Pay No Attention

Poor wretch in Poreč

In Poreč (pronounced sort of like "poor wretch"), I had a reservation booked and a deposit down in a hotel smack in the old town, a short stroll from the 6th century basilica.  I arrived at my hotel, confirmation sheet at the ready, to find the hotel closed.  I do not just mean that the door was locked -- this had happened twice before, but in those instances, a sign on the door (in Croatian -- bring your dictionaries, boys and girls!) indicated that I simply had to hunt down the proprietor in a nearby cafe or at a neighbor's house. No, in this case, I mean, closed, shuttered, locked and dark, with a sign on the door saying (in Croatian, of course), "closed from October 8 until December 29."  I double checked my reservation sheet.  I tried the door.  I said "what the F*CK?!"  A nice old couple walked by and said something to me in Croatian.  I explained that I only spoke English and they said, helpfully, "hotel is closed!"  Ah.  Now that I had this confirmed, I wandered around until I found a tourist office, where another helpful man informed me "yes, hotel is closed." I said "They took a deposit from me!" He merely shrugged and said "I cannot help you."  He only booked excursions, not lodgings.

Thoroughly stymied, I dragged my luggage through the cobbled streets looking for -- another hotel?  a noose to hang myself?  Well, the hotels I checked along the way were booked, but at last I walked past an office with a sign saying "Riviera Co."  I recalled that my confirmation, in tiny print at the bottom, had mentioned a Riviera Co., and crossing my fingers, I went in.  Yup, it was the office of the company that owned my hotel.  "Ah yes," the receptionist said.  "Hotel Neptun is closed.  We have put you in Hotel Rubin."  She could not explain how they expected me to know this -- I stumbled on their offices by pure blind luck and because I happened to have looked at the fine print on the email confirmation, and remembered it.  Had I arrived after 5 pm, that office would have been closed, and I would have been stranded. 

Anyway -- Hotel Rubin is about 3 kilometers away from the old town.  Nothing, you say?  Well, it is when you're dragging all your luggage´(lucky I am a light packer --never bring anything you can't schlep for miles and up ten flights of stairs if need be), when there are no places to store your luggage in town (so you must first schlep your bags to the hotel before doing anything else), when you've already spent hours trying to figure out where you are going, and as a result, have only a couple of hours in which to see the things you came to see.  Hotel Rubin turned out to be a monumentally huge Communist-block-heap-of-concrete-type tourist hotel at the end of a long, long, long lonely road with not much on it but snackbars that were shut for the season, and it was absolutely the last place I would choose to stay. It was huge and echoing, filled to brimming with tour buses full of Germans, and with a buffet restaurant that bears a striking resemblance to a corporate cafeteria.       

As a truly bizarre touch, over my bed was a rather pornographic painting of a nude woman with outspread legs and stylized, but neatly groomed, genitalia.  Don't you worry, I took a picture.   Another strange detail was the "employee of the month" poster.  The woman looked as thought she's been knocked across the kitchen a few times with a cast-iron pot -- her lip looked swollen, her forehead and eyes were bruised, and she had a look of mute anguish on her face, as though she were silently imploring you to put her out of her misery.      

Other than that, Poreč was fine.  I had a liquid lunch (just wine) at a cafe bar on top of a 15th century tower. Somehow, I had completely lost my appetite -- maybe it was that print.  I saw the basilica and its beautiful mosaics -- and seriously, they were lovely -- and then I trudged my weary way back to the hotel, had a power bar, and fell asleep.  Well, I was overdue for a crappy travel experience.

Roving through Rovinj

Rovinj doesn't have much in the way of specific sights.  It's just a delightful little Croatian coastal town on a hillside awash with lovely red-tile-roofed old buildings and surrounded by sparkling blue sea.  I strolled about, ate a fantastic lunch of pasta with truffles and grilled scampi, washed down with white wine. Then I took a little nap, ate two ice cream cones, strolled around a bit more, and watched the sun set from the terrace of a fabulous wine bar set precariously on the edge of the water while sipping a fantastic pinot, waited on by a craggily handsome waiter who reminded me, just a little, of Viggo Mortenson.  Croatia has a lot of extremely good-looking waiters.  Could they all be struggling actors? 

