Mila by the sea at Okrug Gornji, July 2009.
The one constant companion on my travels over the summer was a copy of Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her epic, thousand-plus-page 1937 travel book about Yugoslavia. Robert D. Kaplan, in Balkan Ghosts, said that he'd have preferred to lose his passport than his copy of the book. Seemed like the kind of recommendation that made it worth lugging around.
Despite its many quirks and hinks, the book is about how this part of the world has a weird habit of grabbing people bay the ear and refusing to let go. I thought about this a lot as we prepared for our trip. I had also listened to a podcast of a talk given by retired American diplomat William Montgomery, who had served as ambassador in Croatia and Bulgaria in addiiton to many other posts around the region. When he retired a few years ago, he decided to settle down in a house near Dubrovnik, which prompted one of this friends to express the concern that an interest in the Balkans can become like a disease. It is a condition that got Montgomery, West, and even my wife, who has always got a funny look in her eye whenever she talks about Croatia.
Of course, everyone sees this in their own way. For me, my first impression, was of an incredible pain in the bum. We left Budapest by train very early in the morning, and reached Zagreb to find that the trains would go no further becauase an accident near the coast, which had killed six people, had closed the railroads. So we had a few hours in the capital before taking a bus for another six hour trip to Split on the coast. From there, we had to catch another smaller bus to Trogir for the rest of the trip. For whatever odd reason, the bus station in Split is far too small for the country's second city. And it was a mass of crushed people and buses coming and going. As we searched for the right loading spot, I got to talking with a young fellow to see if he was going up the coast. He had just come off the ferry from Bari, which docked just across the street, and was on his way on another bus to Sarajevo. I have to confess a certain American ignorance about the city, which I knew mostly from news reports in college as the epicenter of a world of baffling and confusing pain. It struck me as strange that this fellow -- who was of indeterminate ethnicity but American citizenship, but that's a long story -- would be bouncing around hoping to get there.
Once we found our place near the sea, my first impressions were immediately shaped by traveling with a two-year old, and that we were staying with our friends and their own two-year old. Totting the shorties around unavoidably warps your sense of time and place -- how you sleep, what you do, what you eat, what you think is fun. It isn't bad, just different. But it didn't take long for me to note that Croatia is much more touristed than I had thought. In the English-speaking world, Croatia barely exists as anything other than a slightly exotic and out-of-the-way place for certain adventurous travelers. But for a wide swath of Central Europe, it seems to be the rough equivalent of Cape Cod. The part of the village where we were staying was almost entirely hastily constructed summer rentals. The traffic was astonishing -- it took us two hours on a bus one day to travel the two kilometers to Trogir. That gave me lots of time to note the different license plates -- from Slovakia, Poland, Germany, Hungary. The beach was a scrum of different languages, rarely English.
Maybe because I've spent my entire adult life living in places with a significant tourist economy, or because I read too many situationists in college, but I feel acutely aware of the condition of being a tourist. When I'm traveling, I always feel that sense that whatever I am seeing or experiencing is warped by the very fact that I am there. Couple that with the realization that an entire infrastructure exists to accomodate me there as an economic unit, and there is a strange sense of guilt, self-consicousness and alienation from what is, at a certain level, unreal. It is something I struggle with in the strangest ways -- the thing I like most about living in the Berkshires is showing people from other places around. I often feel like I am helping them to puncture their sense of "tourist-ness" by presenting authentic experience, even when taking them to Mass MoCA or the Clark or some other perfectly obvious touristy thing to do.
But nevermind the digression. Back to the point, I was stunned by how beautiful the sea was, the Solta Channel with the islands just out of reach, the sparkling clean water. I was amazed at how perfectly well the weather held for two weeks, in which we barely saw any clouds and when the day and evening temperatures fell into such reliable predictability. There was the cute little restaurant nearby, with its lovely pizza and Karlovacko beer, which I loved even though every night we ate their they played the song "Baker Street" on the house stereo, thus permanently lodging it in my head like some kind of sonic shrapnel.
It was perfect, but if the first sniffle of the Balkan disease didn't come until later.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
The Balkan Disease (part 1 of 2)
Mila by the sea at Okrug Gornji, July 2009.
