Bloggerific

As you may or may not be aware (I have no idea who is reading this right now so it is quite possible either way), I went to Croatia two weeks ago. Monday (May 1) was a national holiday in Germany. It was the equivilant of Labor Day, Tag der Arbeit. I and several colleagues took off the Thursday and Friday before and went to Croatia. The plan was to hang out at the beach the entire time and get some sun, enjoy the warm weather.























In case you don't know how to find Croatia on a map and also to show you where in Croatia we were, even if you do know where Croatia is, I have included two maps.





































The weather for the week was not conducive to such things. Below is the weather history for the city where our hotel was for the time we were there. Notice the last column that says 'Rain' every day but the day we left. Also, I would like to point out the "Visibility" column where you see max of 7, average of 7, 4, 3, 7, and 7, and low of 7, 2, 1, 7, and 7. Sunday, April 30 was the day we went to the National Park. (I'll get more into that later) The visibility was defenitely NOT '7' at the National Park that day.








So now I'm done bitching about the weather.

The trip was awesome. I loved it. I went with awesome people and had a great time. The three guys were all American: Me, Guillermo, and Kyle. The girls were much more multinational. Catarina is Italian, Jennifer is American, and Patricia is Spanish. (I think this is the only picture we have of all of us together, actually. We tried to take one on Sunday in the National Park, but I didn't really cooperate. Not out of spite, out of ignorance.) We rented 2 cars, one for the guys, one for the girls.



















Left to Right: Me/Kyle (I can't tell which of us is more left), Patricia, Guillermo, Jennifer, Catarina

(Great picture of what our 'beach vacation' was like)

Thursday (April 27) was kind of boring. We got to the hotel/villa and spent a bit of time wandering around the local town. That night, the three guys went out at the only bar/club we went to the entire time we were there. Thursday night the place was packed. Apparently there were a lot of people from Microsoft or something there. Whatever... I had a good time.

Friday the weather was pretty much supposed to be shit again so we just went to Rijeka, the nearby city. Once we got there it sprinkled a bit, but in the end, the weather became quite nice. We explored Rijeka for a while. We met an old guy on this bridge from the parking lot to the city who told us about how he was a soldier or something. Then he said the beat to yankee doodle to us. He was quite proud of himself. I believe he was a bit intoxicated as well. I am also pretty sure his rendition of yankee doodle was quite wrong, but I wasn't going to tell him that. I was frightened by him.

Rijeka was a nice European city. There was a woman handing out fliers for a party going on that night. Kyle and I took a big stack of them. Kyle passed them out to random cute girls on the street. I wanted to but wound up being mostly a chicken. I tried a couple times and got turned down each time.








































On the way out of Rijeka, we saw a castle perched upon a mountain top. We decided we would go there.
















The girls, being cautious and always looking out for our best interests, instructed us to get directions to the Castle from someone, preferably the guy whom we had to pay for the parking pass. I went up there, handed over the ticket and the guy replied in Croatian. Not being a speaker of the Croatian language (except the words I learned while there which I'll list below in the appendix), I just stared blankly at him for a moment. After a blink or two, I decided the way to procede was to use sign language because even though I knew very well that damned near everyone in Croatia seems to speak English quite well, I didn't want to be rude and assume. I guess the sign language was what led him to his next conclusion. 'Italiano?' Being the wonderful communicator that I am, I replied to his question with another question. 'English?' with an ashamed shrug. (I'm quite ashamed about the fact that I only speak English.) Fortunately, his communication skills were good enough that he replied with the price and not with 'No, I'm Croatian.' Anyway, I didn't get directions from him. This was never disclosed to the girls. We just took off driving. Along the way, we stopped on a hill because I wanted to take pictures of the bay and the willage below. We, being afraid that the girls would think we were lost, told them that the church we stopped right next to was recommended to us by the parking lot ticket guy. (We're bad people, I know and I honestly feel bad about it now. It got worse before it got better, though.) We flawlessly found our way, without directions or a map, to the top of this hill where the castle was. "Yeah, I think it's probably this way." "Are you sure?" "Nope. But confidence is the way to go here." "Alright." Flawlessly... Damn, in hindsight, maybe we were lucky we didn't lead the girls into some bad part of town or something. Nah, we knew what we were doing. Anyway, we made it to the castle. Took a few pictures, shown below. Then we retreated back to the hotel before going back to the same bar again. This time the two European girls came with us.








































The plan was to get up on Saturday and go to the National Park where we expected to see things like this: (Spoiler: We didn't. Suspense Re-builder: But why not?!%!$!??)



















