croatia

Walking into Dubrovnik at night is like fallng in love for the first time. The streets are white as marble and shimmery, reflecting the street lights and all the buildings are impossibly alabaster, as fairytale as it can be. I could see my dreams at my feet. Hardened by cynicism and tourist mobs and sights, you often forget how magical Europe can be... Croatia is arguably the most beautiful part of Europe, and Dubrovnik is its pearl. I don't know why I wasn't willing to let myself close my eyes and fall into it at first, but i did.




The mountains here were twisty and turny, and we had to stop and relieve ourselves. Hvar is incredibly, strange abandoned fields with terraced farms and mountain stone shepherd huts and mediterranean homes with stony roofs. In the distance you can always see the Dalmation mountains in the background, which are white capped and misty in the spring but not spotted like Dalmation dogs.



The cherry trees were blooming at this time, and we kept listening to a dirty Serge Gainsborough and Jane Birkin song, where they recorded themselves having sex in the study and she screams "I'm coming" over and over again in French. A sign proclaimed in German that this was an organic hippie farm. Someone had come here in the 1960s and found herself.



That time we had also been inside an ancient Roman emperor's palace and the most incredible and elegant promenade. Croatian girls were so beautiful, walking up and down along the palm tree boardwalk, all the people more elegant than Monte Carlo and drinking espressos in the harbor. Macho boys roared around on mopeds showing off tattoos. The women are so elegant, in little black dresses and dark sunglasses smoking cigarettes and thin, jabbing at the air as they talk.



Walking along the walls of Dubrovnik: you can see the crashing cliffs and sea on one side (and the fellow tourists finding their way to the cliffs through holes in the city walls and diving into the water). The Adriatic is so beautiful, so blue. Everyone tells me that it's more polluted than the Atlantic, because it's a closed-off tub of water shared by millions of people. How does it get so blue though? It's like a hyped up photoshop saturation. It's like a turquoise jewel.



On the other side of the city wall you can see the city and the rooftops, tiled and red and miniaturized. You can peek down into the alleywalls and see inside windows, the schoolchildren playing soccer and the women hanging their wash. On one side you can see the sea and the boats coming into harbor with fish. You can see everything. You're godly.

And the city walls would not have been so wonderful if you couldn't make an almost-perfect circle around the whole city. It's like seeing the earth. You know the feeling when you are on the Staten Island ferry and you are watching the skyline flatten and go 2 dimensional? You can see where you spend your days in this enchanting city and wonder at how infinite but small it is at the same time.



It's so strange to know that this was bombed in 1991. They have a huge map at the entrance to the city showing what was rebuilt or ruined. the man in the café tells us how they sent the women away by sea to the north. Croatia is a long tiny coastline the further south you go, with Dubrovnik near the end of the tip. The men from the countryside fled into the city and watched helplessly as their pride was shattered and set on fire.

there are so many cats in the city. they're hiding in the alleyways. I go alone one morning and crawl down through walls onto gardens perched into the cliffs and sit in the shade of the cypress trees. It's still snowing in Slovenia and northern Europe, but here it's warm and the people are Slavic and Mediterranean and happy in the bright sunlight and good weather.



There are the high rise projects too and the reality and the huge German supermarkets and McDonald's. We find at one point a massive Roman and medieval ruin between car parks and junkyards. It's green and peaceful and empty of tourists and people. H shows us where the baths were. We climb a hill, the pretty cypress trees framing the highways and thousands of apartments in the distance.



H tells us that in the end, Venice was the evil one. The Venetians robbed and burned, while the Ottoman turks restored and let live. It's so good to be around people who know their history again... well, did they burn everything? Venice is a great city but is filled with treasures stolen from everywhere else. And then these great cities like Paris and London filled with stolen Egyptian mummies and jewels and Grecian temple statues. They like to say that they are "protecting" it from the natives.



