Croatia: a place where they film things

As I've already posted about Dubrovnik and Zagreb, I thought it would make the most sense to give this video its own post. A stitching-together of those two cities, and a thin slice of Split to round things out. After the jump, the video!

This one was fun to cut together, in part because I'd forgotten what all I had filmed (and in some cases hadn't realized what I caught in a shot?) Here, then, are the highlights for me, should you care to locate them.

1. A pigeon tossing around a piece of prosciutto in slow motion, proving again that they are the filthiest, most disgusting, and most evil birds in the animal kingdom.
2. Two shots in which I tell my friend Kate to do something ridiculous (chomp on an island and open her mouth as wide as she can)
3.  Accidentally catching on film the frigging cannon blast they shoot off in Zagreb (every day at noon I believe?)
4. The peacock that spent an afternoon hanging out around my feet like a big ol' creeper
5. The... the fun places and the nice people? And the sights, don't let me forget about the sights

Okay! This concludes this round of things - after Zagreb, I moved on to my next long-haul stay, a little under a month in Vienna! (Which is already over by the time this posts! Life is weird!) I'm really glad I took this tear around the Balkans, and doubly so to have done so with a good old friend, but among other things it reminded me why I love slow travel and shoulder-season or off-season travel, which I think help you escape the Disneyfication of these places at the height of the tourist season. Still and all, gratitude wins the day, and I ain't never gonna regret having caught the fleeting glimpses that I did.

Zagreb

Oh but I loved Zagreb. There's something about being in a city with its own energy, especially after so many stops in places whose major (and almost sole) industry was tourism. I'm sure it didn't hurt to be a few hours further north away from the heat of the south, but there was a friendliness and openness and just plain fun to this spot that I loved dearly. And really, once I passed a music shop - as in, a shop selling musical instruments - I realized how long it had been since I'd been in a city with a large enough local population in the center to cater to the commercial interests of residents. I breathed a sigh of happiness and dove in. As with Dubrovnik, no video here - though that should be up in the next few days. I don't have a ton to report here - my earlier post on the Museum of Broken Relationships aside, I mostly poked around and got a feel for the energy of the place - but I would love to spend more time here in the future.

After the jump: photos!

Walking to my AirBnB was somehow the first time that I realized I was staying about a block away from the Croatian National Theatre. Coooooool! Great social life in this piazza through the coupla days I was there, hooray for theatre and travel and public spaces and whatnot!

I wasn't in Zagreb long enough to feel I could spend a few hours of my time at the animation festival that coincided with my visit (ugh festivals while traveling are my favorite thing) but the toothy bowler hat pictured here exerted a hypnotically persuasive pull...

INSTEAD, why not wander through one of the major squares in the Lower Town (Zagreb is split between upper and lower, with altitude actually determining the split) and find out they have a mega low-key renaissance festival going? All handcrafts and a hand-cranked "ride" that you can see in the video when that goes up later this week. 

This was one of my faves my first night here. Following the sound of music, I came across this micro street festival, a wine tasting with what seemed by all appearances to be spontaneous swing dancing. This, pals, this is why the meander is one of my favorite ways to explore a new spot...

A failed experiment in long exposure times that PRIMARILY taught me that you actually need a tripod for these things you dundering dope! Still, let's all imagine how cool this would have been if the focus had been clear on the non moving things! Whoaaaa great shot Imaginary Pat!

Chatted with the deeply excellent artist who makes these, and who has an entire series of Captain America Elephant prints. "I love Marvel," she said, "And last year I made this elephant, and I just couldn't stop making more, he was so cute!" Well AGREED, friend, agreed.

View of the Lower Town from the edge of the Upper Town. Towns! Or maybe cities! It is too sleepy to research this nomenclature at present, see you all in the future with mooooving pictures!

Crossroading in Mostar

Mostar was tantalizing for me. It was my first visit to a city with visible, historic and ongoing Islamic culture, architecture, traditions, and (as its famous bridge symbolized before the 1990s saw it destroyed in the violence of the Balkans) a place of balance between diverse ethnic and religious groups. I left hungry for more - both to get past the somewhat touristy center of the town, but also to explore more places like it. I won't visit Istanbul while a dangerous authoritarian is in charge of Turkey (I only tolerate despots in my home country thankyouverymuch) but it's achingly high on my list of places I'd like to go. In any event, after the jump: Mostar, Bosnia!

Mostar from atop a minaret, with its old bridge rebuilt for a new page of history.

