“Croatia, in general, it’s Crazyland.”

“Croatia, in general, it’s Crazyland.”

My penultimate night in Zagreb, and in the whole of Croatia for that matter, a Croatian retired professional football player, whose generosity was rivalled only by his drunkenness, offered up these wise words of wisdom about his homeland. He then offered us some more wine, and I think that was the last coherent English phrase that I was able to discern from him. But I’m getting ahead of myself; that part of the story comes later.

Zagreb was unexpected. We went to Zagreb, Croatia’s capital city, more for logistical reasons than out of any real desire to spend time there. Most other tourists think the same way about the city: it’s a good place to catch a flight, train, or bus en route to or from the sunny paradise of the Dalmatian Coast, and it has good connections to Italy, but it doesn’t really stand out as a place to visit like the southern coast of the country does. Lindsay and I were most excited to go to Zagreb because we had plans to meet up with two friends, one we’d traveled with in Turkey (Nick), and one we’d gone to school with at UBC (Boz). We saw Zagreb more as the backdrop for these reunions rather than the feature attraction. But then Zagreb went and surprised us.

Unlike the Mediterranean coast of Croatia, Zagreb has a much more Central European feel. Its grand wide roads and open public squares are adorned with statues of men riding horses and looking dignified. The day we arrived in Zagreb was the last day of a week-long folk music and dance festival, so there were concerts and events going on throughout the center of the city. We watched Montenegrin and Croatian dance troupes perform on a stage in the main square: romantic ballads, energetic sword dances, and raucous boot-stomping men’s dances.

Zagreb is a great city to see just by wandering through it (I know, I would probably say that about most cities because I’m fond of wandering, but it’s especially true of this one). It was a Sunday afternoon the first day we arrived, so many stores and businesses were closing early, and the streets were quiet, with only a small number of people sauntering through them. We checked out a church and a couple other attractions, and then bought some fruits from an outdoor market and ate them with some lemonades at a café.

We had read in Lindsay’s Lonely Planet guidebook that Zagreb has a J.R.R. Tolkien pub, themed after the great writer’s Middle Earth world, and we made it our mission to find it. I thought it would make an especially fitting photo op for my pint-sized plastic traveling gnome, and I admit that I had other pint-related activities in mind too. Armed with map and guidebook, we tramped around Zagreb until we turned a corner and found ourselves a few buildings down from the address printed in the sacred Lonely Planet. We were standing outside building #6. Tolkien’s pub was building #8. We stepped further down the street to the next building, the building which would contain the fantastic – nay, fantastical – Middle Earth themed Tolkien pub. Visions of wizards, elves, magic, and ogre-sized mugs of frothy mead flashed through our geeky minds…

But building #8 was rundown – deserted, even. The front doors, these huge, sturdy medieval wooden doors shaped in a stout arch, perfect for a Middle Earth alehouse, were locked shut with thick metal chains. Peering through the crack in the door, we could see the room was bare but for some scattered bits of trash and discarded furniture. What a disappointment. The Tolkien pub had shut down! We saw a pair of 20-something British girls aimlessly walking up and down the street. I called out to them.

“Do you speak English?”

“Yeah. Are you looking for the Tolkien pub too?”

“Yeah. I guess it closed.”

“Yeah. I guess we’ll have to have a drink somewhere else then.”

And with that, they were gone. As for us, we took some pictures of us (and Gnomie) standing in front of building #8 looking forlorn, and moved on.

Our next stop was the town’s bell tower, as towers are usually the best way to gain some orientation in a new town. The tower wasn’t much to look at, but the view was quite nice, with several churches and older buildings nearby.

I thought to myself, “What a nice view of…” And then I realized that I had completely blanked out. I couldn’t remember what city I was looking at. I couldn’t even remember what country I was in. For a full ten seconds, I was at a complete loss; I could have been anywhere. Then, my memory gradually came back to me. My mind started at the beginning and worked its way forward… Turkey… Bulgaria… Serbia, Montenegro… right, Croatia. I was looking at Zagreb. Right.

It was at that moment that I first came to the conclusion that I might be a bit travel-weary. I had, after all, just that morning stepped off of my fifth night bus in five weeks of travelling, and night buses aren’t exactly conducive to a full night’s sleep or to any shred of coherence the next day. I resolved that my time in Italy would be spent in recovery: less movement, less landmarks and museums, more sleep. Paris and London, my final stops of the trip, would tax my energy, of which I was clearly already deprived.

Oddly enough, later that night, while we were wandering a street lined with bars and cafes looking for a restaurant that served real actually meals rather than just beer and coffee, we noticed a nondescript café-bar with a sign labelled in both English and a strange script resembling Sanskrit or Arabic. The strange script, we soon realized, was Elvish. We had stumbled upon the new location of Tolkien’s pub! Unfortunately, though, we were on the hunt for dinner, and Tolkien’s only served drinks. We resolved to return later for some Middle Earth mead. As it turned out, this was never fated to happen; Zagreb had something completely different in store for us.

We sat down at an outdoor table of a restaurant a few blocks away and ordered our food. There was musical entertainment that night in the form of a middle-aged man with an electronic keyboard, a microphone, and some pre-recorded background tracks. He played a mixture of English and Croatian pop songs. A man at the table next to us seemed to really enjoy the music, and he loudly and boisterously sang along to the Croatian tunes. We’d only just sat down for dinner, but he was already visibly drunk. He was also very friendly. He tried to make conversation with us, but it wasn’t easy because he spoke very little English. He did, however, speak Spanish, and Nick speaks Italian, so they attempted to communicate a bit in a new language I think we dubbed Spitalian.

Eventually, we came to understand that the Croatian man was an ex- professional football player (European, not American) and that it was his birthday that night. We wished him a happy birthday, Nick and he exchanged some names of famous football stars that he’d played with, and that was that. Or so we thought.

