2012_10_19 Croatia

On the dawn train from Budapest to Zagreb I met Chris, a 53-year-old New Zealander who has taught English in Japan and Korea. He headed for a hotel in Zagreb while I continued on to Split. The round trip ticket from Budapest to Split was cheaper than one-way and I ended up using it.

I hadn't found a couch in either Split or Dubrovnik, the tourist meccas of Croatia, so I dragged myself to a hostel I booked online, Green Paradise, past the walls of Diocletian's palace in the Mediterranean port of Split. 

I would be meeting an old friend from my Manhattan days - travel agent, theatrical producer, bon vivant - who was on a Mediterranean cruise out of Venice with her Romanian pal.

My room in the hostel had four beds and lockers, a kitchen, computers, showers, and I soon met Ibraham, a dark 60 year old Egyptian with long hair and beard in dreadlocks, who friended me on Facebook. Too hot, too many people in Egypt, he told me. He lives in California on Social Security and was bound for Dubrovnik. He'd recently taken up drinking beer and planned to be homeless when he got back to the States.

The next morning I made my way to the dock and on the third "tender" from the cruise ship, photographers waiting, was my pal, first off the boat. A sudden loss of vision in one eye made exploring the castle ruins, a maze of stone steps, challenging for her. We stopped for cokes and coffee, she bought lavender sachets for her co-workers at Emir Airlines, treated me to lunch, and then the rendezvous which had been the linchpin of my travels was over. She swore I'd lost twenty pounds. What a pal! I am definitely in better shape than I was sitting around Nelsonville.

The hostel staff kindly printed out my absentee ballot for the November election from email and I wandered around Split another day. In the late '70's I had taken a Yugoslavian cargo-freighter from Camden to Casablanca - cheaper than airfare with a week's worth of meals - and that is when I first heard of Split.

A morning bus to Dubrovnik - a city not to be missed - and passport control on a spit of land belonging to Bosnia-Herzegovina. As in Split, a small crowd met the bus with apartments and rooms to let. I agreed on 50 kuna a night (the Split hostel charged 60) and was bundled into a neighbor's car by a squat heavy woman with almost no English. Soon I was sitting on a terrace overlooking a soccer field. There was a big double bed, a tiny kitchen, more than I needed; and over coffee, the price suddenly tripled. So I took off, bag and baggage, inquiring of passersby where the hostels were. I soon found myself at a large hostel with no age limit, at twice the price and half the charm of the private one in Split, and had an empty room to await my 66th birthday.

I had finished the autobiography of Tony Curtis (Hungarian Jew) and left it in Split, along with Lonely Planet's Staying Healthy in India, taking a Nero Wolfe Rex Stout antique and Stephen King's Insomnia. I must have something to read! The next morning I paid for another night and headed down the hill to the Old Town, a self-contained walled city with hundreds of restaurants, stairs, narrow streets, churches and tourists. I befriended a cat and read on a bench looking over the water.  A few hearty souls were in it, as the weather was summery on October 9.  Back at the hostel I watched television in the basement - 2 1-2 Men, Malcolm in the Middle -  nonsense I had never seen before, and cooked up some of the kilo of red peppers I'd bought in Split.

Back to Split on the bus to the Green Paradise, now full of Korean girls who shared their pot of soup. Again, as in the Porto hostel talking with a Korean girl, I thought, why not go there, too? We shall see!

Sometimes in Couchsurfing, people see your request and offer their couches out of the blue. Vuk, a young filmmaker in Zagreb, invited me to the flat he shares with 2 roommates, Matthew and Michaela, so my knowledge of Zagreb would be more than the view from the train station. Vuk's flat was a 12-minute walk, on the third floor. Ibrahim had told me people in Zagreb didn't earn enough for busfare. Vuk told me most people don't pay it, and when the controllers confront them, well at least those people have a job! Teachers were demonstrating against pay cuts, all the money tourism brings to the country seems to disappear. Vuk and Michaela worked in hostels and the season was about over. Matthew, a mountaineer who hikes every weekend, is a university librarian and earns less than a garbage man. Vuk was applying for a PhD in film studies in Belgrade and I corrected his English on his 'Motivation' letter. He is going to India in a few months to check out "Bollywood." He made Turkish coffee and rolled cigarettes, looked much better than his Couchsurfing photo. He'd recently had a hernia operation so he couldn't help with my luggage. He gave me a key to leave under the mat and stayed at his grandmother's. [Editor's note: How sweet!]  I read his book of wonderful Raymond Carver short stories.