I'm not sure what we were really expecting, (the forecast for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday was 'Crapiness with a high of fortunately-not-cold-but-also-not-actually-all-that-warm') but on Saturday morning, we awoke to rain and poor visibility. The the laid-backiness of this vacation made me really happy because even though we went to bed the night before saying we would get up and leave town by 10am to get to the parks and spend the whole day there, we got up at 10 and after lunch finished about noon, we decided to go to a city about an hour away instead of going to the National Parks. On the way to the city, the rain stopped and the sun came out. It was gorgeous. We stopped in a little town along the way which had an absolutely gorgeous view and took several pictures. One of them has already been posted on my photo blog. ('Beautiful' from May 4th, 2006) We proceeded on to the city of Pula. (Seen on the map above.) In Pula we just hung out for several hours. We happened across a big Catholic youth event going on in a small version of the Colloseum in Pula.























There were a crap-ton (metric) of young Croatians there. We photographed the colloseum and a bit of the event. (Guillermo borrowed my camera and everyone thought that he was from the press so they would pose and ask him to take their picture. Seemed so Not-German to me. I loved it.) We had a really good seafood meal where I ate my first octopus (not calemari, the kind with the little pods still on their backs and their full face still visible) and we saw a pretty cool old fortress/castle. The castle and seafood happened in the opposite order though.
































That's what the seafood platter looked like. The pod-opus was actually quite tasty.



















I was looking for a picture of the castle, but was reminded that Guillermo really enjoyed taking lots of pictures of my crotch.

The castle was really cool. (That third-grade level sentence only emphasizes the extreme excitement for castles characteristic of many boys in third-grade which I experienced.) There was a moat where Guillermo and Kyle had to try to escape from the Crocodiles and Dragon which were there. Not the actual reptiles, but their ghost still haunts the moat to this day. It was a close call.








































The girls went on to see a different city before they came back to our hotel. I don't remember the name of it. We all went out on Saturday night. It was fun. Too bad I'm not more of a bar guy. S'Ok, I think in general I'm a fun guy to go on vacation with. (Milks may disagree...I've gotten better, milks, trust me.) I didn't drink much on Saturday (2-3 beers and maybe one shot of brandy the whole night) and it was my turn to sleep on the pull-out sofa. Needless to say, I got tucked in by a few of those with more energy and a higher BAC. (Yes, those are plastic two-liter bottles of Croatian beer.)


















Saturday night we decided that we would go to the National Parks the next day no matter what the weather was like in the morning because on Saturday we woke up to shit weather and as we were en route to our destination, the weather became beautiful. ::Play suspenseful music::

Sunday we woke up to...Guess...!RAIN! Unphased, we ate our breakfast/lunch and left the hotel at something like 1pm. (3 hours after our 'latest' planned departure time for the day.) We drove along the coast because we decided that even though it was cloudy and sprinkling, we would like to see the water instead of a highway. We saw some pretty cool views, but really didn't accumulate any great pictures from that leg of our vacation. We turned inland and crossed the mountains of the coast and were immediately immersed in fog. Thick, low, spirit-crushing fog. But we were not meer mortals on this trip. (Remember the fantastical navigation abilities...same ones we used to get to the National Park and later, to get away from the National Park, but that's another exciting tale.) Spirits uncrushed, we turned on the fog lamps and continued onward. The fog came and went, alternatively getting our hopes up and letting them down the entire 2 hour drive from the coast to the park. At one point when there was not much fog, we guys (we had two cars, if I didn't mention that before. I probably should have, at least.) got way ahead of the girls and decided that the wide open clearing would be a great place to take a whiz while we waited for them to catch up. I wasn't paying too close attention to the other guys, but as soon as I was prepared for the act, the girls had caught up. Then there was too much pressure and I had to get back in the car with a still-full bladder. No worries, no one went wee-wee in their pants. At one point in the ride, we saw sheep. (I refrained from photographing the shephard who was there with them because that was a little awkward.)
















We found out where sheep came from on our trip as well. OK, we didn't actually find out, Kyle, Guillermo and I made up enough science to determine where they come from. They are mined from the sides of Croatian mountains. Then they are shaken in a big industrial shaker. (You gotta get the rocks out of their wool.) Then they are launched out of a big canon that makes a 'ffffwooomp' noise to the field where they will be tended by a shephard. Its the only logical explaination for the source of sheep.

When we got to the parks, it was raining and foggy as crap. I bought a plastic poncho that made me look like a doofus so that I could protect my camera from the rain and so that I could look like a doofus. Oh yeah, it was also about 3 degrees C (37F). Kyle and I thought it would still be a good idea to explore the place. You can see the ideas coming out of our heads.


