Kate and I spent most of our time here wandering - the touristy center, all cobblestones and shops and huge piles of meat in cafes, coalescing in the iconic old bridge; but also some less-polished areas, seeking out some street art and generally just trying to get a feel for what day to day life is like around here.

It's-ameeee I climbed a thing and you can only slightly tell how nervous it makes me!

While I don't know that I'd say we got under the surface, one of the most rewarding pieces of this leg of the trip was getting to chat with people here - it is an incredibly friendly culture, tremendously hospitable and welcoming. Our second morning, we went to a local farmer's market and found the vendors eager to share their wares with us, offering sample after sample of local brandies, honey, and other specialties. Kate stopped at another stall to buy a little fruit for a snack, and the woman running the stand refused to take payment - it was a gift for a visitor. It was really moving and lovely!

Back down at the base of the minaret. One great thing about this area was hearing the call to prayer booming out several times a day.

One of the major draws had been a chance to explore a bit of Islamic-influenced culture - when the Ottomans occupied this region, they'd spread their religion through incentives (rather than requiring it by force) and there are still many Bosniak muslims here. Because of the town's touristy trade, this particular mosque was set up to accommodate visitors, with the prayer area separated for worshipers but viewable from the visitors' section. Getting to explore the building while reading about the practice within was pretty great.

Probably my favorite of the street art panels just north of the old town center.

Of course, the city's legacy is marked by the ethnic and religious violence of the 90s, whipped up by horrifying leaders who used racial and religious resentment as fuel to convince their citizens to participate in ethnic cleansing. Many buildings, especially outside the core, are still pockmarked with shrapnel and bullet holes. An cemetery near our AirBnB had death dates entirely from the mid-90s, as it was the one site that was dark enough to enable Bosnians to bury their dead under cover of night at a time when snipers made it impossible to go out by day. Throughout the Balkans there are stories like this, along with a lot of people trying to find their way to a peaceful future of coexistence, though there's still plenty of finger-pointing in the mix. In some ways this serves as a grim reminder to how places can get torn apart by leaders who thrive on spewing hate and annointing scapegoats. I don't think America's on the cusp of something like this, exactly. But I also know we're not above it or beyond it.

"Don't forget. But do forgive. Forever."

 But. The people. Jaz, whose hands you can see below, runs Cafe Alma, where he walks visitors through the history and the ritual of Bosnian coffee, sharing a bit of his own story and welcoming you like family. He wants his shop to be a place for connection; when it's busier than it was for us, he often seats groups together, but even on our sleepy morning we made a surprise connection with a street artist from Bristol, and Jaz seemed deeply satisfied. "This happens all the time," he said.

Bosnian coffee setup! THIS WAS SWELL AS I HAVE INDICATED

 In short, while the pace of the trip and the geography of the place limited how under the skin we could get, we both loved Mostar a lot. So much so, in fact, that we booked tickets to Split for a 6 AM bus that never showed up, ensuring we'd get an extra five hours while we waited for the next one to arrive! Yayyyy more time in Mostar!

This was a bit of a bummer, honestly as it meant blowing the only connection I could make to my next planned destination, Plitvice Lakes (click those links and you'll see why I'm still a bit heartbroken to have missed out). And I did get sad and frustrated, for a few moments. But man, friends are good in all things: Kate was patient with my sadness and frustration despite her own grumpiness, and helped me rebound. (She also, fortunately, had booked a place in Split, which was where we were planning to part ways, so I wasn't homeless for the night.) So, out a pile of Euro for the bus and an overnight stay in Plitvice, I still got to hang with my friend and made my alternative plans to arrive in Zagreb the following day. Little rattling episodes that don't become trip-ruining disasters: this is becoming one of my favorite new things, really. Up next: Zagreb, where I found my ideal city tempo again!

Slouching on the roof of the Mostar bus station, trying to dodge the sun and waiting for... the future.

Dubrovnik: picturesque and cruise-ship-riffic

Dubrovnik! Larger than Kotor, though with many of the same "how do you get past the tourist-oriented stuff?" challenges. To a large extent, with the possible exception of getting away to Lokrum Island (a gorgeous woody retreat from the city) I don't know that you can or that we did... Both here and in Kotor, going in March instead of June would probably make a huge difference. But it's still gorgeous, and I guess I understand why they film television shows and movies here. After the jump: mostly photos!

One of approximately 4,000 photos I took through turrets on a walk of the Dubrovnik city walls. This is a thing worth doing for sure, but also do it first thing in the day because it gets hot and a million other people have the same idea. We got there right away and it was cool but one hour later and it would have been disastertowne.

