The bag of useless currency

Europe is overrun with pay toilets. It drives me mental. No one should have to pay to pee, people.

I caught the bus from Dubrovnik to Podgorica, Montenegro, so I could then catch the overnight train to Belgrade. I had a two hour wait at the Podgorica train station, which smells like cigarette smoke and gasoline. I had to pee.

The cost for the toilet was €0.40. ‘So what?’ you’re thinking. Yes, I’m fundamentally opposed to paying for public toilets, but sometimes you suck it up and do it.

Except I didn’t have €0.40. I had €0.15. And 400 Hungarian forints. And 35 Croatian kuna. Also 1 Bosnian mark, 2 Czech crowns, an American quarter, $3 Canadian and 5p. According to The Keeper Of The Toilet (ie. the woman sitting on the floor outside the door), this amounted to a whole heap of nothin’.

I waited the two hours. When I got on the train I went immediately to the bathroom, which had a smashed window, no faucet on the sink and therefore no water, and no toilet seat (or paper). I hovered, as the train rocked and swayed, and unfairly cursed all Montenegrins.

The Moment.

I stayed with Ricki and Monika for five days. We were supposed to pick olives from the trees they own, up on the mountain, but it kept raining in the afternoons. There were two other couchsurfers there at the time, Benny and Janic, and we spent our time out of the rain, eating mandarines picked from the surrounding trees and drinking homemade wine. And homemade cherry brandy. And homemade walnut schnapps.

One of Ricki’s jobs is delivering coffee to cafes in Dubrovnik and the surrounding area, and he offered to drive me down the coast. We hopped in his 30-year-old yellow VW Golf, which has no working speedometer or seatbelts, and headed south.

Just north of Dubrovnik he pulled over at a road-side stand that looked like it sold nothing. There was an empty drinks cooler, some vacant tables, and the old couple that owned it. As soon as Ricki pulled up, though, the old woman reached into a display case and pulled out a bucket.

‘I stop here every time I drive past,’ Ricki said as we got out of the car.

The bucket was full of fresh oysters, and the woman got immediately to shucking them. She laid the half-shells out on a plate next to half a lemon, which Ricki squeezed onto their tongue-like tops. We had five each – slurping the oyster directly off its shell – at a mere 4 kunas a pop. We hopped back in the car.

With the lingering taste of oyster and lemon on my tongue we made the rest of the trip; past southern Croatia’s white-house-village-sprinkled hillsides and the Adriatic’s own brand of blue-green.

There is a moment on nearly every trip that I travel by bus, train, or car, when, looking out the window, an irrepressible and goofy grin spreads across my face. In the movement from the place you’ve just seen towards a place you’ve never been, from the things you’ve just learned towards the things you don’t even know that you don’t know yet, there are a million shards of joy.

Balkan Stories

Serbia

When Vesna was a freshman in university she joined the student movement that would eventually bring down Slobodan Milošević. We were sitting having coffee in the Sarajevo sunshine when she casually mentioned she’d been its PR person. It was her job to send footage of abuse of protestors to international news organizations – the BBC, CNN.

I peppered her with questions.

Milošević was stealing votes in all his elections, she says. He would lose, but could claim that he’d won. Students mobilized, determined to show the world that they were living under a dictatorship. They took courses in media relations, in effective protesting techniques, but they traveled to Montenegro to do it because they knew they were under surveillance.

Once, she returned to her apartment and found the door ajar. The flat had been completely ransacked, ‘like in the movies,’ she says. Any data she’d collected on Milošević was confiscated.

Sometimes strange men would show up at her door, and say her parents would be fired if she didn’t stop working against Milošević.

‘It didn’t happen, they just wanted to scare you,’ she says. ‘My parents didn’t care, they said if that was the reason that they lost their jobs, then they’d just have to lose them.’

Did they ever think, while they were working, that they could actually do it? Bring down the president?

‘No,’ she says. ‘But we couldn’t just do nothing.’

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Bata was 22 when Croat soliders came to his family’s door looking for him. He hid in his parents’ room, and heard a soldier calling. ‘Bata! Where is Bata?!’ He decided to go out and face them. He says he thought he was going to die, but once he made that decision, he felt calm.

Soldiers were going door to door in the apartment building, rounding up Muslims. The soldier who had called Bata’s name was inside the flat, a few others were standing at the door.

‘Bata!’ the solider said. ‘Good to see you! Don’t worry guys, he’s one of us.’

Bata hadn’t recognized the soldier until he leaned in close to his face. Then he realized who it was – an old school mate, but someone he hadn’t considered a friend. They’d been on opposing soccer teams, hadn’t really liked each other. Bata doesn’t know how the soldier knew where he lived, or why he covered for him, didn’t turn him in. ‘He wasn’t a good guy, he’d committed war crimes,’ he says.