We were actually quite lucky, in my opinion. When we got to the ridge overlooking the lakes, the fog lifted to just above the ridge so we could see down into the valley. We took some decent pictures (it still wasn't perfectly clear below, but we could see, at least.) We walked down into the valley and crossed the lake right in front of a set of falls. Walking along the lake on the other side, we saw several sets of falls and took pictures. I can't speak for the others, but I was amazed at how beautiful it was. As soon as we ascended out of the valley, the fog came back down. This was clearly evident because once we reached the ridge, it was barely possible to see the waterfalls anymore. Here's a couple of the pictures taken at the falls.





























































































So, after the falls, the girls let us lead the way back to our hotel. Well...We did a good job, but we didn't exactly make them happy. In a split second decision, we decided it would be a good idea to go to Bosnia and Herzagovina. Bosnia and Herzagovina is not on the way back to our hotel. Well, we were travelling with some pretty smart girls, so they figured out we were going to wrong way and tried to signal us. In a moment of poor judgement, we decided to ignore them because we were almost certain that Bosnia was only a few more kilometers away and we would explain then. About 20 minutes later, still not in Bosnia, we agreed to tell them what was going on. They were not real happy with us. "Why didn't you just tell us you wanted to go to Bosnia" they said. Anyway, sullen (for about 45 seconds) and remorseful (still - just a bit), we led them the rest of the way to Bosnia. We weren't even sure how this would go down because we realized that half of us didn't have a passport with them to get into Bosnia. We made it in anyway. The border guards hang out a few hundred meters inside the border and we didn't need to go through any control to get out of Croatia. So we made it to Bosnia on our vacation to Croatia.


















We drove back to the hotel and I think we stayed in that night. We explored Opatija (the city where our hotel was) the next day before our flight back to Germany. You can see how nice the beach would have been to enjoy if the weather was nice.























We landed in Köln and had to catch a train back to Hannover. That was disasterous. The girls had their tickets printed. The guys forgot to print their tickets. We had to buy new tickets. In the scurry to buy tickets and make the train, I broke a nice bottle of handmade brandy that Guillermo bought from the guy who owned our hotel. I felt really bad. I also had to ride the train all the way back to Hannover smelling like a damned alcoholic. (It got all over my clothes and was EXTREMELY strong.)

Appendix A: Croatian words. (Best guesses on spelling and pronunciation, but using these words, I got my point across.)
Jivjeli - jiv-yay-lee: Equivilent of Cheers, or Prost. Probably has a different, literal meaning, and I probably learned what it was. However, it took so much practice just to pronounce it that I don't remember what it means.

Dobrodosli - doh-bro-dosh-lee: Welcome [There should actually be one of those tails on top of the s]

Dovidjenja - doh-vee-djehn-nya: Goodbye (Not literal, but that's how you use it.) I think it means 'Until we see each other again', or something. [The 'dj' should actually be a d with a cross through the neck.]

Hvala - hvah-la: Thank you

Molim - mo-leem: Please/You're welcome

Idemo - ee-deh-mo: Let's go. (I learned this one from watching several movies which were in english with Croatian subtitles. That's pretty popular on Croatian TV.)



Appendix B: Fun random pictures of us in Croatia.

Our hotel/villa





















I almost got run over by this van taking this picture of a church with flowers in front of it in Rijeka.


























We frustrated the girls for about 15 or 20 minutes by skipping stones. We were trying to skip them to a peninsula that was about 5 kilometers away. I don't know if you know anything about skipping stones but that is a challenging task, to say the least.














That's the stuff vacations are made of.


One might say this photo characterized the trip. Catarina is trying to get Kyle to help her by holding her crap for a moment. Kyle is resisting. Jennifer (reaching in from the side) is trying to get Guillermo's attention to say 'Let's go, we've seen what we need to see here and are ready to move on.' Guillermo is just kind of hanging out. Patricia and I are just kind of doing our own thing.


















We stumbled along the archeological remains of an ancient Roman Home Depot. This is the 'Structural Building Materials' section.
















And the 'External Decor' deparment:

















Footnote: Many of these pictures were taken by Patricia and Guillermo. I hope you two don't mind that I borrowed them here.

Footnote #2: There is a certain number of pictures which can be uploaded to a post before blogger asks you to verify that you are not spamming all these pictures. I have crossed this threshhold.

Thanks for reading. Next week I go to London with my brother. I'll make a post about that when I get back. Later.