I'll have a video up later this week combining all my Croatia footage; in the meantime here's this! Dubrovnik was gorgeous; our host was a charming and delightful grandpa who spoke almost no English but was always friendly and helpful, from offering us a bottle of juice when we arrived to encouraging us to make ourselves at home in his gorgeous garden.

I AM A FAN OF THIS BACK YARD SITUATION.

We found the Croats (and Bosnians, foreshadowing!!!) to be incredibly friendly. Case in point, actually, and very much a change from Kotor: we got incredibly lost trying to find our AirBnB and at one point, I wandered down a street that turned out to be a dead end with a cafe at the end. The waitress asked if she could help, I muttered an apologetic explanation... and she invited me into the cafe, got me onto their wifi, pulled up my confirmation, and helped me sort out the map. Adding to this, she seemed surprised when Kate and I showed up later for coffee - this was just a friendly gesture, not an ingratiating investment for future custom!

And THIS dude was apparently just GIVING PARROTS OUT LEFT AND RIGHT.

In any case, it was real pretty if a little sleepy, and I do think the highlight was sneaking off to an island. It's funny: I actually sometimes crave a kind of sleepy "grab a book and read on the beach" vacation, but by virtue of being over here, in cultures that aren't my own, I immediately and instinctively want to be culturally exploring, and tend to feel like that recharge-and-relaxation approach is somehow wasting time. It's not! But I do think I learned, in Kotor and Dubrovnik, that if I ever want that kind of trip, I need it to be in a culture I've already spent some time, because if I spend a week eating nice food and relaxing in the sun in Fort Myers, I feel a lot better than if I do the same in Croatia.

One of the least cinematic places on earth, why do people come here even.

Up next: Mostar! Our taste of Bosnia, a lot more cultural exploration, and a major bus-connection mishap. Whee! In the meantime: here's a photo pile.

The courtyard in the old apothekary. I think this used to be a monastery! Maybe still is! Courtyard.

The rooftop stairwell from a Napoleonic-era fortress that Croats used to defend Dubrovnik from attack during the war in the 90s. The exhibit here is shockingly propagandistic and one-sided, but you do get a remarkable sense of what this chapter of their history felt like.

W E  L E F T  T H E  C I T Y  T O  F I N D  A N  I S L A N D

This happened. For an extended period of time, actually. Peacocks were all over Lokrum island. And there was swimming! A+ time, Lokrum. Definitely recommend this, especially on heavy cruise-ship traffic days or on weekends.

Kotor, or, Friends Make Things Good

Kotor made its way onto my itinerary here partly thanks to geography (as a way to get to Dubrovnik from the northern Balkan states) but also because it had the reputation of a less-touristy Adriatic coastal walled city, kind of Dubrovnik without the craziness. It was... not entirely that, but I still had a grand stay, thanks in part to the power of friendship. Post-jump: things!

Kotor from the climb up the town walls! Hikes are the best, gang.

So. The Bay of Kotor is achingly gorgeous, and the Montenegrin interior is similarly so. I can imagine that tooling around here with a car is thoroughly delightful! The city itself, as you can see in the video above (and the photos here) is beautiful, with a great sense of its history as a port city. (The main gate to the city used to be right on the water, so you could only get in by pulling your ship alongside and stepping directly into the entryway.)

"Wow!" old timey ship captains used to say, "That's quite a view! What are all these cruise ship passengers doing here?"

But the thing is... Kotor is very much on the cruise ship map these days. This means to some extent that it gets crowded with day trippers, which is never the most fun, but it's also the first place I've visited where I felt the insane change of culture in response to the cruise ship influx. Most of the cities I've visited that had cruise ports have been fairly sizable, cities in their own right. And they all retain that sense of local culture, even in smaller cases like Venice, where tourism is very clearly the main engine of the local economy. Kotor's not that - it's small. And the depressing reality is, or seems to be, that everybody in Kotor is selling constantly.

The city is also full of cats! I did not elect to visit the cat museum although I did visit the cat souvenir shop. Lot of cat-themed things in there, which I guess is good if you like cats or cat-themed objects?

 Which, you know: this is their job! And there's nothing wrong with that. But while we were able to have a good conversation with a waiter our last night there, it otherwise made it feel really difficult to make any kind of connection to local culture, since most of what was on display was meant to appeal to international travelers. Fair or not, it felt like the arrival of cruise ships had fundamentally altered the character of the place and made it a pretty spot, a good spot to use as a base for hiking or coastal wandering or sailing adventures, but not a place to connect in a culturally exploratory way.

