Croatia. This is an incredible place. Mountains, rivers, lakes, ocean. Beautiful. Good food. Good coffee. Mild autumn weather.
Lets start with Zagreb. This is a city of art, food and street cafes. The public transit is in the form of trams, many of them straight out of the 60s, at a time when socialism was at a crescendo. Next to the main square, which is blanketed with modern ad banners for mobile phones, sunglasses and Coca Cola, there is the market. It must be the way that people used to do things, before supermarkets came to be the norm. Rows and rows of fresh fruit and veg crowd table tops. Choosing a table to buy from is difficult. When i finally stop at one, i point to the items i'd like, and the hip young woman, the farmer in overalls, the wizened wrinkled face woman - all equally likely to be the person behind the table - take the items and weigh them on a scale with free weights that look like little milk vessels. My produce is sinfully cheap, and the dirt still clings to it, seemingly picked that day. The experience is overwhelming, not only because i know most of the people are calling out to me trying to get me to buy their goods, but just because of the sheer volume and variety. I see eggplant, tomatoes, white potatoes, baking potatoes, yams, green lettuce, leeks, broad beans, apples, oranges, nectarines, pears, white onions, garlic, red onions, zucchini, large green squash, string beans, carrots, rocket, parsely, more more more....my head swims with the combinations of color and potential dishes to be made. Downstairs, inside the first thing you smell, before you see it are the tubs of sauerkraut. Its there ready to buy in whatever quantity you could imagine. Next there are butchers and bakeries, and then come the cheese counters. The cheese area is set off from the main bit of the inside market (which looks like a little shopping mall with bakeries and meat counters). The cheese area is a series of marble topped counters, some with a small refrigerated case. There is soft cheese, that you buy and mix with yogurt or cream or somesuch, and it becomes a sort of spreadable cottage cheese. There are massive wheels of farmers cheese, smoked cheese, mild, strong, salty, sweet, fresh butter, eggs. These are all tended to by women, who all seem to have been trucked in from a farm somewhere in the 1940s, with scarves and dark sun-kissed skin, with wrinkles and callouses from weather and hard work. They wear practical clothes, bottoned shirts and aprons. They seem patient but not overly joyous about serving me, and we stumble through some communication about "half a cheese wheel and how much might that cost?". I imagine the woman who is probably 60 but is small and has furrows in her cheeks making her appear to be 100, is thinking that there is not much more that life could bring along to her cheese counter that would surprise her.
We speak different languages - so different that it is virtually impossible to reason through the meaning of words written, much less spoken. I can order one coffee with milk (eiden kava i smljekom) and i can greet you with a "hey! how are you! whats new?" kind of a greeting, but thats about it. I can pronounce anything put in front of me, but i dont retain the words for special strudels made with salty cheese and filo dough or the name for the old cheese ladies at the market. I feel slightly guilty for not understanding the language, exacerbated by the guy at the shmenker internet cafe who, when i ask about how to pay, retorts angrily "WE DONT SPEAK ENGLISH HERE!". However, my guilty feeling is mostly my own construct, since most everyone does speak some english, and a good lot of those speak it really well. But its still a matter of enforcing the need for english to me the lingua franca - i feel guilty that mine is the language most expected of other peoples, and it is sort of a priveledged guilt then since i dont speak any other languages fluently. (To do list: bone up on my other languages i've started on).
Then there is the coast. Sparkling waters. Limestone cliffs and rock outcrops. Roman ruins, italian feeling, wine and olives everywhere. Yet its still distinctly ADRIATIC - and it is some elusive difference between here and the Mediterranean. Connected, but different and proud of it. Could it be the remnants of socialism, the monuments to Tito and rulers past? Could it be the crazy names of things that Jenna and i repeat to each other, testing our Croatian pronunciation ("Trsat. TUR-sat. TRY-st? TR-sat!")? Maybe its just the knowledge that we are in Croatia, this is where Sandra is from and her family and her friends and her identity is rooted here, was built here. Because no matter how much i read about the place, and hear about the war or the history, there are still these elusive bits that i think will always be there for an outsider. For now, it is enough to pay attention to what i notice, to try to look at the place with a child's mind: see what i can see, count how many trains pass this spot, see how many coffees i can have in one day, drink with the locals. Zhh (the local "cheers")!
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