A little while later, our waiter came up to our table, announced “He paid your bill,” and then promptly walked away without any further explanation. We were sure that he had mis-translated. We asked the waiter to come back, but the football player shook his head and said, “No, no, no,” as if to discourage us from protesting. Apparently, in some European countries, it is customary to give gifts to others on your birthday, rather than just to receive. I remembered that Peter had said this about Bulgarian birthdays.

Of course, we accepted the football player’s generosity, toasting his birthday with our wine, and once again attempting conversation. About half-way through our bottle of wine, the footballer expressed his disdain at our rather cheap choice of wine. He called the waiter over, pointed to the bottle and said a few words, and before we knew it, the half-empty bottle of wine was replaced by a much classier full bottle of wine. Now we were drinking the same kind of wine as the footballer, who seemed much more satisfied with this turn of events. Clearly, it was cause for another toast. (And another, and another, and another…) When we complimented Croatia, telling him where we’d traveled and how much we liked the coast, that’s when he replied with one of the most memorable fragments of broken English that I have ever heard: “Croatia, in general, it’s Crazyland!”

Needless to say, we were quite content chatting with the generous drunken ex-footballer, so by the time we left the restaurant we were too exhausted to go to the Tolkien pub. We never did get to go to that pub, but I don’t think any of us really minded. By then, we’d learned that the key to traveling in Croatia – or most of the places we’d been, for that matter – is to embrace the moment and the place for whatever it turns out to be, even if it turns out to be nothing more or less, in general, than a Crazyland.

Korcula: If life gives you tomatoes, you eat them like an apple.

Our next stop after Dubrovnik was the island of Korcula along Croatia’s Dalmatian coast. My memories of Korcula are a haze of beach, sun, and tomatoes…

After two nights in Dubrovnik, we set off on the ferry for Korcula Island with Amra. While I slept like the dead the night before, Amra and Lindsay were both woken up in the dead of the night by the old lady’s son, who was talking very loudly. Amra went downstairs to see what all the fuss was about, only to find the old lady and her son in our bathroom.

Apparently, a pipe had broken in the night and the son was trying to fix it. It wasn’t working out very well, though, and the son – who, I might add, is a very large, very potbellied, and considerably strange man – was getting angrier and louder by the minute.

Amra told us that the son had shown her a piece of the offending pipe and voiced his rather deranged and paranoid opinion that the British guys, who had just checked into the room below ours that day, must have taken a knife to the pipe in a deliberate attempt to sabotage the old lady’s meagre apartment rental living. Amra expressed her scepticism. The son expressed his blind rage. Amra then expressed her desire to go back to her room, in which direction she promptly scurried, hastily locking her bedroom door behind her.

Despite all of the drama of the night before, I still felt that we had lucked out with the rooms that we had rented from the old lady in Dubrovnik, and I worried that our luck might run out in Korcula. Once again, we arrived in a new town with no map, no reservations, and very little idea about how to ensure a good room at a good price. As soon as we stepped off the ferry, we were bombarded by locals offering their sobe, rooms for rent. We spoke with a few, eventually accepting one teenaged boy’s offer to take a look at his family’s sobe. We followed him for the three minutes he had said the walk would take, up along a side path leading through a residential area with white-washed buildings and bright purple flowers (but a word of advice: three Croatian minutes = five to twenty minutes real time).

The room was fantastic. For about $33 CAD each per night, we got one room with a double bed, another with two single beds, a large and clean private bathroom with a big basin perfect for washing clothes, a fully furnished kitchen with all the appliances and dishware we’d need, and the best part, a large terrace with patio furniture, a clothesline, a radio, and a view of the town. The terrace had a garden behind it, and the family kindly told us that we should feel free to pick tomatoes off of the vine in the garden whenever we wanted. One of the first things Amra and I did was step out on to the terrace, pick a fresh tomato off of the vine, and eat it like an apple. It was still warm from the sun’s rays beaming down on it day after day. Delicious.

That night, after a full day of wandering around the town, sleeping, and swimming in the ocean, we sat on the terrace with our last-minute scrounged up dinner of sandwiches, beer, and fresh fruit. We turned the radio on to the Dubrovnik radio station, which cycled through periodic stints of Croatian crooners, classical music, and golden oldies a la Frank Sinatra, and which now seemed to be stuck on a consecutive stream of Elton John hits. There on the terrace, Lindsay, Amra, and I listened to “Benny and the Jets” – followed inexplicably by “Candle in the Wind” – chatted, and watched Korcula town in front of us.

We heard a marching band practising off in the distance.

“We are being followed by music. God and music!” Amra commented, referencing the music school that was next to our room in Dubrovnik, as well as an earlier conversation in which I’d told the story of our short stay at the monastery in Bulgaria. And it was true: our trip was punctuated by strange and surreal forays into churches and mosques, and I seemed to encounter a nun or monk in each new city I went to, including Korcula. And now the music, too.

“Well, there are worse things to be followed by,” I answered.

Croatia: Sobe (Room for Rent)

After our harrowing 26 hours spent traveling from Sofia to Croatia, we arrived in Dubrovnik in the late afternoon, desperate to set our bags down in our room and rest. First, though, we had to complete one rather necessary task: find a room.

While Lindsay had booked all of her rooms from Canada for the part of the trip she travelled through Western Europe alone (and I’d done the same for my last trip to Europe), we hadn’t bothered to do the same for the part where we travelled Eastern Europe together. We figured that it would be less crowded with tourists in Turkey and Croatia than in France and Italy, so we’d be able to book a day or two ahead.

Better yet, we thought, we could always find a place in person once we arrived into town. There’s something appealing about the idea of sauntering into a new town and casually seeking out your shelter; it’s unfettered and adventurous. The unappealing flip-side to this image, though, is the image of you sleeping on gum-stained concrete at a bus station, all because you irresponsibly sauntered into a town in which there is no shelter to be had because it’s all been booked up for weeks. Granted, sleeping in a bus station is no doubt an unfettered and adventurous undertaking. But it’s just not appealing. They’re always filthy, uncomfortable and loud, and they’re filled with drifters, thieves, and miserable backpackers waiting for the next bus out of town because they arrived there without reservations thinking that they could just find a place in person (they were wrong).