These two locals refused to talk to us at all, probably because we weren't buying souvenirs. Thanks a lot, snobs!

The compensation in all of this was the arrival of my friend Kate from Bristol, who I've known since we were freshmen at Northwestern. She's now a literary agent, and she and her husband Stuart have become two of my best pals, people I visit every time I'm overseas. Last year Kate met up with me in Krakow the weekend before my divorce hearing so I would have an old friend at hand around that event happening, and this year decided she wanted in on a slice of my Balkan adventures. It was great! We met in Kotor, hiked the intense city walls up the side of a mountain, ate whole fish at a great traditional restaurant in town, and then headed off for Croatia and Bosnia. All that and more in future posts... For now, suffice to say, friends are the best and swellest, and make all situations adventures!

Kate drew a portrait of me and then photographed it, so I took a picture of her behind some beers, because both of us are artists in our own way

Little joys

Brief break from the catching-up posts: Vienna is making me happy in small ways that I want to commemorate here. Last summer, I arrived here heartbroken, jetlagged, culture-shocked, and sick (with a nasty chest cold that would hang around for a month, possibly this was psychosomatic but either way I'm glad to report I have not been this sick since then). I'd since forgotten a lot of the things that made me happy, or that I hadn't even realized at the time made me happy! Here, then, post-jump, a compendium!


1. DIRTBAG MOZARTS. (I don't always use the term dirtbag, depending on the company.) These guys are great. Flaks sent to drum up audiences for touristy mediocre concerts of Mozart or Strauss music, they're clad in silk trousers and vests and sometimes powdered wigs, but what's great about them is they could not care less. It's that great thing you get with some European waiters, the sense of "I'm doing this for money and will not pretend I enjoy it." So you tend to see them slouching around, smoking, and grumpy, and the disconnect between the touristy come-on and the total eyeroll of their execution delights me. This I rediscovered on my first trip into the Innerstadt last week, walking through a massive Habsburg gate to see my first Dirtbag Mozart of the summer picking his nose. Never change, Dirtbag Mozarts!

Sadly, neither of these Dirtbag Mozarts were smoking, which is my favorite thing that Dirtbag Mozarts do, but I think they both nicely capture the "Yeah whatever you gonna buy an authentic experience or not" vibe.

2. The glories of European liberalism! Specifically, the little things: the streets here are shockingly clean, especially coming from Boston (probably other American cities too!), because they literally pay people to sweep them on a daily basis. Or perhaps the free gyms in the parks: exercise equipment out in the open for anyone in the public to use, and people use them all the time, mothers and their kids as much as anyone. It's a delight. (Also, as I'll post about sometime later this week, alllll the cheap art!)

3. Things Done Well. German cultures basically worship bread, and Vienna has a whole host of bakeries doing just their thing, and doing it exceptionally well. This, as I'll write about in my Useful Post on Vienna, is one place you want to get outside the grocery store for cheapness and quality - €1.90 at a local shop will get you a full loaf of fresh-baked bread: seeded, dark pumpernickel, rough whole-grain, whatever. My strategy has been to get the heartiest-looking fare possible, and I have yet to be disappointed.

4. Rhubarb yogurt. Yogurt over here is amazing generally, but in Austria there's a company that does a seasonal rhubarb flavor, and I'm obsessed. I actually had to suppress a yip of delight when I saw that I hadn't missed the season for this.

5. Biking heaven. I posed about this last year, but Vienna has an incredible, well-posted biking system, and drivers are amazing about working around cyclists when the road is shared. It's not Copenhagen (still the greatest bike city on earth as far as I can tell) but between the infrastructure and the free city bike loaners, it's a dream come true.

That's a solid top five for now - more to come soon!

A Serbian Sprint

Continuing the theme from my post on Romania, a sprint through Serbia after the jump!

A pile of greenery in the middle of Belgrade, which is: not the prettiest city!

I was lucky to make my connection from Timisoara to Belgrade via a small shuttle van - about the same price as an all-day train trip with one tight connection, this allowed me a short three-hour trek in the company of a group of friendly, talkative Serbians, including a driver who initially mistook me for an Australian. At the border crossing, as we waited for a passenger to sort out a tax refund with customs, he extolled the fast-paced energy of Belgrade ("Coffee, coffee, food, drink, everything every hour of the day and night") and filled me in on his globetrotting past as the child of diplomats. He'd lived in Seoul, Denmark, a few other spots, and now with a family of his own was based in Belgrade, though often on the go transporting passengers between Balkan states. He finished by telling me to just eat all the street food I could find: "We have amazing fast food, but not like your American fast food. Local, organic, fresh." Well, okay!