While exploring Couchsurfing from my living room in Ohio, I'd been accepted by a Frenchwoman of my age living in the Croatian countryside with a lot of birds. Now I filter for English, females, ages, photo and verification on the site, but Maryla speaks neither English or German, so I boarded a train for Nova Kapela and entered a French world. Croatian houses line the single street. She met me at the station with her dog, Pepita. Her Croatian husband who had been on dialysis died in the spring. Her grown children live in France. She had studied Croatian in Paris, but cannot write or read it, as I learned when I asked her to write in Croatia, "Did you find a VISA card?" She still has a house near Charles de Gaulle airport, inhabited by her troublesome daughter, an air stewardess, who finds fault with all potential lodgers. At 43 she is unhappy to be single and childless but criticizes endlessly and her mother doesn't tell her she takes in couch surfers. The daughter calls daily to complain. Am I spared? I don't envy her the joys of parenthood. 

Marie Louise was a pediatric nurse for many years in France while her husband drove a truck and has a good pension. Her neighbor came to borrow money to dig a new well, earns a little gardening for her, and a young woman helps clean her large house. It had been her inlaws' farm before the 1990 war and her husband made most of the furniture. I had a luxurious bedroom upstairs where her kids and families sometimes stay. Maryla (the Croatians can't handle her name) has a dozen sheep, chickens, ducks, geese, peacocks, and now rabbits, Pepita the dog and several cats.  Before dark she let the sheep graze in her garden. We couldn't find any English programs on her 1000 channels so she let me take the computer upstairs to bed and I saw an Alfred Hitchcock antique, eerily similar to The Thirty-Nine Steps.

The next day was overcast but we explored by car with Pepita. First to an ecovillage, Stara Kapela, a ruin a doctor had restored into a tourist destination. Sometimes he sent business her way. She had her deceased sister-in-law's modest home for rent on several websites. In the basement were the remains of a still to make prune eau de vie, the local specialty. Nearby she showed me a barn with some newborn pigs under electric lights for warmth. But I realized that like their older relatives nearby, they would never know sunshine or fresh air but stay cooped in there their whole lives. She has drowned many newborn kittens in her day and grieved over birds killed by foxes and weasels.

I'd told her about my lonely birthday in Dubrovnik and she took me to lunch for a belated celebration. First to a nephew's place in the woods with trout-stocked lakes and cordoned off trees - there were still live bombs around from the war. But he was expecting a baptism party of 50 so we ate elsewhere and returned later for coffee and schnaps. I saved part of my lunch for the train ride back to Zagreb.

At last we had beautiful weather and drove again to the bigger town for groceries, animal feed, and the bank for the loan to her neighbor. In the afternoon we hiked up the hill behind her farm past a small church to the cemetery where her husband and his family lie. The area was all vineyards before the war but now is fallow. Recovery is taking a long time. She noticed one of the rabbits hopping about with a mouthful of hay. Her hired man told her she was expecting, so she separated them to avoid natal cannibalism.

Maryla drove me back to the train the next morning and told me I was welcome to return and stay for a month if I liked! I left behind my rain poncho by mistake. Always something.

One of these posts began with the words, not yet ill, arrested or robbed. Well, I did catch a cold, the Russian police took me off the train because my visa had expired, and somehow in Zagreb my VISA card disappeared [Editor's emphasis]. I always carry it around my neck with my passport. I paused at a bank machine just before my train to see Maryla and that familiar plastic card was nowhere to be seen. The day before I'd walked to the Old Town, withdrawn cash, had the local specialty at lunch with some friendly retired Australians, visited the Zagreb City Museum and gone to sleep not knowing what misery was in store for me.

Luckily I brought almost almost a thousand dollars in cash for my Far East trip. I have a USAirways Mastercard but they treat any cash withdrawal as a loan and charge 28% interest or some such usury. So I am not in terrible trouble. At Vuk's urging I had left my heavy bag with the cash behind during my visit to Maryla and it was untouched. I emailed my credit union in Ohio and learned I couldn't proceed without telephoning them, so I bought a calling card at the post office. We couldn't get it to work on the public phones, but a kind young Croatian girl who spoke English finally accessed it at some expense to herself, no doubt, through her own cell phone. The bank told me they would replace the card in 7 to 10 business days and mail it to my home in Ohio! I trust my sister will send it on to me in Ukraine or Macedonia or Bulgaria, wherever I am by then.