But I digress.

We showed up in Dubrovnik exhausted, dishevelled, and without a room. We didn’t know much at all about the country, and we didn’t speak the language. At this point, we weren’t too coherent in English either. In Croatia, hostels and hotels are not as common because it’s most popular to rent a room (or sobe) independently, usually from a hunched-over elderly lady wizened by age and war. Because of this booming private room-rental business, to step into a bus station or ferry port in a more touristy town in Croatia is essentially to step into a meat market of accommodation. Old ladies flank travellers, enticing them in broken English and hushed voices: “Sobe? Room? You want room for rent? I have, very near Old City. I give good price. I have map.”

When you’ve just completed a 26-hour marathon trip on three buses through four countries and across three borders, these determined entrepreneurial old ladies can be a bit… overwhelming. We didn’t know where to start.

As luck would have it (and I don’t think it’s too melodramatic for me to say that luck hadn’t flashed its cheeky grin at us for a couple of days), a Swedish girl walked up to us at the station and asked us if we had found anything. No, we hadn’t, we answered. We weren’t sure how to pick out the good offers from the bad ones – some of which, we worried, could be scams.

As it turned out, Amra had been to Dubrovnik twice before. As a matter of fact, her parents originally came from Bosnia so she could speak the language shared by the countries that once made up Yugoslavia. She was fun and friendly, she seemed to know the ins and outs of room-hunting in Croatia, and she was looking for other travellers to share a room with.

The three of us checked out a room near the bus station before deciding to take a bus to the Old Town in the hopes of finding accommodation within the heart of Dubrovnik. Once there, Amra spoke with an old lady who explained that her friend had a room “just within the city walls of the Old Town.” Did we want to see it? She called the friend over.

This had to be the oldest, smallest, most hunched-over and wizened old lady that I had seen yet. She hobbled over and begun speaking with Amra. Since I couldn’t understand their conversation, I opted to watch instead. I took in the old lady. She was tiny and age made her crumple over herself quite a bit, but her arms! Her arms were massive tree trunks, her hands colossal and calloused from decades and decades of hard work and self-reliance. She reminded me of my friend Robin’s Polish grandmother, Babtcha, who I had met while traveling in Europe the summer before. (I think that if you were to travel through Eastern Europe in search of the heart of each nation, you’d find it in each country’s version of this old lady: strong, stern but welcoming, years of history written on her face, and never questioning the necessity of the endless hard work she does.) The old lady’s hair was pulled back into a frizzled bun, and her face was wrinkled and squashed to the shape of an oval more wide than tall. She was missing several teeth, so her mouth seemed to take up less space.

The old lady led us off inside the walls of the city, slowly because that was the only speed that she was capable of. She hobbled along, up and down stair after stair, and we slowly, awkwardly crept after her, bags on our backs so that we resembled a herd of determined turtles.

But it was the perfect speed to take in the Old Town. White stone walls towered above us, slick marble stones on the ground before us. It was like a magical, majestic fairytale city. The walls shone from the late-afternoon sun, and at night, they would glow from the light of the moon and the street lamps. Dubrovnik, called the “pearl of the Adriatic” by the romantic Lord Byron, is truly enchanting, as if it lives within its own timeless faery spell, magic that hasn’t worn off for centuries.

The old lady slowly hobbled from the main street down side alleys, and up stair after stair. I was nearly mortified when she apologised to us for her taking so long to climb each stair: her ankles were so swollen, her feet so calloused, and the veins in her legs so blue and throbbing, that I feared they might shatter with each new laboured step. It shocked me to think that she must complete this exhausting climb every time she left her apartment. Lindsay, Amra and I joked that we would probably still feel compelled to take the room once we got there, even if it was hideous, for the simple reason that she had gone to so much effort to show it to us.

Finally, after a series of stairs, twists, turns, and more stairs, we came to a door at a dead end which was labelled with a single word: “Sobe” (room for rent). The old lady opened the door and beckoned us in…

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Never have I stayed in a place like this. We enter a room – actually, more of a courtyard, with a ceiling of grape vines keeping the sun out. There are a couple of tables with some chairs, a sink next to a set of stairs leading up to another level, and clutter everywhere. It’s not particularly clean (it is, after all, essentially an outdoor courtyard) but it’s not dirty either, just filled with clutter.

I am immediately overwhelmed by the room – the sights, the sounds. A white fluffy Samoyed dog scampers happily up to greet us. Bird cages line the walls – nine of them in total, each with multiple occupants. All of the birds tweet and chatter. How many of them are there?

The old lady sits us down at the patio/living room table, offers us juice, and then begins talking to Amra. I stare and stare around the room, wide-eyed in amazement at the absurdity. The grape-vine leaf ceiling, the clutter, the panting google-eyed dog… and the birds, the birds! I can’t believe my luck: a missed flight out of Bulgaria drives us to take a 26-hour bus trip, which drops us at a bus station in Dubrovnik, where we meet a friendly Swedish-Bosnian girl, who then leads us… here, to this strange and amazing aviary courtyard. I’m blown away.

“She says she is worried that you think she is stupid,” Amra says, “Because she talks so much. But she wants to make sure you know that you can trust her, because so many people scam the tourists here with their rooms.”

I count the birds. Twelve at first. No, fifteen. I get up to twenty when the old lady finishes her cigarette and rises. She orders Bili the Samoyed to stay and then shows us to our room. As it turns out, she rents out three different suites. The second suite she shows us is perfect. There is one room with a double bed and another with a single, a large clean bathroom, and a kitchen area, and it’s all for 22 Euros each.

As we stand in our new room, with its comfy bed – infinitely more comfortable than a bus seat – we hear somebody playing a piano concerto. There is a music school next door, and its courtyard is visible from our bedroom window. The music wafts into our window, singing songs of beauty and grace, and I have fully realized the appeal of sauntering into a new town in a new country, unfettered and adventurous.