Burgers and beer: genuinely a Serbian thing but also it was nice to have a hamburger sometimes you do want hamburgers, this concludes my report on hamburgers across the globe.

I only had a few hours in Belgrade, which I spent exploring a couple of areas: Skadarlija, a cobblestoned area full of restaurants and shops, and then Stanica Kalemegdan, the old fortress turned city park, which was full of school groups, couples, and older adults out seeking shade from the heat and the sun. I made my way south along a central pedestrian-zone street, eventually finding the bus station and my hour-long connection north to Novi Sad, my home for the night.

Not pictured: the animatronic dinosaur park on the other side of this formidable gate.

My host in Novi Sad, baby in tow, checked me into my cute apartment (a standalone building in the courtyard of an apartment complex) and after checking in to let my parents know I was making connections okay, I zipped off into town, where the nightlife was just kicking into gear. It was exactly my kind of place: not mad with clubbing, but tons of young folk out having food and drinks, wandering the cobbled streets, listening to street musicians, walking alongside the Danube (which weirdly reminded me of the Twin Cities riverscape back in Minnesota) or relaxing in the park. I got the local street food signature, an "Index Sandwich" (an unholy but tasty toasted ham-cheese-and-other sandwich), and joined the wander for the evening. This, I thought, would have been a pretty great place to plant for a few weeks of getting work done, exceedingly pleasant without being distracting in the mode of major cities.

One end of the major square/thoroughfare in Novi Sad. I apparently didn't take as many photos here as I thought, though I think the video has more of the imagery that captivated me?

The next morning, I made my way to a cafe and plugged away at work for the day, stopped off for a street-food lunch, and after an afternoon round of productivity, returned to the bus station for my summer record worst decision ever, an overnight bus ride from Novi Sad to Kotor by way of Belgrade. After the first leg of the trip, I felt good - a nearly empty bus, room to stretch out, quiet. In Belgrade, everything changed. An amped-up group of Serbian teenagers filled in around me, playing music on their phones, snacking, and loudly bantering until 3-4 AM. They all fell asleep right as the bus coasted into the wildly stunning landscape of Montenegro (there's a train line that echoes this journey and I could not recommend that idea more strongly), of which I have no evidence, having been moved away from the window. Ah well! I catnapped when I could, reminded myself I was saving a night of lodging expenses, chalked it up to Life Experience, and once in Kotor underwent one of the truly greatest naps of our era.

The Danube in Serbia! This river goes everywhere! What the heck, river?

Up next: Montenegro, and the arrival of a friend!

A Day in the Life

If you read this site regularly you know I am VERY MUCH a slow-travel proponent. But part of this summer's scheme involved interspersing roughly monthlong productive stays with quick-travel. It's a bit faster than I'd like, frankly - anything less than a two-night stay gets me worn out fast - but it means I've seen a lot! Here, to give you a sample of what that nonsense looks like, is my day in Romania last week. After the jump: too many all many things.

Oradea at 6:45 AM, all stately and majestic and fleeting as I ran through it like a maniac.

I'd arrived in Oradea late at night; my AirBnB host picked me up at the airport, her second act of kindness after having picked me up a plug adapter when I left mine in the flat back in Milan.  I started the next day early, leaving around 6 AM to explore Oradea before catching a connection to Timisoara, where I knew I wanted to spend more of the day.

Well and pretty, though SECRETS ALERT this is cleverly framed to obscure the construction site that made it a little less gorgeous in person. Still: WATER AND REFLECTIONS AND ARCHITECTURE AND TREES, WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT EVER.

Walking through Oradea's empty streets, particularly as I left the more stolid Soviet-era architecture of the outlying parts and made my way into the Secessionist explosion of glorious architecture in the center, I was struck by how lovely the city was, and also how much renovation was afoot. Nearly half the buildings in the historic core had scaffolding and tarps covering them, clearly a major push afoot to renovate and restore. It was a little bummerish for me, combining with the early Sunday morning hour to make the place feel a little bit like a film set that was 80% complete but not yet ready to shoot. Still, once the renovations are complete it's going to be quite stunning.

I mean, it's plenty stunning as is, but you know, why not go for more stunning when you can.