Dead and turned to clay

Istria was part of Italy for a while, and it shows.  Lots of excellent pasta and pizza, just like Italy. The accent is somehow Italian, and people are as likely to say "ciao" as "dobar dan."  The architecture reminds me of Italy.  There are gelato stands on every corner.  And men's heads swerve to check out my ass, just like Italy.   Anyway, I started my Istrian adventures in Pula, where I got my first taste of Croatian urban blight. They don't call it Poo-la for nothing.  On the one hand, one of the best preserved Roman monuments anywhere, Pula's 1900-year-old arena, along with some other splendid Roman ruins, make the place a can't miss for Romanophiles ( and I do not care whether that is a real word.  Nyah, nyah.). On the other hand, its naturally gorgeous bay is filled with hideous industrial machinery, and unlike most water in Croatia, you wouldn't want to swim there.  The city more or less shuts down for the weekend -- the place was virtually a ghost town -- and with the exception of the arena, the opening hours of the various attractions were somewhat eccentric and by no means set in stone. Sadly, many of the ruins, notably the hauntingly beautiful remains of the Roman theater, have been liberally spray-painted with graffiti by local hooligans. (Shall we call them "Poo-lagans?")   Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay with a vengeance.

By the way, Pula was yet another place where I found the door to my hotel inexplicable locked during business hours, and had to hunt down someone to let me in.  In this case, it turned out I had to go to a restaurant downstairs and around the corner (owned by the same person) and snag the fat, surly waiter to check me in.

I'd like to take this opportunity to tell you all just how much my Fodor's guidebook sucked.  It had so many details wrong that I can't possibly be bothered to enumerate them all, but let's just start with the opening and closing hours for attractions, shall we? Fodor's indicated that I would find just about everything open in Pula on a Sunday, and Fodor's was just exactly wrong.  Nearly everything except the Arena is closed on Sunday -- and Fodor's got the hours wrong (ironically, it is actually open longer than Fodor's indicated).  I walked for blocks to find an open ice cream stand.  The tourist office was open, but the sole purpose of having someone at the desk appeared to be so she could tell tourists that everything was closed.  So here's a shout out if you are going to Pula -- don't go on Sunday.  Another thing that sucked about the Fodor's guidebook were the maps, or lack thereof.  As a rule of thumb, I think that if a place qualifies as a FREAKING UNESCO HERITAGE SIGHT, it merits a freaking map.  Thank you.  And while they're at it, it would be nice if they put the train and bus stations on the maps they do provide.  It would be really nice to get an idea if you can walk two blocks to your hotel and the center of town, and in which direction, or if you need a taxi.  Oh, and they should stop sticking those irksome "Word of Mouth" comments from the fodors.com forums in the guidebooks -- they are annoying as hell and completely useless.  I need maps and accurate information in my guidebook, not a quote from some fatuous jackass telling me that "Some of the most interesting places in Croatia are the Caffè (Coffee) bars . . . . These are bars that also serve coffee,, cocoa, sodas, etc."  Get rid of them immediately!  Do you hear me, Fodors?

Ten hours and no bathroom -- bus ride from Trogir to Pula

On October 12, I spent an afternoon and evening in Trogir, a lovely little medieval town near Split , which is only a few city blocks long, but nonetheless has an all-night disco bar, unfortunately located right under my hotel. At 5 am the next morning (disco bar still going strong!), I took a bus to the town of Pula in Istria, the north-western section of Croatia. I will be pretty happy if I never see a bus again. On the bright side, I have seen almost every inch of the Croatian coastline, and it is truly spectacular -- dramatic mountains plummeting down to deep blue sea, beautiful villages and glistening bone-white islands. On the con side: (1) there were NO BATHROOMS on the buses, (2) if you race to use a bathroom when the bus stops, someone is likely to unceremoniously deposit your backpack on the floor of the bus and take your seat (this happened to me not once but TWICE), (3) the entire way, the driver blared hideous Croatian pop music, or God help me, Croatian techno, while people babbled into their cell phones and, so help me God, a Patrick Swayze movie ("Icon") played overhead.   Honest injun, I am not making any of this up. (4) Most of the passengers absolutely reeked of cigarette smoke, and I believe I was the only one that bothered showering for a 5 am bus. There is another bus that goes overnight instead of at 5 am , but rumor has it that it is even worse. God knows this one was bad enough.) Thank God for my headphones and Ipod -- I would never have survived.

Split

I have never seen anything quite like Split.  The old city is built inside an ancient (and obviously enormous) Roman palace. In the 6th century, barbarians sacked a nearby Roman town, and the surviving townspeople took refuge within the walls of the old palace and then simply turned it into their city.  I have seen a lot of Roman ruins and a lot of medieval ruins and a lot of walled cities, blah blah blah -- but nothing quite like this.  The medieval buildings are built right into the Roman walls and what remains of the palace buildings.  For example, the Roman emperor built himself a magnificent octagonal mausoleum within the palace walls, but in the 7th century, the townspeople (Christian by that point) tossed out the sarcophagus (no one knows where it is today) and turned the mausoleum into the centerpiece of their cathedral  It is one of the most amazing and beautiful things I have ever seen.  The Roman forum is still standing, with some buildings incorporated within it, and it is still the main square of the old city.  You can have coffee and wine sitting on the steps, under the ancient columns (and, of course, I have).  My hotel incorporates Roman ruins as well, and it is just gorgeous.  I walked around the first day just going "Jesus! . . . JEEsus!" every time I turned a corner and saw something else that was amazing.   