The soldier died a year later in the war, so Bata never got to ask him.

His family left Bosnia after that. Bata went to Sweden and lived there for 14 years. His parents left later, after Sweden’s border had been closed, and moved to Norway. His sister, Majda, got a visa to work as an au pair in England, and once she got to London she applied for refugee status.

When the family moved back to Mostar, they found a Croat doctor had moved into their abandoned flat and set up his practice. When they said they wanted their home back, he tried to sue them – he sent them a bill for improvements and repairs he’d done to the place while they were gone. The charges included €300 for moving items out of the flat – trying to bill them for having stolen all their belongings.

‘He sued our ass, so we sued his ass back!’ Bata says (loudly, of course). They sued the doctor for unpaid rent, for all the years he’d been occupying their home. They won.

Croatia

Ricardo’s family has lived in Gradac for over 400 years. The street he lives on is named after them. He’s a war vet, and defended Dubrovnik in the siege.

Ricki moved to Italy once his military service was done. ‘I told them at the border I was going to buy clothes,’ he says, laughing. He stayed for 11 years.

Now he and his sister Monika are back in their home town, and opening a travel agency that will take people on bike and boat tours of the area. I helped him one day to paint walls in their soon-to-be-opened office.

When we finished we had some cherry brandy in a restaurant downstairs. He lit up a cigarette, took a long drag.

‘I’m going to quit, once we get our business started,’ he says, exhaling.

‘How long have you smoked?’ I ask.

‘Sixteen years, but I quit for two and a half.’

‘You started again after that long? Why?’

‘There was a time, during the war, when the Serbs bombed us for 48 hours straight. It was difficult not to smoke during that.’

Getting Out of Mostar

I tried to leave Mostar after one night. I really did. I’d spent one day wandering around the Old Town and seeing the New Old Bridge, and eating the best cevapi in town. I thought I should be moving on.

 Majda, who runs the hostel,  took me to the bus station and I bought a ticket, and I waited for the bus.  Jonathan, who’d also been staying at the hostel, came with me. We waited with our packs on. The bus didn’t come. We took our packs off. The bus didn’t come. Jon lit a cigarette, because that usually works, he said. No dice. We tried sitting down. We tried going for coffee. No bus.

Majda showed up two hours later to collect some more guests. She sat with us for coffee. The bus didn’t seem to be coming, and even if it did, I’d made up my mind anyway.  Jon and I both asked Majda if we could come back for another two nights. She laughed at us, and took us back to the hostel.

Majda’s brother Bata has an amazing tour that he does of the area that I’d wanted to take, and it was running the next day. I’d finally put an end date on my trip – November 18th – and didn’t think I had any more time to spend in Mostar.  Finally, though, I took the bus’s absence as my chance to change my mind.

Thank god I did.

Bata’s tour is brilliant. It lasts for 12 hours. You get in his van at 9 a.m. and his loud booming voice starts to tell you about his life, the life of the town, the history of the war and how it affected inhabitants. He talks about how Mostar was and still is divided between Muslims and Croats, drives you up a mountain for a view of the city, and then takes you for lunch at the best burek place in town.

That’s only the beginning.

(I didn’t brave the icy November water, but a few people did.)

I can’t go into the details of Bata’s tour. There’s too much. There’s the waterfalls and the 14th century village, the history lessons starting from the 7th century, the fresh figs and pomegranetes, the shots of rakia, the Dervish House near the cave from which water constantly flows from an undetermined source.

What I can say, after 12 hours of Bata shouting, is that I’ve gained so much more understanding of Bosnia and its people and their resiliance. I’ve been learning, as I’ve traveled the Balkans, about what happened here, both in the recent past and throughout history. What I’ve learned from people like Bata, though, can’t be gained from a book. I sat in shotgun, in the van, and got to talk to him (when he wasn’t shouting) about the region, about its young people, its agriculture, its recovery, and what Bata calls ‘The Bosnian Spirit’. It’s all intrigued me to the point where I’m already planning my trip back to see more.

When I did finally leave Mostar, Madja told me to write in the guest book about our first attempt to leave. Apparently that’s never happened before.

A whole new way to travel

Couchsurfing is the future, folks. Get on board.

My first couchsurfing experience was in Hungary, where I stayed with two fantastic women: Judit, in Pecs, and Irina, in Zalaegerszeg. They are best friends, and taught me the meaning of hospitality.

When I arrived in Pecs on the train, Judit was at work but arranged for another couchsurfer, Plazzi, to pick me up at the station. He made me crepes.

When I arrived at Judit’s house, that has a stunning view of the whole city, she had prepared for me traditional Hungarian food, and invited me to a jazz concert. The next day she showed me around her town – stunning, but in the midst of a major facelift because it will be Europe’s Cultural Capital in 2010 and has been infused with EU money.