I made my way up to the train station, where my host had helpfully informed me that my bus to Timisoara would be. After waiting a bit for a bus that was due to arrive at 8:30, I thought I should check the train schedule, to see if the one morning train had left on time. I hit the ticket window, said "Timisoara?" and the woman started shaking her head, pointing at the platforms, and yelling. I couldn't tell if she was saying the train was there, or had left, and didn't know if I could buy a ticket on the train. I raced out to the tracks, where the assigned track was empty; another track had a train idling on it, but in my early pre-coffee brain I just assumed the train I wanted had gone. Later I would realize this was obviously not the case, but oh well. I settled into the waiting area in the train station, pulled out my laptop and started trying to sort out schedules for the train (none more til the end of the day) and busses (a few more on tap). A Roma woman approached, asking a series of questions that I couldn't understand; after explaining I didn't speak Romanian a few times (one of only a handful of phrases I had time to learn), I went back to my work. She stared at me for a while before moving away to feed pigeons.

Side note: American money is depressingly lame compared to literally every other country's currency. Romanian currency has translucent sections to it! I loved it so.

I made my way back to the front of the station, stopping into a coffee shop favored by the taxi touts waiting out front, clumsily ordered coffee and asked in English if they knew where the bus to Timisoara left from; they shook their heads. Finishing my coffee, I noticed that the bus agency's door had opened; I strolled over, asked the proprietor if he spoke English (he waggled his hand "a little bit") and asked if I could get a ticket to Timisoara. He said "Pay on bus" and gestured toward the station. "In front of the station?" "Yes."

An hour passed, then two. I'd looked at the schedule online and knew two busses should have come and gone. A van pulled in, and knowing that sometimes "bus" means "van" in this region, I asked the driver if he was bound for Timisoara. "No, sorry," he said, returning about fifteen minutes later to tell me "those busses pick up down there," gesturing down the road. "On the other side?" "Yes."

Oradea: also a place that reminds you that Soviet architecture and urban planning was not especially lovely.

Crossing the road, I suddenly and stupidly remembered that I had downloaded Google Translate's Romanian language pack onto my phone. I hastily typed out "Do you know where the bus to Timisoara departs?" and started daisy-chaining my way across people waiting for their own busses or trams, all of whom became quickly kind and helpful as they arm-gestured me up the road and around the corner, where I finally saw two vans emblazoned with "ORADEA TIMISOARA." Found it! ...with 90 minutes to go til the next bus left. OKAY.

The bus gradually filled up, eventually packed with people standing as well as sitting. We made about 3/4 of the trip, then took an extended lunch stop, at which point an older woman getting on decided that she wanted to trade her seat for mine, and enlisted the bus's passengers in communicating this to me. I shrugged and made the change, and we made our last leg into Timisoara. I hopped off the bus and walked to my hostel, a goofy character-heavy spot called Hostel Costel, put in a deposit for a key to my room, took a shower, and headed off into the city.

Hostel Costel has a mustache theme of some sort going, and that is hecka great if you ask me!

Timisoara was gorgeous, its architecture reminding me variously of Habsburg holdings, Secessionist buildings, and even in places (very unexpectedly) Gaudi in his drooping, organic, ornate majesty. The city was also packed with people - families, clusters of young people, kids, all out and strolling on a Sunday afternoon. The city centre is full of the kind of town squares that I love, in Italy or elsewhere, providing a social space for people to see the community on a ramble.

One corner of the massive central square. I'll grant that I'm a sucker for blue skies, but holy moly this area was grand.

I settled into a midafternoon meal, my first of the day, grabbing a streetside table at a recommended pizzeria down the road from an art installation where local DJs were spinning, and then made my way to the National Theatre, where the Romanian National Opera was performing La Traviata. It was an interesting experience - the music direction was phenomenal, with admirable vocal performances and acting from the singers, and a stellar orchestra - but the direction was full of clumsy storytelling and odd, inconsistent miking. Where most singers were unamplified, there were some area mics onstage that would catch random vocalists and boost them unnecessarily, or (more often) would catch the beads on a singer's dress as they grazed the floor, calling to mind Lina's pearls in Singin' in the Rain. I left after the first act - it was a gorgeous night, my only one in town, and I wanted to ramble.

Mind you, $7 tickets to the opera are pretty magical even with the odd grumble about sound issues

I passed a family whose sixish-year-old daughter was throwing a dramatic fit over whatever journey they were taking; we caught eyes and shared a brief smile, her faux-agony giving way to recognition that somebody had clocked her performance. I made my way to a vinyl shop/craft beer bar; one of the co-owners was brewmaster at a local brewery, the other had founded the shop as the city's first vinyl store in the rebirth of that format. We chatted a bit over a beer, and I admired their deep-cuts collection, knowing I couldn't lug anything around with me for the rest of the summer.