At Vuk's urging I went to the contemporary art museum across the river on my last day. I watched videos of a violent gay pride parade in Zagreb from a few years ago and multi-screen views of a men's Turkish bath. There was an alphabet of headshots of Patricia Hearst from SLA to her wedding day. That night I tried to use up the phone card and couldn't get anywhere, even with the help of the police, trying different phones. I am halfway through John Galsworthy's wonderful 905 page Part 1 of The Forsythe Saga. My own saga continues. But I finally got my absentee ballot in the mail. Go Obama!

2012_10_06 Cracow, Poland to Budapest, Hungary

Nina of Cracow lives in a white room across the river with a deaf white cat. She plans to move to Edinborough in a month, a city she has never seen, but still hosting Couchsurfers until the day of her departure! I think it becomes an addiction. Not yet thirty, she has about seven degrees in cultural anthropology, arts management, death sociology.  But she plans to clean houses - she finds it soothing and interesting.

A crisis at home in Ohio - the gas company would not reconnect for heat (I have electric stove and hot water, so couldn't see paying $20 a month for nothing all summer) for my niece and her two toddlers, without a phone call from me. Nina helped me find a calling card but I only got busy signals for the toll-free number. In the end the company relented but it was a stressful time in Cracow, haunting the phones to no avail.

Across the bridge is monumental Wawal Castle, high above the river, with a spiral staircase leading to the dragons den cave. There is a dog statue; he waited for years for his dead master to return at a busy roundabout. Castle tours are by appointment, but I was meeting Nina for lunch. She arrived chic in high velvet heels on her bike and we ate at a typical cafeteria. 

She is vegetarian but I tried bigos and on the third day gave up trying to swallow the remaining concoction of meat, wine, plums and cabbage. Salted smoked cheese from a street vendor had dulled my appetite.

 I went on to a portrait gallery upstairs from the cloth guild arcade in the center of the square. A bunch of Swedes in red shirts serenaded the city from the balcony. The cabbage had me running for the WC!

The Old Town - every city has one - features a medieval square, a church tower where a live trumpeter holds forth on the hour, horse drawn carriages, sidewalk cafes, souvenir stalls, a grim reaper on stilts and a man singing opera like a castratto to taped music.

I talked with Nina about visiting Auschwitz, which is a train ride away. She had been there recently with couchsurfers a few weeks ago and didn't recommend the experience. I have a lot of ambivalence about it, I should go but I don't want to. In the end, I visited the royal castle, the Jewish quarter and Oskar Schindlers factory, with exhaustive exhibits and recreations that kept me there past dark.

Another day, her best friends Peter and Ralph, who are building a wooden house together, drove us ninety minutes into the country to visit another open air museum, old houses from different regions, churches, where the Polish pope lived, a guided tour kindly translated by Peter. Then lunch in a country restaurant. Sick of cabbage, I chose a Greek salad and mulled wine to warm up with.

Nina has lived in her flat for nine years and divested most of her possessions. She hopes the boys will take the cat for a while when she leaves. She wanted to see some of my thousands of photos and the Russian icons and churches captivated her, made her want to go to Russia NOW. Before I left for the sleeper train to Budapest, the next couchsurfer arrived, an Australian Adonis...

There were three cots in my couchette but no other travellers. I met a South Dakotan on a Eurailpass who paid $20 more for the sleeper. Not a bargain. The noise and motion of the train did not induce a good nights sleep. I even left Martin Amis MONEY book behind, too.  

But when I got off the train in the dark cavernous station in the morning, a smiling older Hungarian woman welcomed me with fried pastries from her bag. I changed my paper zloties to Hungarian florins, found the sleek modern Metro and emerged across the Danube from the Parliament, where my next hostess, Petra, in a big hat and a big smile, and her two whippets, Boris and Motzi, were waiting for me. Boris is a champion and Motzi an elderly rescue dog. We all four boarded the bus to join her white cat in a beautiful two story flat with huge picture windows on a back garden and balcony. Petra prepared a breakfast of cheese, sliced sausage, bread, tomatoes, turkish coffee in tiny cups. I brought out my whole wheat bread. The dogs enjoyed her apple peels. The cat shocked Petra by warming up to me (I fed her.)

Petra, a divorcee of 47, has worked in film production and now does market research on some days, interviewing the public. Bruce Willis filmed another Die Hard over the summer, Budapest standing in for Moscow, and elderly people thinking the Soviets had returned when they saw red stars and tanks in the street. 

