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!
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