Home, but not finished

I got home yesterday. I’m currently at my parents’ house, far from my laptop and busy battling jetlag. Even though my travels are already finished, I’m determined to finish the travel blogging, since it’s what I have resolved to do. (Also, I have no job so I have plenty of time on my hands. Once I defeat the jetlag.) Once I get back to my place, I’m going to make myself busy posting trip photos and updating the trip blog, so keep your eyes open for that.

It’s not over yet!

The Best Laid Plans (Alternative Title: The Fuck Up)

I thought about not posting this, and then just lying about how I got from Bulgaria to Croatia – for all of about 10 seconds. Then I realized that‘s not how I do things. I own my fuckups.

The following is taken pretty much verbatim from a journal entry that I wrote on the bus from Bulgaria to Croatia.

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We missed our flight out of Bulgaria. Missed it!!!

Last night, after a day of slothily hanging around at Peter’s family’s apartment and then going to a movie at Sofia’s one and only mall, Linsay and I went to the internet cafe to check on the status of our flights (from Sofia to Dubrovnik with a connection in Vienna). Peter had told us when we’d first met up with him in Istanbul that SkyEurope, the budget airline that we had booked our ticket with, had filed for bankruptcy protection — another tourist industry victim of the recession. Peter said that they were still operating, but were protected from creditors while they try to reorganize the company and its finances.

Lindsay and I were already really anxious about the flight because, while SkyEurope offered the cheapest flight to Dubrovnik by far, we had to catch a connecting flight in Vienna, and the layover time there was only one hour. I think we were both sure, once we were in Europe and had already bought the tickets, that something would go wrong — that the first flight would be delayed or cancelled or that the budget airline would fail us somehow.

But no. SkyEurope was fine. They didn’t even have a chance to screw us over, because we screwed ourselves over right from the beginning.

I’m not quite sure how it happened that both of us got Monday the 13th of July into our heads as the departure date. Looking back on it now, I think I remember that we had originally wanted to fly out of Sofia on the Monday, but SkyEurope only offered the Dubrovnik flight on the Saturday, two days earlier. So we caved and bought the Saturdays flights, sad that we would have less time with Peter in Bulgaria. So sad, in fact, that we eventually came to believe that the flight was actually on Monday. Our subconsciouses were incapable of fathoming having a mere three days in Bulgaria. No, oursubcionsciouses thought. It must be five days. It must. That’s what was in the itinerary.

Damn subconscious.

So when we checked out flight online last night, and couldn’t find it, we still hadn’t caught on to what our own mindsa had done to us. We went back to Peter’s place. He called the Bulgarian SkyEurope hotline for us. He looked perplexed.

“Oh, the flight was on Saturday? That’s odd… I’ll have to check with the two young ladies about that…”

And that’s how it went. We rushed back to the internet cafe, checked the confirmation email that we’d received (for the second time that day — it hadn’t occurred to us before to check the actual date of departure)… and there it was. Clear as day. Saturday July 11th, 9:35 a.m.

Shit, I thought. We are never going to live this one down.

Peter stayed at the apartment to call train and bus stations about routes to Dubrovnik, while we checked for flights online. All flights were at least $650 CAD — before taxes. Terrible. We decided to wait until morning to figure things out. It was, after all, Sunday night, so none of the bus or train stations were still open.

Defeated, we slowly headed back to the apartment, where we watched English TV with Bulgarian subtitles, moped, and drank a survivable portion of one small glass of rakia each. I ate almost an entire Lindt chocolate bar to myself and felt ill straight after. We were all in a bit of shock, I guess.

How could this have happened??! How could Lindsay and I have missed our flight like this? By two full days?! We, who have been talking about this trip for nearly the entire year we’d been living together! We, sho are always so prepared! Our itinerary was perfection itself: just enough time to allow for flexibility, but snappy enough to keep things interesting. We had spent hour upon hour on tourism websites; in libraries reading chapter after chapter of Lonely Planets, Rough Guides, Let’s Gos, Rick Steves; watching travel shows and documentaries; reading newspaper articles; talking to friends and acquaintances who had been to the places we wanted to go…

We had done everything right. And still we fucked up. It was almost epic in its absurdity, its irony, its unexpectedness. One-hundred-and-seventy-five Euros! Nearly three-hundred-and-fifty Canadian dollars! Gone!!

That night we discovered the great fuck-up, we could do nothing but sit in shock at our stupidity, our complete lack of forethought. It was almost too much.

When you screw up like this, there’s nothing that you can do but accept it. You spend a moment or two dwelling on it, stewing in your flaws and mistakes, and then you move on. That’s how we all get by without being perfect people. We live, we fuck up, we own the fuck up, and then we move on.

Right now, moving on for us is literal. We’re at the border between Bulgaria and Serbia, awaiting customs and soon to receive our passports, newly stamped by the Republic of Serbia. Saint Peter (for that’s what I shall call our Bulgarian friend and translating genius) has come to our aid (just as soon as he was finished laughing at us) and helped us by a 50 Euro bus ticket to Dubrovnik. The route starts at 4:00 pm, goes from Bulgaria to Nis in Serbia, and then transfers to a bus to get to Herceg Novi, Montenegro, where we have to buy another ticket to get to Dubrovnik in Croatia. We’ll be there by tomorrow morning. We fucked up, but we move on.

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Of course, this was written at the beginning of the bus trip, about four hours after leaving Bulgaria. Here’s what I had to say about the trip a few hours later:

 

We finally made it to our next bus in Serbia. We got into our bus station in Nis at about 8:30 and were completely confused about how to find our transfer bus to Montenegro. While Lindsay was at the information desk trying to get our tickets validated for the next bus, there was a complete meltdown in the bus station office. The staffers were yelling at each other really loudly, then one of them broken down and ran out of the office in tears. Lindsay thinks it had to do with an American traveller and how the staffers lost his ticket so that he ended up missing his transfer bus. Oddly enough, it turned out that the bus driver had the American’s ticket on his bus… just not the American himself. It was all very hectic and confusing. To pass the time, we played some Go Fish with the American and a Croatian lady who was desperately trying to get home as soon as possible. A Greek train strike, messed-up bus schedules, and anti-Croatian sentiment in the Balkan countries was making this difficult for her.