O, but anyway...

they have different plants down there, different plants that remind you of the Italian countryside. All of these islands: Mallorca and Cyprus and all the islands of Greece and Croatia were linked by ships from Greece and Rome and Phoenicia. Hvar, the town, was a beautiful venetian plaza and white stone cathedrals, and you want to lie down and stay there forever. and we wanted to.

slovenia

slovenia :: Ljubljana

slovenia is slovenia but it is also something that it is not. which means: a complete lack of the usual beautiful cities of Europe tourist headaches like traffic jams and excessive souveneir shoppage and city squares packed with more tourists than residents. the country's airport reminds us more of a friendly bus station, secluded in the woods and innocent. It is lacking in traffic and hassle and excessive security strip searches. People leave enormous suitcased snowboards unattended and crossing the taxi lane to get to the bus isn't life-endangering.

when we board the bus the old driver is absentmindedly listening to first a Laibach then a Rammstein song.

everywhere you go you can see the mountain peaks in the background. after living such a long time in flatlands, the old childhood memories of seeing mountains come back. just as living near an ocean has a strange calming effect, so do living near mountains. like the sky, they are always changing. from the city and the observation deck of the modern art museum i can see the mountains, and a few days later i can see the mountains all around me, pushing through and three dimensional. even around the small towns around the train there are small clouds that float at human head level.

The countryside is eerily familiar to anyone who has lived in Germany or Austria. The buildings are the same, the street signs are the same, it's just that the names have a Slavic tinge, but the churches and roadside Virgin mary shrines are pronouncedly Bavarian almost. The streets are clean and well-repaired, and there is an atmosphere of extreme calmness and order everywhere we go.

At the train station a few days later, I notice the enormous piles of rave flyers. This is a young city. In the oldtown the shops feature expensive trendy labels from Italy and the U.K. We keep making jokes and obsessing over a beauty product store called EXTRAVAGANJA. Walking around the pretty bridges you walk past people who look like they have stepped out of your neighborhood in Berlin or Vienna or Munich. They are clear-skinned, long-legged, tall and young.

At Tivoli Park, full of forests and pathways and a grand Italian mansion, I like to pretend that I am one of them, and that this is my weekend walk with my friends. The couples and children scramble up and down the snowy hillside, and I make my way ot the top and gaze down at the city, ah, so now I know why there are no scenic postcards of Ljubljana in all of its entirety. The concrete outskirts and skyscrapers are not so alluring. All the same, I don't mind and it all looks fine to me.



At a café (which is actually a really kitschy concept of a French café and would be offensive anywhere else but since i'm on vacation it's ok) the waiters look like hunky fashion models, and they serve excellent espressos and macchiatos to intellectual families. I bet the mommies are film directors and the papas are art professors. The children sneak in programs like PIMP MY RIDE, but the parents drag them to modern theater performances.

The whole city was rejuvenated architecturally by national architect hero Josef Plecnik, although at the end of his life he wasn't fashionable and lost his sphere of influence. People only get hero-fied when they die. He was a Sim City real life player who went crazy and transformed Ljubljana into something special with all of his clever bridge makeovers and market constructions. Maybe todays modern architects should take a listen and stop constructing buildings that look like vector explosions or Frank Gehry copycats.

at the hotel there were machines that we could polish our shoes at, fine and rough. The old men with the canes and the fedoras did that, and I tried to copy them but was not so successful at making my sneakers more presentable. The silkscreen dye stain is still there.

the town hall was beautiful, with a stylized map of the city against a wall, but the three huge murals of the Slovenians being enslaved first by the romans, then the turks, then the Austrians unnerved me. Is it healthy to have a national identity that goes back so far? Is it really healthy to construct a culture? Well if not, so they say, it will all be English and McDonald's. By the cathedral in the main square, men in 1940s Italian fascist uniforms zip around in sputtering mopeds as chic filmmaker crews push people away behind the line. It's a film about the Italian takeover of Slovenia in the forties, and a woman is running around looking like Betty Page in a brown suit trying to protect a young boy with flowers.



At the bus station the middle-aged people strike us as different, smaller and humbler with more old-fashioned 1980s haircuts that aren't ironic. Little did they know, they would give birth in the 1970s and 1980s to a Eurovision generation of leggy supermodels who would listen to techno trance music and dance naked in the woods. They listened to Rod Steward songs and drank beers and twirled their moustaches at 6 a.m., wondering how time had passed on so quickly.

bosnia