Maybe this was the central square in Timisoara? There were multiple gorgeous and cool squares is I guess my point okay.

I headed back as the sun set, skirting the canal ringing the old city center, now beautifully set up as a park of sorts. Couples lounged and made out on the banks and on benches, cyclists zipped along the paths, and just up the hill from the river a series of bars sold drinks to people who weren't just bringing their own to the park. I passed about a half-dozen spots where you could hear bands playing live on temporary stages, at least one spot with ping-pong games going, and was passed by a pirate boat offering rides to little kids.

The colored umbrellas thing ain't new, but I'm a sucker for it every dang time.

Back in the hostel as night fell, I pulled out my by-now well-broken-in and scuffed-from-hiking boots, set to polishing them and sending emails to future hosts to confirm my next few stays; realizing I'd kept a set of keys to my Oradea host's place, I messaged her and made arrangements to mail them back to her the next morning on my way out of Timisoara. Having meant to go to bed early, I stayed up a bit past midnight before finally turning in, exhausted but happy. All told, I'd spend thirty-six hours in Romania: long enough to whet my appetite for more, short enough to feel my inadequate grasp of the place. Who knows if I'll have a life that allows me the time and resources to travel to far-flung corners in the years to come, but... I know I'd sure like to try.

THIS LITTLE GUY WAS ADORABLE OK THAT'S ALL BYE

Trust Me: This Is All Made Up

A random, brief, navelgazing post, brought on by my experiences traveling through Cinque Terre, Milan, Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro... Jump, etc.!


It struck me at some point in Serbia, after a few days of dirt-cheap rentals there and in Romania, accompanied by low-cost street food and free park-strolling and city-wandering, that money can absolutely be a barrier to thoughtful travel. If I'd been running on a high per-day budget, I might have opted for hotels instead of family-run rentals, or higher-end restaurants, missing out on conversations about the lives of my hosts in Oradea and Novi Sad and generally able to retreat into my own comfortable sphere. This isn't a new observation; I think Arthur Frommer (maybe Rick Steves?) talked about the old-school model of tourism, where cruise ships would stop in Caribbean ports and tourists would literally throw money onto the docks to see local kids running for it. That's a super gross image! But it's also kind of speaking to a larger picture - not the cruelty of the passengers so much as what they were paying for: physical separation from the culture, a ship to keep them from the people on the docks.

Ultimately, all travel is an exercise in placing yourself and all you carry in the trust of strangers. You trust that your accommodations will be as you expected, that you'll get where you want to get, that nobody will fleece you, that you'll be safe, that you'll be given access to unique and enjoyable experiences. And money, it seems to me, often serves as a tool to make that trust invisible, to allow you to convince yourself it isn't the case.

If you stay in Hilton or Marriott branded properties or generic mass-market hotels wherever you go, you're buying a certain kind of predictability, a confidence that things will be as you remember them. It's actually not especially different from renting a $15 apartment from AirBnB, depending on the amenities,  but your money has bought you the mental space to believe that the manager won't breach your privacy. Perhaps it's bought you trust that you won't have to have any extended conversations with weirdo hosts; as the major hotels move into apps that let you unlock your room with your phone and avoid all human contact, this perceived distance increases. The reality (with rare, obviously notable exceptions) is that you're equally safe in both scenarios, but in the Hilton branded scenario, you aren't as mindfully aware of the trust you're endowing your host with, because you're paying to put it out of mind.

In the same sense, paying the premium you'll pay in Europe (especially off-the-beaten-path Europe) for "American style breakfasts" or restaurants with English language menus is all about familiarity: I know what a cheese omelet will look and taste like. (If they get it wrong, it's a funny anecdote and I didn't accidentally order an eel.) Going the route of the locals makes you aware of trust again: trust that there's a reason they eat burek for breakfast in Serbia, trust in the mystery filling ingredients, trust that nobody will make fun of you for struggling with the language while you order, trust that the food you're not familiar with will be tasty and safe. The most extreme example of this is one of my favorite ways to find food in an unfamiliar city: finding a street-food stall away from any major sights that has a long line in front of it, joining the line, and ordering whatever everybody seems to be ordering. Sometimes that means not knowing what it is until eating it (or even after!), but it almost always means low cost, and again, a high level of conscious trust.