Petra has a rare Citroen Deux Chevaux (two horse power) no longer made, and attends annual rallies of enthusiasts in Europe. She loved Greece but found they are not kind to their animals. She is a doting mother! She lives high in the hills of Pest (Buda, the city center across the Danube, is flat) in a millionaires quarter. She bought her flat some years ago, and her gas stove, like Nina's needs special treatment to stay lit. She sometimes rents out her bedroom to visitors through a site called airbnb. When she works she drives the whippets to her mothers house and washes their paws as soon as they get home.

We walked to a nearby shopping mall up the hill with the dogs. Later without them, we took the bus and tram into town and I got a three day transportation pass. Petra took chances no controller would be on the rush hour bus but you cannot get on the Metro without showing a ticket. I am getting more used to the very long and steep escalators in the Metro. 

We went to another train station to see about my ticket on to Split. Round trip is cheaper than one way, so I might return to Budapest. We walked past theatres on fashionable Andrassy Street, Petra noticing passing celebrities. Ornate buildings with classical statues abound. We visited a picturesque bar, an old loft decorated with mobiles of rushing rabbits, and had celebratory beers. I noticed many second hand clothing stores and a slightly dark air of desperation in the population I hadn't felt in Poland. Her last guests, two African American girls, had to change their plans when one had her passport and visa to India pickpocketed on the Metro. They took walking tours but didn't pay.

As in Porto, Portugal, there are free walking tours of the city of 2 1/2 hours, tips encouraged, so the next day I joined seventy or so people, divided into three groups for a lesson in Hungarian history. The language comes from Mongolia and the alphabet has 44 characters! Theirs is a long history of losing battles. Famous is the image of a horseman directing his bow and arrow behind him. Last names come first: Liszt Ferenc.

I met couples from Michigan and Manchester. The Brits had been to Budapest the winter past and planned to come again. They reckoned flying here with 3 nights in a hotel with breakfast was worth 250 quid each. I kept my opinion to myself. We crossed the Danube and some climbed, some rode to the top of the hill opposite to see palace ramparts, churches and souvenir stands.

Studying my map I finally made my way to the central Market, a huge enclosed building on three levels. In the basement were huge fish crowded in tanks too small for them, gulping desperately. Upstairs I found gulash soup and a glass of wine at a cafeteria, then bought veggies and eggs. I had asked the tour guide where second hand books in English could be found to replace MONEY and found the Tony Curtis autobiography, (a Hungarian Jew from the Bronx!) on sale and a massive paperback of The Forsyte Saga to keep me occupied. I hadn't known of Petras Jack Kerouac collection, her incentive to learn English, but found the shortest book, Doctor Sax, distasteful.

Petra would be staying late at her mothers house to celebrate her name day. Back home I set out again for the supermarket for milk, yogurt, cheese and cookies. Petras car was leaking water under the windshield in the rain and we drove with the boys to a mechanic to assess the repair. He told her Citroen parts was going bankrupt but she found out otherwise. I went into town to visit the National Museum. A special exhibit was Beethovens piano, given to Franz Listz, and earphones to hear Polonaises and other beautiful piano music played by Bela Bartok and others. I joined another walking tour of the Communist era. I saw bullet holes from 1956 and restored ground floors while the upper levels continue to crumble. There was a large circular fenced hole Petra didnt know about, many assume it is part of the Metro, but it is the exit of a Communist bunker against nuclear war. We ended our tour in the same bar with the rushing rabbit mobiles and Communist artifacts.

Online I couldn't find any couches in Split, Croatia, my next stop, though an acceptance I had missed appeared in Budapest. Margit, a woman of my age, lives even further up the hill in Pest and we three met in the city at a cafe my last day. 

They lapsed into German and Hungarian sometimes. Petra had a work appointment and Margit took me to the station to buy my ticket to Split and sent me off to the end of Andrassy road where massive art museums are, I couldn't see it all before closing time. 

She was very sweet in our short acquaintance, and I am tempted to return to visit her. Petra kindly set her alarm for five am the next morning and drove me, with the elderly whippet in the back, through the predawn empty streets to the train for a fond farewell. I sat all the way to Zagreb with Chris, 53, from New Zealand, on a nearly empty train. He has taught English in Japan and Korea and had a Lonely Planet guide to Eastern Europe with him. He got tired of Japanese hiring him for $70 an hour to speak English with him in posh cafes to show off. He stayed at relatives in London during the Olympics and hotels on the road. I wonder what he will find to see in Zagreb.