Then Judit drove me to a small village famous for its vineyards so we could do a wine tasting. She took me to a sculpture park filled with bizzare works made from the marble of the surrounding hills. She made another Hungarian feast, and invited Plazzi and his friend, and we drank more wine and I soaked up the conversation, and thought about how damn lucky I was.

In Zalaegerszeg, Irina greeted me with equal enthusiasm. She taught me more about Hungarian food, about literature, about the language. She drove me to a castle, and to Lake Balaton (the largest in Europe). She suggested itineraries for my stay there, looked up train and bus times, made me breakfast and did my laundry.  We ate and drank beer and laughed and laughed and laughed.

When I signed up for couchsurfing I didn’t quite get what it was all about – I thought it’d be a good way to save some money and get a bit of local insight to the places I visited. What I’m learning is that this system can be a way of life, it can create community, and it adds a whole new dimension to travel. I love to stay in hostels and meet other travelers, but staying with local people so enhances the experience and deepens your understanding of a place, that it’s hard to want to travel any other way.

In Sarajevo

In Sarajevo, a man sits on a suitcase in the main square every day, surrounded by pigeons, and sells birdseed.

In Sarajevo, they brew beer drawn from a lake below a lake below the city.

In Sarajevo, roses bloom from the concrete.

In Sarajevo, a family whose house was on the front lines of the war keeps a rocket shell on their kitchen table. They got it from their own roof.

In Sarajevo, men play life-size chess in the park.

In Sarajevo you can follow the sound of hammer on metal  down a narrow lane to find a man making a coffee pot in his shop.

In Sarajevo, up on a hill, is one of the world’s best bob sled tracks. It can’t be used, because it’s surrounded by thousands of land mines.

In Sarajevo they sell pens made of bullets as souveniers.

In Sarajevo you can stand at the synagogue and listen to the call to prayer from the mosque.

In Sarajevo you can wander up up up the hill to an old army baracks, eating a bag of fresh Turkish Delight.

In Sarajevo, a woman working at a 24-hour cafe comes across a group of travelers at 2 a.m. She invites them in for cappuccino, and starts to tell her story – in German, to those who understand. She takes out pictures of her son; a teenager when he was killed in the war, and she lays her head down on the table, and weeps.

Train: Budapest to Pecs

I set out early from my hostel to catch my train south. I came to an intersection, that I’d been to several times before, where you had to cross under the street. I went down the stairs on one side, navigated the square underneath, came back out to the sidewalk, and continued on.

About 15 minutes later I started to wonder why I hadn’t reached the station yet. I couldn’t even see it. I looked up at the street sign.

Hang on, that’s not the street I should be on.

Shit. I got out my map. Turns out, somehow, I’d take the wrong set of stairs up from the underground passageway, which had spit me out onto the wrong street going the wrong direction. This was more frustrating because all I had to do was go STRAIGHT. Gawd.

I trudged back 15 minutes, set myself in the right direction, and by the time I got to the station after an extra half hour of lugging my backpack around Budapest, I was tired. And sweaty.

I got into the station and glanced up at the board with the train destinations. Beside the one that said ‘Pecs’ was the number 10. I took that to mean platform 10, and headed off to find it. It was far. When I got there there was a small two-car red local train, whose sign did not say ‘Pecs’. I asked a Hungarian man standing beside it.

‘Pecs?’ It’s pronouced paich, and I was saying it wrong.

‘Pecs?’ said the man, correctly. He shook his head, waved his hand to indicate I needed to go several tracks over.

I wandered back towards the station entrance, asked someone in a day-glo yellow vest – ‘Pecs?’. I was pronouncing it worse as time went on. This time, the man held up ten fingers, then three.

‘Track 13? Thank you’.

I went to track 13. There was no train there and no destination listed on the sign beside it. I asked someone else. Again.

‘Pecs?’

This time the yellow vest just shrugged his shoulders. I checked my watch; my train was supposed to leave in 10 minutes. I hoofed it all the way back to the station entrance to look at the board again.

It said Pecs, alright, and ‘10′ beside it. But as I looked closer, I saw that above the ‘10′ it said ‘Minutes delayed’, not ‘Track number’. The track wasn’t even listed yet.

Damn it.

When the track number did come up it did in fact say 13, and I did get on the train, back aching and cursing my impatience. And, eventually, I learned how to say ‘Pecs’.

Budapest

In Budapest, the weather changed. While I’d had summer-like conditions in Vienna, when I arrived in Hungary it rained, and it got cold. I spent my first day wandering around in the dreary weather, until I discovered – Huzzah! – that my peeps from Prague were also in Budapest. I took some beer to their hostel to celebrate, and moved into their hostel a day later.