When our bus to Montenegro finally came, we gave our bags to the man in charge of storing them on the bus. He took our bags, labelled them, and then said something to us in Serbian.  We started to walk away, but he repeated it.

“I have no idea what’s going on,” I said flatly.

He repeated it again, staring at us expectantly.

“You have to pay,” another passenger translated bluntly for me.

This was news to me. I’ve never had to pay a separate fee to store my bags on a bus.

“Oh.” I said.

I had no Serbian money. My wallet was crammed with Bulgarian lev, British pounds, Croatian kuna… but no Serbian money. A few hours earlier, I’d scrounged around in my wallet and used my last 30 Euro cents to use the station’s pay toilet.

So I excused myself to use a nearby ATM. After punching in my pin number, the machine informed me that it only had bills available in 200 and 1000 notes. It occurred to me that I had no idea how much the baggage fee was. Irked, I opted for the 200 note.

I paid the bus luggage man for our two bags and got 120 of the currency back. It then occurred to me that I had no idea how much one Serbian dinar is worth. Exhausted, disoriented, and bug-eyed, I stared at Lindsay. She had lost her ATM card back in Istanbul, so I was paying for her fee too.

“How much did that just cost me?!”

I had NO CLUE what 80 Serbian dinar amounts to. Could be 80 cents. Could be $80. No idea. I stared at my 100 dinar note for a while, trying to work out how much money I was holding. Can I buy dinner with this? Or just a bottle of water? Is this hostel-for-a-week money, or is it just 75 cents for the tram? There was just no knowing.

Whichever, way, I got to use the bathroom, our luggage is on board, and we’re headed to Montenegro, where we’ll have to take out yet another strange type of randomly fluctuating currency that we will no longer need just as soon as we get to Croatia.

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That last bus ride from Montenegro to Croatia turned out to be a bit longer than we had suspected. In the end, we left at 4 pm in the afternoon and we arrived in Dubrovnik at about 6 pm the next day, after 26 hours of bus travel. And that last bus ride across the Croatian border? Here are my notes on it:

 

They oversold the seats, so four people went without — including us. I sat on the stairs at the back, with Lindsay in the aisle behind me. Some southern British girls in the comfy seats behind us decided their legs were sore so they stretched their dirty feet into the stairwell, directly in front of my face. Thanks for that. We went across the border like we were being smuggled in. Am I expected to pick grapes for low pay and with no job security when I arrive in Croatia?

I listened to Ben Lee’s “Close I’ve Come” to keep my spirits up — I could see the mountains of Croatia! Then, right at the border, the bus started rolling backwards, back toward Montenegro. “Don’t send us back!!!” I couldn’t help but yell out.

But it had stalled, and some men got out to push it. They pushed it around in circles in the customs lot at the Croatian border until it finally started, and then we all smuggled ourselves back into the bus and off over the border. The Croatian border control didn’t seem particulary bothered that there were people sitting in the aisles of the bus. Have passport, will travel.

(Later, a ticket inspector boarded and we figured out that the bus didn’t actually over-sell; the Italian family of four just hadn’t bought any tickets. Grandma, little boy, mom and her infant. I had been angry earlier at the people who hadn’t given up their seats for the Italian mother carrying her infant. She had to cram herself in between two people at the back of the bus, making a seat for herself. I was less sympathetic once I worked out that she was the reason I was sitting crammed into a stairwell with a posh British girl’s dirty feet in my face. Much less sympathetic.)

Rila Monastery: it’s hard to sleep when God is talking so loudly.

Written on the form we had to sign when checking into our room at Rila Monastery:

˝Please, I would like to get your blessing, and to shelter for… days in the complex of Rila Monastery. The purpose of my visit is spiritual, to bow at the Holy Cloister. I would like to give small amount of money, about… lev of my staying. I declare, I am aware of the inside rules of the Monastery and I will observe them.˝

We didn’t know when we decided to stay for a night at Rila Monastery that we would be signing what essentially amounts to a declaration of pilgrimage, but we should have expected it. Rila Monastery is, after all, considered Bulgaria’s Jerusalem. People come from all over the country to see and visit the monastery – taking in the church and museum, sitting in contemplation around the courtyard, and visiting the religious monuments in the surrounding mountains. An Eastern Orthodox monastery that is still in operation today, its solemn and silent atmosphere contrasts with its beautiful natural surroundings: the lush green mountains form the backdrop, and the church in the middle of the courtyard is the centrepiece. With its stark pattern of black, white, and red horizontal stripes, the church is like no other I’ve seen before. Monks wander back and forth through the courtyard and into their roped-off indoor quarters. They dress in long black robes and tall rectangular black hats, and they all have long curly black hair and beards. To sum it up, they look formidable.

With the striped church, wandering solemn monks, silent grounds, and beautiful nature backdrop, our visit to the monastery can best be described as surreal.

The priest in charge of registering accommodation in the monastery was away from his post when we first arrived, so we went over to a small restaurant just outside the monastery walls for some lunch. Sipping a Zagorska beer within plain sight of the monastery walls, I wondered allowed whether or not this could be counted as blasphemous activity, until Peter reminded me that many a monastery has made a living of brewing ale and wine.

When we returned to the registration office, the priest opened his door and ushered us into his office, where he handed us the forms that we were to fill in. Along with a section for name, birthdate, and passport information, it also included a standard ˝plea for shelter and offer of mandatory donation˝ message (not in so many words, but just the same), under which we were told to sign our names. As we filled in these outlandish relics of forms, knowing full well that neither we nor the priest was under the impression that we were actually expected to be on a pilgrimage, the priest sat at his desk, rifling through paperwork and taking calls on his cell phone. I quietly snuck a photo of the form, desperate to document the document. The priest then expertly handled our bill, charging Peter the cheaper rate of 12 lev for Bulgarians, while us foreigners paid 30 lev each.