The one constant companion on my travels over the summer was a copy of Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her epic, thousand-plus-page 1937 travel book about Yugoslavia. Robert D. Kaplan, in Balkan Ghosts, said that he'd have preferred to lose his passport than his copy of the book. Seemed like the kind of recommendation that made it worth lugging around.
Despite its many quirks and hinks, the book is about how this part of the world has a weird habit of grabbing people bay the ear and refusing to let go. I thought about this a lot as we prepared for our trip. I had also listened to a podcast of a talk given by retired American diplomat William Montgomery, who had served as ambassador in Croatia and Bulgaria in addiiton to many other posts around the region. When he retired a few years ago, he decided to settle down in a house near Dubrovnik, which prompted one of this friends to express the concern that an interest in the Balkans can become like a disease. It is a condition that got Montgomery, West, and even my wife, who has always got a funny look in her eye whenever she talks about Croatia.
Of course, everyone sees this in their own way. For me, my first impression, was of an incredible pain in the bum. We left Budapest by train very early in the morning, and reached Zagreb to find that the trains would go no further becauase an accident near the coast, which had killed six people, had closed the railroads. So we had a few hours in the capital before taking a bus for another six hour trip to Split on the coast. From there, we had to catch another smaller bus to Trogir for the rest of the trip. For whatever odd reason, the bus station in Split is far too small for the country's second city. And it was a mass of crushed people and buses coming and going. As we searched for the right loading spot, I got to talking with a young fellow to see if he was going up the coast. He had just come off the ferry from Bari, which docked just across the street, and was on his way on another bus to Sarajevo. I have to confess a certain American ignorance about the city, which I knew mostly from news reports in college as the epicenter of a world of baffling and confusing pain. It struck me as strange that this fellow -- who was of indeterminate ethnicity but American citizenship, but that's a long story -- would be bouncing around hoping to get there.
Once we found our place near the sea, my first impressions were immediately shaped by traveling with a two-year old, and that we were staying with our friends and their own two-year old. Totting the shorties around unavoidably warps your sense of time and place -- how you sleep, what you do, what you eat, what you think is fun. It isn't bad, just different. But it didn't take long for me to note that Croatia is much more touristed than I had thought. In the English-speaking world, Croatia barely exists as anything other than a slightly exotic and out-of-the-way place for certain adventurous travelers. But for a wide swath of Central Europe, it seems to be the rough equivalent of Cape Cod. The part of the village where we were staying was almost entirely hastily constructed summer rentals. The traffic was astonishing -- it took us two hours on a bus one day to travel the two kilometers to Trogir. That gave me lots of time to note the different license plates -- from Slovakia, Poland, Germany, Hungary. The beach was a scrum of different languages, rarely English.
Maybe because I've spent my entire adult life living in places with a significant tourist economy, or because I read too many situationists in college, but I feel acutely aware of the condition of being a tourist. When I'm traveling, I always feel that sense that whatever I am seeing or experiencing is warped by the very fact that I am there. Couple that with the realization that an entire infrastructure exists to accomodate me there as an economic unit, and there is a strange sense of guilt, self-consicousness and alienation from what is, at a certain level, unreal. It is something I struggle with in the strangest ways -- the thing I like most about living in the Berkshires is showing people from other places around. I often feel like I am helping them to puncture their sense of "tourist-ness" by presenting authentic experience, even when taking them to Mass MoCA or the Clark or some other perfectly obvious touristy thing to do.
But nevermind the digression. Back to the point, I was stunned by how beautiful the sea was, the Solta Channel with the islands just out of reach, the sparkling clean water. I was amazed at how perfectly well the weather held for two weeks, in which we barely saw any clouds and when the day and evening temperatures fell into such reliable predictability. There was the cute little restaurant nearby, with its lovely pizza and Karlovacko beer, which I loved even though every night we ate their they played the song "Baker Street" on the house stereo, thus permanently lodging it in my head like some kind of sonic shrapnel.
It was perfect, but if the first sniffle of the Balkan disease didn't come until later.
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