitude in the street here is much the same as in The City. There is a sort of funky vibe to the younger Marseillais, but mixed with a feeling like they or their fathers are very reliably in the fishing trade. There are lots of knit, handmade-looking clothes here. Wide-cable knit sweaters, scarves, ill-fitting dresses which look trendy or messy depending on how cute the girl is. It's the sort of place where there are tons of shops, but not many stores. Everything looks to be makeshift and humble, as if the actual buildings are hand-me-downs.

The harbor beams. It is packed with boats which are worked on and loaded and cleaned and inspected every day, while the gulls oversee the activity. The city appears to have two suns; one of them lives under the ocean and blasts through the surface of the water as long as his skyward brother keeps him company. Cafes and boutiques are everywhere, so there is a lot of plate clinking and soft paper flitting. The breeze rips everyone in the city and pushes them through the hilly streets and along the winding coastline.