Actually, what I mean to say is that Peter gave ˝small amount of money, about… 12 lev˝, of his staying, while the rest of us pilgrims gave about 30.

Peter had told us the day before that this price differentiation betweel nationals and foreigners is actually illegal by EU rules, but that it still goes on all over Bulgaria.

Once we finished signing our declaration of pilgrimage, we were given our room keys: one for the boys, and one for the girls. The rooms were definitely quite monastic: sparse, with three beds, a fold-up table, and a storage unit.

As soon as I sat on the bed, I almost instinctively found myself dissapointedly saying, ˝Awwww, monastery beds…˝ They were no more than cots, and Lindsay soon found that the one she originally chose had a large person-shaped sinkhole in the middle. We speculated that the beds were this creeky and uncomfortable because we, having just signed a pilgrim form that would allow us to sleep in a monastery, were expected to be thinking about God all of the time anyways, so who needs a comfy bed?

Since a nap was clearly out of the question, we decided to go for a hike along the pilgrim path in the mountains around the monastery instead. The path led up to the old house that a famous and revered Bulgarian monk had once lived in (I think he may have founded the monastery), and then up to the sacred cave that the monk had lived and prayed in earlier. A bit further along the path was a sacred prayer rock. (There were a lot of sacred prayer things around Rila.)

We climbed into the cave, which featured a framed picture of the monk leaning against a rock at the entrance and countless pieces of paper shoved in various cracks — peoples’ prayers scrawled on scraps and left there in the hopes that God would answer. Here, we found ourselves in almost complete darkness. We fumbled along to the back of the cave, where a ladder led up to a very narrow crack through to the ground above the cave. We considered our options before deciding to attempt to fit ourselves through the crack. Backpacks were removed, strategies were formed, wills were fortified – and then we set off. Peter first, proving that tallness was not a problem (though the jury was still out on wideness — Peter is rail thin), then Lindsay, then me, then Berend. All of us through the narrow crack in the rock, we felt as if we’d just been tested and been found worthy. A few minutes later, Peter called his mom from the top of the cave and she told him that the myth of the cave is that, if you can fit through the cracks in the back, then you are ˝good with God.˝

After our successful judgment day, we continued walked farther along the path. We visited the prayer rock, walked farther up the mountain, accidentally abandoned Peter on the mountain for an hour and a half, and then had some tea at the restaurant outside the monastery, followed by some dinner elsewhere.

The priest had told us that the monastery doors close at 7:00 pm, but that a smaller door on the shut main door would remain open. We failed to grasp just how much smaller this door was. Cut into the larger fortress-like doors, the smaller door stood about four feet high, so that you had to toss your bags through the hole first and then crouch (or bow?) to get through. We took many pictures of this surreptitious night-time entrance.

I suppose the flash from our cameras in the dark must have attracted attention, because when I slouched through the door, I stood up and saw two monks, stern black robes and ceremonious hats, quietly taking in our night-time merriment. I didn’t know what else to do, so I waved. Awkwardly. I felt like a teenager who had been caught trying to sneak in after curfew from some sordid and tawdry rager of a party. I felt a sudden rush of relief that I hadn’t had a beer with dinner.

The monks stared at me for a moment or two, unresponsive to my inexplicable wave (can you blame them? Who waves at a monk?), and slowly, with an undoubtedly failed attempt at nonchalance, I backed outside through the tiny door.

˝Did you forget the room key?˝ Lindsay asked, a grin on her face since she knew she had it in her pocket.

˝Monks! Watching! At the door!˝

˝What?˝

˝God is watching!˝˝

Of course, we couldn’t stay outside the monastery walls forever, so I recruited Lindsay and we both slouched in together. The monks had disappeared from their vantage point, and we both quietly crept across the grounds and up the stairs to our room.

That night, moments after we turned out the light to go to sleep, God gave us a reminder of our stated purpose at the monastery: a sudden thunder storm raged on angrily, interrupting our sleep and giving me the unavoidable feeling that the heavens were speaking.

Highlights of Bulgaria

1.  Sofia’s squat shops: These stores, which operate out of the basements of buildings through a small window not far above the ground of Sofia’s city streets, are relics from the old days, when the cost of renting store space was almost unaffordably high. I’ve also heard talk that they were associated with the black market days during Communist rule. Patrons of a squat shop can decide what to buy from the glass-covered shelves that surround the window on the street outside. Then, they make their order and pay the vendor from the window, squatting down to make the exchange of money for goods. This would be a good place for a picture of such a shop from my camera. Too bad I didn’t bring my camera cord with me. Also too bad that I got chastised by the squat shop lady owner, who wouldn’t sell us our fanta and beer until we promised not to take any photos of her shop. Aw, well, Google Image gives me this when  I type in ˝squat shop Sofia˝: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ud4Z9eJqnpY/SKvGoGAU0HI/AAAAAAAAAUE/OlIlAUSm1KM/s400/IMG_0007.jpg

2. Post boxes on trams: We noticed these little yellow squares with pictures of letters on them on the side of Sofia’s city trams. We figured they were quirky Communist-era remnants that had gone into disuse, like so many things in Eastern Europe. But then Peter asked two separate tram drivers about them, and they both said the tram-side post boxes still work! Lindsay used one of them, so blame Bulgaria’s post-box-trams if you don’t get anything from her.

3. Rila Monastery: We slept in a monastery on our second night in Bulgaria! It was definitely an experience. More on this later..

4. Hiking the Rila Lakes: The night after our stay in the monastery, we headed out to the nearby Rila lakes area and did some hiking up the mountains to take in six of the seven lakes. It was really fun and beautiful, even though it got disorientingly foggy and starting pouring rain as we were heading back down the mountain.

5. Peter’s hospitality! We said it with red wine and we’ll say it again right here: Lindsay and I are so so so grateful to our amazing friend Peter for showing us around his Motherland. The use of his grandparents’ apartment was a great break from hostels and a fantastic taste of Bulgarian apartment life (with its ominous doorless elevator, intelligently designed bathrooms where the shower and toilet are in separate rooms, American television with Bulgarian subtitles, and ˝family˝ breakfasts each morning at the dining table).  Thanks Pete! (But we’re still going to make Communist Bulgaria jokes – you can’t stop us.)