It's the same down the line. Taxis or booking a driver let you (to some extent) replace the anxiety of "will I get there/what if I can't find the bus stop/what if I don't know when I've reached my destination" with a sometimes-exorbitant fee. But if you do book a taxi or a driver, you'll never get to see what the Mostar bus station looks like at 6:30 AM and take in the comings and goings for the next five hours while you wonder what happened to your bus that never showed up. And that, too, is a kind of connection to the culture! Or so I will continue to tell myself!

To some extent guidebooks are where I make an exception to this general "less money = more connection and awareness" rule, but this depends on how you're using them. You're paying for hopefully-recent information on where to deposit your trust, but you run the risk of plodding along the Lonely Planet or Rick Steves trail alongside tens of thousands of fellow tourists dutifully checking off recommendations and sites that have grown accustomed to Anglophone tourists. Good guidebooks will still keep pushing you toward the unfamiliar and unique - situations where you are still conscious of the trust you're paying out. To me, the ideal guidebook gives you enough information to explore on your own - the things to keep in mind as you look for the off-road connections that won't deliver a predictable experience.

I think this is rad, frankly. Exercising the muscle of trust, of saying "let's see what happens," is good for me - I'm miles from the stressed out dude I was a couple of years ago, but I'm still a researcher, still a guy who likes to know what's going on, and it does me good to find and take joy from all the moments when I can breathe a bit, and give the unknown a shot. It's lovely to get a known quantity, of course, and there are always days that you want to find the comfort of that routine, of knowing the experience you're going to get. But when on the road, it's great to stretch a bit, save some coin, and be mindful of the trust you lay out to others every day of your life.

Milanoramo

GANG. I was a little "whatever" about Milan when I planned this trip. I mean, yes, I've gotten more into style lately, and it's a huge center for menswear, but it's also got the rep of being a modern city without most of the loveliness we think of as Italian, and I kinda figured... schmeh? Well guess who continues to be a big dumb dummy who doesn't know anything about cities that are actually fantastic? It, in the parlance of our times, me. After the jump: twenty-four hours in a cool joint.

YES I am still climbing to the top of buildings (the Duomo here) for some reason. NO for some reason this was not as terrifying as they usually are, and YES I assume that's because my brain somehow thinks standing on a marble (?) rooftop away from the edge is safer than standing on a steel platform at the edge of any other building, the human heart is a mystery.

With only a day to rattle around the city, I made quick work of a few things to get a taste, ultimately leaving with a sense that I wouldn't mind spending a couple more here someday. Well, to be specific, I texted friends that I wanted to move to the neighborhood where I had dinner because it had some magical energy that appealed to me at a bone-deep level, but you know, a couple of days would be cool too.

Milan, living up to all my stereotypes, but also being amazing?

I popped into a few menswear stores, including some with tremendously friendly sales associates (delightfully little snobbery here), including one fella from Saint Louis who talked me through the philosophy and approach of Caruso, a label I now love while knowing I will never be able to afford it. Travel! It's a thing or something!

Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in the early morning, all... art deco, right? I'm bad at architecture ANYWAY IT WAS NICE.

The Duomo was cool, though contrary to national stereotypes, this Northern Italian site was run in the most incoherent and disorganized way compared to e.g. places in Rome and Florence, with their ticketing line opening at 8 AM and serving a grand total of four patrons by 9 AM. It was worth it (I think) to get a ticket to the rooftop, even with some restoration work afoot, though I'd say probably worth eating the extra fees to buy your ticket online and print it at home.

Old and New Milan, all jumbled together, from atop the Duomo!

My favorite area on this blitzkrieg, though, had to be the Navigli district, where I had dinner. It's alongside an old canal in the city's southwest, with tons of nightlife and restaurants, and some spots like my dinner joint: a coffee shop by day, appertivo spot in the early evening, restaurant and later bar at night, and throughout the day a grocery/market for their produce, cured meats, cheeses, wines, etc. Their food was amazing, and the staff were extremely cool, chatty and friendly (and gave me a free espresso at the end of the meal as we talked shop about their setup and how much I loved it). In short, it was nifty and I would 100% explore here more if I had the chance to swing back.

A quieter stretch of the Navigli at night, around the corner from the buzzy scene that was afoot elsewhere!

After an afternoon, a night, and a morning, I split for the airport, where an €8 flight to Oradea, Romania set me on my Balkan chapter. More on that in the days to come - this was an intense, sometimes challenging, often lovely, and frequently rewarding leg of the trip. Ciao til then!