The crew is Hylton (South African), Becs (Australian), and Adam, Mitch, and Jarod (from Manitoba, Alberta, and BC, respectively). We stayed out of the cold dampness by doing the Lebowski challenge, which consists of watching The Big Lebowski, and taking a drink everytime someone says ‘dude’. It’s hard.

I did make it around Budapest despite the rain, and then a sunny afternoon but with cold, cold wind. It’s a beautiful city.

 

What’s best about it, though, are the Turkish baths. We went to the Szechenyi ones; a sprawling yellow building with an open courtyard and warm mineral baths in the middle, with old men playing chess in the pool and occasionally yelling at each other (good-naturedly, I mean). Inside the building is a labrynith of smaller baths and saunas of various temperatures, and we spent hours going from one to another. The biggest challenge was going to the 90 degree sauna, then dropping yourself into a 16 degree pool. I disliked it. One sauna smelled of citris fruits, another like peppermint, one had changing-coloured lights. The outside pool had a section that pulled you around in a circle, then sprayed jets up from the bottom. Standard dress code for men of all ages and shapes = black speedos. Don’t leave home without them.

(The baths were hard to photograph at night)

 

Other things about Budapest!

1. At the grocery store, weigh your produce yourself. If you can’t tell the clerk how much your bananas weigh, she won’t sell them to you.

2. The ‘pizza’ croissant things at the grocery store, that you buy as a quick and cheap lunch, have peas and carrots in them. Yuck.

3. If there’s no crosswalk, it’s because you have to go through the passageway under the street.

4. Dogs wear clothes a lot.

5. The subway makes fantastic Nintendo-like noises that remind you of Duck Hunt. I giggled at every stop.

Vienna: The Highlights

 

 

C’mon Vienna. Seriously. You’re a bit ridiculous. We get it, you’ve got big buildings. One after another, giant, ornately-carved, expansive, grand buildings, surrounded by sprawling gardens. At first, it’s pretty. Then, as you continue to walk, and are continually bombarded by giant, ornately-carved, expansive, grand buildings, you start to wonder: Hey Vienna, what are you trying to prove?

It really is lovely, if in an over-the-top sort of way. The many, many museums, the palaces, the Parliament, the opera house, cathedrals; they’re all beautiful, and there’s much to see. Too much, for one visit.

What was really beautiful about Vienna is the Cousin Peter lives there, and could show me what he likes about it. When I arrived, he took me first to the best vantage point, from which I could see the whole city. We drank a beer, and he pointed out the bits I’d be seeing during my stay.

While he was at work, I’d wander about, being overwhelmed. When he was finished he’d meet up with me, show me a bit more. He knows a lot about his city, does Peter.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire, it seems, was a pretty big deal – or so you surmise by the scale of their palaces – like Schonbrunn, or Belvedere (where I saw Klimt’s The Kiss. I’m not an art person, but I love that painting).

The weather was freakishly warm for October, and we spent an afternoon in the Schweitzerhaus beer garden. It was packed on a Tuesday afternoon. People were eating 1.5 kilos of pork. The dark beer tasted like honey. Women – not coming from Oktoberfest, but just from work – were wearing dirndls.

Pete took me to the market, where we tried Sturm (which is not-quite-wine), and to a classic old Austrian coffee house, Cafe Hawelka, where we sipped Wein Melanges and talked politics. Perhaps most importantly, he showed me where to get €2 kebabs.

 

He made me goulash one night, and schnitzel another, and on my last day there (halelluja) turkey for Canadian Thanksgiving.

 Cities are so much better when you have a great host. 

Raft + river + beer = bliss

Cesky Krumlov, in southern Czech Republic, is lovely. Really lovely.

 

It’s also a bit like Banff, in that it’s a touristy town with mostly restaurants and sovenier stores in its centre, but the prettiness makes up for the touristy bits. And I guess I can’t complain – I am in fact a tourist.

The hostel I stayed in arranges, every day, for guests to hop in an inflatable raft, grab some drinks, and float down the river away from the city for the afternoon. Me, a Kiwi, and four Aussies showed up for the ride, drinks in tow. Pedro from the hostel chucked us in the boat and pushed us downstream – he came and picked us up hours and miles later.

The raft tour is usually a pub crawl, but after the summer most of the pubs along the river route are closed for the season. We were surprised, then, when we spotted a campsite with a little stand that looked open. We pulled the boat over and got out, but no one was there. We laid in the grass in the sun for a bit.

A man appeared from over a hill, then, pushing a wheel barrow. He waved and pointed at the small stand.

‘Pivo?’ he called.

Yes please!

His tattoos covered his entire body, and his earlobes were stretched more than anyone I’d ever seen. He stolled over, sold us some dirt cheap beer, and disappeared back over the hill with his wheel barrow of rocks.

Are all my posts about beer? It’s starting to seem so.