    

Besides exploring the old city, I also took a stroll out to the Meštrović gallery, which was in a villa designed by Ivan Meštrović and filled with his sculptures.  I particularly loved a cyclops in the wonderful-smelling garden, and inside, a sculpture of Job and a wooden relief of angels.  The only thing to mar the experience was a large group of hideously obnoxious American teenagers.  Their guide was a super-hot Croatian guy who tried manfully to control them and point out the beauties and subtleties of the sculptures.  The teenagers were clearly having none of it and kept whining about how they wanted to go to the beach.  Nonetheless, they kept snapping pictures (totally against gallery rules, of course) to prove to their friends back home that they'd been there.  God, how I hated them.  Their guide and I exchanged sympathetic looks a few times, and although we never spoke, I felt sure that on some mystic plain our souls communed ("These children are horrible.  I would like to bend you over that statue and ravish you."  "Yes, I also hate the children.  Let us go behind Job and have illicit relations.")

But alas, we were two ships that pass in the night, and I was happy to leave the children behind and head off to the Kastelet, where Meštrović created a wonderful chapel in a 16th century building.  The chapel has wooden reliefs illustrating the life of Christ going all the way around it, and they are amazing.  Best of all, I had it all to myself for more than half an hour, with no whining teenagers in sight.   No hot Croatian guides either, but you can't have it all.

Dubrovnik

Dubrovnik is just unutterably beautiful.  Surrounded by sea and the original medieval walls, it is absolutely soggy with charm and I was drunk on beauty, staggering around in a daze with my camera.  (Speaking of drunk, Croatian wine is excellent, but do not count on buying any in the U.S.  The Croatian vineyards are small and Croatians drink it all, and import some as well.  I seized the day and drank as much as possible while there.  I also systematically sampled ice cream from every ice cream place in Dubrovnik, becoming something of a local expert.)

I had gorgeous weather all but one day I was here, but Dubrovnik even looks gorgeous in the rain.  Streets, houses and monuments are made of lovely pale gold stone, and that the houses and shops all have terracotta roofs and dark green shutters.  The city dips down in the middle like a bowl, and that the side streets are built up on steps to the walls.  Lovely, although it does cause the rain water to cascade down those side streets . . . 

My guesthouse in Dubrovnik, "Rooms Vicelic," was located on one of the many side streets that are more or less just flights of stairs.  Unfortunately, Rooms Vicelic was located on the third flight.  As I dragged my luggage up the third flight, I was thinking "you've got to be freaking kidding me", and then, to top it off, I got to the door and discovered it was locked.  A sign gave a cell phone number and directed guests to telephone when they arrive, which would be just great if I had a cell phone.  (Mine does not work overseas.)  Finding a payphone would entail dragging my luggage down the three flights of stairs, and then later dragging them back up.  So I pounded on the door for a while, and finally was reduced to asking passers-by if they had a cell phone.  Either no one understood me, or no one had a cell phone -- everyone just shrugged and passed on.  At last, one of the guests heard me knocking (and frankly, wailing), and let me in, and I used his cellphone to call the proprietress, Anka, who turned out to be a plump woman who called me and everyone else "dahling" at least once in every sentence. 

I know I like a place when I spend 4-5 happy days there, and have a hard time explaining how I filled all that time.  I took a glass-bottomed boat trip, and another boat excursion to Cavtat, a nearby fishing village.  I went to a classical concert in a church.  I walked the city walls for hours, and took dozens of pictures.  I saw several wedding processions -- apparently Dubrovnik wedding receptions do not stay in one place, but instead parade around the city, stopping periodically to dance and sing and wave flags and play the accordion.  I played with the little red dog that was always hanging out in the street in front of my guesthouse.  I cooed at the darling little blond baby from down the street, who was often stationed on his mother's lap in front of the guesthouse (the mother was a dear old friend of Anka's, dahling), and who always greeted me with a crow of delight.  And other than that, I think I just sat around in outdoor cafes and wine bars, ate three-hour meals, and wandered aimlessly.  I just loved it.   

Zagreb

Last night was my first night in Croatia (in the capital, Zagreb ). I sat down to dinner in a deserted little restaurant at the unfashionable hour of 5 pm. Jetlagged as hell, but never too exhausted to flirt with the waiter, I got into an extended conversation with him between courses. It turns out that he lived in New York for 10 years (moved back to Croatia about 2 years ago to be near his ailing dad). How 'bout that. His name was Robert (he insisted I call him Bob, which for some reason I could not do without laughing) and I am completely misplacing his last name (I wrote it down somewhere), which is pretty bad, given that I was out until past 4 in the morning with him and his friends the following night.