My First Mosque

Note: This should be the last of the Turkey posts, since I’m already one country behind — I’m leaving Bulgaria for Croatia tomorrow morning.

Vancouver doesn’t have many mosques — I’m sure there must be some, but I have never seen one in BC. We have plenty of churches and Sikh temples, both of which I have either sat in service or voted (or both), but I have never stepped foot in a mosque before coming to Turkey. I knew that we would do the typical tourist trip to Istanbul’s famous Blue Mosque, but the first mosque we visited ended up being in the Uskudar district, on Istanbul’s less touristed Asian side.

After a short ferry ride from European Istanbul, during which we drank 50-cent cay (tea) on the famous continent-splicing Bosphorus River, we hopped off the boat and back into Asia. We weren’t sure what to do with ourselves, but had our minds made up for us when we saw a mosque just up the street.

The courtyard of the mosque was a peaceful reprieve from the bustling city outside its walls: a fountain with taps formed the centrepiece, and more taps lined the wall of the entrance. A few people came and went, washing their feet, faces, and hands before entering through the thick hanging fabric that formed a door between the courtyard and inner mosque.

We sat at the entrance for a bit. Then, Lindsay and I donned our headscarves to cover our hair and shoulders, we all removed our shoes, and we stepped behind the carpet partition…

——————–

Inside, it’s darker and quiet but the room is huge and open. The ceiling is raised high up in a dome, and light filters down from chandeliers and windows. A low fence separates the front of the mosque from the back, warning tourists not to cross into the prayer area. People almost casually pray on their own in front of the partition, scattered throughout the front half of the room. They stand, kneel, fall forward prostrate, kneel again, and stand, repeating the whole process again and again. But there is no service, and each person goes through these motions separately, at their own pace.

A small child, no older than three or four, follows his father’s praying motions for a bit: kneel, fall forward prostrate, kneel, stand… but his age gets the best of him and he runs across the length of the mosque in a sudden burst of speed, looking back at his father only once in a playful glance of intermingled mischief and innocence.

I suddenly grow more self conscious when I see some people staring at me curiously; I certainly stick out more than a little, with my light skin, shawl failing to completely cover my light brown hair and spaghetti-strap tank top, and, best yet, my bright red TURKIYE baseball cap perched on top of my head.

Just as I decide to take my leave, I notice that the only other women visible in the mosque are two foreign tourists wearing pink shawls handed out to them by mosque security at the entrance. I step back outside.

But I return less than 10 minutes later, sure that I must have missed something in my first visit. The ezan (call to prayer) begins as I enter, called out by the muezzin five times a day and broadcast throughout the city from the loudspeakers of neighbourhood mosques. I’m curious to see if something is happening inside now.

Still no service. More people arrive, but they pray in solitude, one by one and on their own.

Three young boys run around me near the entrance. They play-fight, stifling their giggles and shouts of protest as they continually glance behind themselves, watchful of grown-up eyes. They are eventually caught by a man coming inside from the courtyard; he silences them with a harsh “Shh!” and a stern pointed finger. The same in any language.

I retreat back outside again, but not 5 minutes later, I’m sitting outside in the courtyard when Steve steps out of the mosque to inform us that something (but what?) is starting. Without a second thought, I re-enter for a third time.

I can immediately tell that something has begun. There are more and more people hurrying up to the prayer area, and they all seem to be waiting for something. Before I have time to take it all in, a mosque guard approaches me and ushers me to the side, pointing toward a set of stairs that I hadn’t noticed before. Disoriented and confused, I fumble up the narrow, steep spiral staircase and find myself standing on a balcony on a second floor of the mosque that I hadn’t known existed. Now I see why I couldn’t pick out any women in the prayer area before: that is the men’s area, and here, on the second floor overlooking the first floor, is the women’s prayer area.

Three women in ankle-length dresses and hijabs are going through the prayer movements off to the right side of me. I step up to the balustrade and peer over on to the ground floor. A man dressed in white robes and a rectangular hat appears and the crowd parts to let him through to the platform at the front — it is the imam, the religious authority who will lead the prayer service.

The imam begins the prayer, and every separate body in the room joins in matching his movements: kneel, prostrate, kneel, rise, repeat. A sea of people moves in unison while the call to prayer sounds out like the voice of God, the voice of Islam. I’m locked in a stare.

Then I look over to the side and notice a woman staring at me while she moves and mutters her prayer. I suddenly see myself for the tactless intruder that I am. I back away from the balustrade and out of sight.

But I can’t bring myself to leave, and I stand near the stairway, watching the congregation follow the imam on the first floor through the carved designs in the balustrade. I stand hidden like this while the ezan crescendos, growing louder and longer — until it ends.

The imam is still at the front of the room, but the prayer has suddenly become disorganized again; people move independently, to their own rhythm, and I can tell that the service is over and this is the wind-down. It’s like the end of a church service, when people linger in the room to mingle with each other, except instead of mingling with each other, they mingle with Allah.

The service having run full circle, I sneak down the spiral staircase and out the door, back into daylight.

“Hey everybody! Let’s all strap thin fabric to our backs and jump off a mountain! Allison, you in?” — “Um.. okay!”

I’d never really given paragliding a second thought until being presented with the opportunity to do it while on my Turkish boat cruise in Fethiye. My first response was to instinctually say no, purely on the grounds that I figured I was the type of person to say no to such a question. But then I thought about that. Why would I say no? Why wouldn’t I say yes? And what sort of person am I, then, if my definition of myself is based on what I think I can’t do, rather than on what I can do? I sat, probably for a full 10 seconds, thinking about this.

I looked around. The boat staff announced that the paragliders would be leaving in about half an hour, some other people on the cruise had already signed up, and to be quite honest, I figured that I really didn’t have anything better to do at the time. So I went paragliding.

A small speed-boat (but not speedy at all) picked us up from the side of our boat and brought us to Oludeniz, Turkey’s famed Blue Lagoon, where the waters are the most beautiful shade of turquoise. This was what we would be seeing while gliding through the skies above, and it’s why paragliding is so popular in this area.

From the speed boat, we jumped ashore and hopped on to the truck that would lead us up to the top of the mountain to the paragliding site.

I am being completely honest when I say that the drive up the mountain in this truck was infinitely more scary than the actual act of paragliding. We sat in the back of a flatbed truck rigged up with a wooden canopy frame and wooden benches, and the truck wheezed and coughed its way up to the altitude of 2000 feet on a dirt path to the top of the mountain. When I say “dirt path”, I mean that the path was actually composed primarily of loose rocks and terror. It passed by treacherously narrow curves in the road and the side of the mountain barely held on to loose shale rock walls. On the side opposite the mountain was a cliff — a sheer drop-off into oblivion. To my continued amazement, it actually turned out to be a two-way road, so the driver occassionally had to slam on the breaks to let another truck by. A couple of times, he had to slam on the breaks, shift to neutral, and then coast backwards down the pile of loose rocks we called a road so that the other truck could get by on the narrow curve that the two vehicles had almost collided on.

To make time pass by faster, I counted the number of people in the truck: 3 up front in the cab and 13 in the back, adding up to a grand total of 16. Or so I thought. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a hand reach down from above the truck, taking pictures of us. There was actually somebody on the roof too.

But then we get there…

When we reach the top and I realize that I will probably not, in fact, meet my Maker in such an ironic death as a car crash while driving up to a paragliding site, I am able to truly appreciate the amazing view of the beautiful Blue Lagoon from 2000 feet up. I happily strap into my gear and prepare, oddly calm. I step to the edge of the cliff. Ali, the pilot who will be flying tandem with me, is waiting.

As we wait for the right wind, I get more nervous. I need a pep talk. Ali, in his broken English, explains the intricacies of paragliding take-off with these words of wisdom: “Run run run, very fast, no sit, no sit.”

Right. So all I’m supposed to do is run full-tilt at this cliff and then jump off? Of course. No problem there.

I’m thinking that maybe this whole ”Run run run very fast” thing is easier said in broken English than done in real life, when suddenly my parachute is being lifted behind me and Ali is shouting at me to run. No time for deep meaningful thoughts or last words; I run. And run and run and run. Even when there’s no more cliff left and I’m in the air, I’m like Wile E. Coyote – I run. My feet flail wildly in the air in some approximation of a flying sprint until I look down and see nothing under me for a long long way and I finally stop. “Okay sit now,” Ali reassures me. He really knows what to say to calm a girl down.

But it’s amazing, and not at all scary once I’ve taken that initial plunge. It’s like sitting in a floating chair, gently coasting back down to earth. I see the world as I’ve never seen in before. I have a flashback to a dream I once had in second year university, the only time I can remember ever being able to control a dream. As soon as I realized I was in control in the dream, I made myself fly, and it was the only time I have ever had a flying dream. I have wanted to recapture that feeling ever since I first experienced it, that sensation of feeling entirely free, weightless, and unfettered. Paragliding is the closest I have ever come to reliving that dream.

I take in the Blue Lagoon, the ocean, all of the houses and hotels surrounding Oludeniz, the boats sitting anchored in the water, the mountain, the sun, the clouds… too soon, Ali is telling me to prepare for the landing, and then I’m standing on the ground amongst tourists and beach-goers.

After we arrive back at the boat, we five paragliders go to the boat-access-only island of St. Nicholas, where Santa Claus is said to have lived and where our other boat mates are exploring. We climb to the top of the island’s hill and have a victory drink of Turkey’s Efes beer.

Leftovers from Turkey

(Wow, I didn’t notice that pun in the title there until I’d already written it. I’m just going to let it slide.)

I’m actually in Bulgaria right now, but I have to catch up on some Turkey events, so the next few blogs are going to cover the rest of Turkey. We’ll start things off with the amazing four-day boat cruise that Lindsay and I took from Fethiye to Olympos. We stopped off at some beaches and small towns along the way: Butterfly Valley; St. Nicholas Island, where it is said that the one and only Santa Claus was born and raised (bit of a hot climate for him, but whatever); the small fishing village-turned-tourist-trap of Kas; the sunken city of Kekova; the beautiful village of Simena, where we whiled away an hour taking funny photos at the castle on the top of the hill; and an interesting pirate bar called Smuggler’s Cove, which was (rather fittingly) only accessible by boat.

But I don’t have the time or energy to write in depth about all of that, so instead, I’ll leave you with:

 

The Daily Rhythm of Life on a Turkish Boat Cruise

early a.m.
- Boat’s engines turn on, people wake up, possible morning swim.

Breakfast
- Hard-boiled eggs, cucumber, tomato, cheeses, fresh white bread, watermelon, tea.

late morning 
- Possible swim before boat starts moving.
- Suntan and chat
- Boat moves to next destination, so take in beautiful scenery along the way.

Lunch
- More tomato, cucumber, cheeses, and white bread. Other tasty lunch-type foods as well.
- Beer also a possibility.

early afternoon
- Beer?
- swim?
- check out whatever destination boat is at, whether a beach or village.

late afternoon
- Get back on boat after checking out said beach or village
- Beer?
- Swim?
- Suntan and chat while boat moves to next destination, where it will anchor for the night.

early evening
- Boat anchors
- This is a good time for a swim. Basically, any time the boat is not moving, and you’re still on the boat, is a good time for a swim.
- After swimming, also a good time for a beer, suntan, and chat with other travellers.

Dinner
- Always very delicious.

evening
- Lots of talk, card-games, backgammon, and possibly beer.

late evening
- Grab a blanket, some bug spray, and a place on the deck, where you’ll fall asleep with only the stars and your boat mates to keep you company.

 

Essentially, what I’m trying to get across with this very concise summary of my Turkish boat cruise experience is that Turkish boat cruises are amazing and you should all go on one.

On to the next Turkey blog post!