Philosophy of Travel/Childbirth

One thing no male writer is qualified to do, but he does anyway, is compare the difficulty of certain tasks to giving birth. The presumption he makes--one made out of respect to all women--is that giving birth is very painful. I do not pretend to know how painful it is, but I hear it is the single most challenging thing people go through on a regular basis. Writers are always looking for such superlatives to liven-up their writing.

To further trivialize this tremendous human miracle, I will say that I have found two things to be like giving birth. One is recording DJ sets (like this one), which involves about three months of pruning and planning followed by two weeks of strenuous labor. The other is traveling.

When I say traveling, I mean the travel days in particular. When an animal gives birth it is at its most vulnerable. Half-way through delivery an antelope cannot easily flee a lion. And so it is on travel days, where one must carry all one's possessions--passport, credit cards, laptop, everything--and haul the whole lot to every country's number one pickpocket/panhandling zones in order to move on to the next place.

Also like birth days, travel days begin with a mixture of excitement, fear, eagerness, trepidation, and then some life-changing epiphany. No city is ever what you think it will be when you roll into it, and no city looks very good during that first minute of seeing it. That's because train and bus stations are usually situated on the margins of towns; airports are located even further out, and so usually the ugliest side of the city, like a newborn baby covered in goo, is the first one sees. But every city I have visited has transformed into something beautiful.

So I propose a toast to travel days, travel stress, and doubtful first impressions overturned by joyful experiences.

Easter in Zagreb

From Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia

After Friday night's sins and an early bed on Saturday night by consequence, I was ready to atone and to attend an 8 AM Easter service at the Cathedral of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Zagreb. I am not a believer, but I enjoy ceremony and I find other people's faith calming*.

Croatia is a predominantly Catholic country, so they're not into silly American Easter things like bunnies and baby chicks**. They are into eggs. Giant eggs, decorated in naive folk art style, have appeared in cities all over Croatia. Here in Zagreb an impressively realistic life-sized sculpture of Jesus and his Disciples (should "disciples" be capitalized?) at the Last Supper (also capitalized?) is in the main square; you can pull a seat up to the table yourself if you feel cheeky.

I feared my blue jeans would render me under-dressed on an Easter Sunday in a cathedral that houses a triptych by famous bunny-painter Albrecht Dürer, but clothes ran the gamut from casual to "Sunday best." The 8 AM service was attended mostly by gray-haired men and their dyed-haired wives, making me wonder about the future of the church in Croatia. The cathedral was not packed. In fact, attendance-wise it looked as I imagine a regular Sunday service would. Perhaps later services were more heavily-attended.

(That night I asked a group of four young women enjoying drinks if they had attended church that morning. Two had gone, the other two had not, but they all assured me that religion was important to them and still had a strong hold on Croatian youth in general. The two who went had also attended 8 AM ceremonies, but did not go to the Cathedral of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. On the other hand, musician Joe Pandur, who I bumped into at a bar later on that evening, was more dubious about the future of faith in Croatia.)

Many women and a few men carried baskets, the contents of which were concealed under linen. I suppose these are bread baskets connected to the ritual of the Eucharist?

I have a bad cold, at least partially attributable to the bad behavior I've documented previously in this blog, so during half the ceremony I was painfully self-conscious of my coughing and runny nose, but fortunately several others present seemed to be just as sick as myself, so I blended right in. During the second half of the ceremony I pulled myself together and was relatively free of outward signs of sickness. It was a minor Easter miracle.

I liked best the part of the ceremony where everybody turns and shakes hands with the people around them. Of course, I did not know the Croatian line everyone says to one another as they do this, so I muttered random syllables as I made eye-contact and desperately hoped I did not offend anybody. They should extend that part of the ceremony and turn it into a sort of speed-dating thing, except it would be a speed getting-to-know-your-random-Croatian-neighbors-in-church-on-Easter-Sunday thing. After all, considering how many wars have resulted in the Balkans and everywhere else at least partially as a result of religious division, wouldn't a greater emphasis on community over sermonizing help smooth things out a bit? OK, I've been drinking beers all evening, but that feeds into an earlier point, which is that no amount of beer interaction compares to the warm sincerity I felt looking into the eyes of those church-goers as we shook hands with one another at the Easter service, none of us sober, but drunk on something else. I'm beginning to understand the powerful social draw of religion.

At 8:45 sharp the ceremony ended, allowing for a fifteen minute transition between the exiting of the attendees and the entrance of the next batch of faithful eager for their own 9 AM injection of faith.



* Usually. But during my exodus from Hungary I was terribly irritated by the guy manically whispering his prayers as he read aloud from his Bible in the seat across from mine. In fact, I will be crude enough to say that he was really fucking annoying.

** Cristina, my girlfriend who was born in Orthodox Romania, is currently in the U.S. and was surprised by how little Americans celebrate Easter. For the benefit of Americans, I should explain that in addition to bunnies, Easter marks the time Jesus triumphed over death, thus trumping Adam and Eve's original sin and saving humanity.

Backdated Entry: Not Recommended

(found on laptop and posted on 18 August 2010)

1) Drink at Club Fuego in Dubrovnik, Croatia until 3 AM; walk one hour back to hostel.

2) Pack things from 4 to 5 AM, then vegetate. Lose consciousness during vegetation.

3) Fucking awake to fucking 6 AM fucking alarm fucking.

4) Walk with three heavy pieces of luggage from hostel to bus station, because of uncertainty regarding buses.

5) Take wrong turn, find yourself at a dead end. It takes ten minutes to reverse direction and try again.

6) Shuffle along the Dubrovnik harbor with your several tons of luggage and your hang-over worrying you will miss your 7:30 AM bus.

7) Reach bus station at 6:55 AM. Load luggage and board bus. Discover that bus was leaving at 7 AM, not 7:30.

8) Count yourself one lucky dumb fuck, then pass out.

9) Oh wait, so it worked! Never mind, then: change title of blog entry to "Recommended!" ;-D

Working Holiday: Dubrovnik, Croatia

From Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia

I arrived in Kiev on 14 January expecting to kick-start a freelance writing career supplemented by some DJ'ing in the evenings. The freelance writing career is crawling along, but progress has not been as rapid as I had hoped. The DJ'ing did not materialize at all, though I have had a few good research nights out in clubs.

I also had to maintain ties with my day job back in the United States, which required several hours of work made more stressful by the combination of deadlines and spotty internet (most recent message from my boss, which I discovered today a few days after it was sent: "Andrew - please let me know when you are online").

And travel is just stressful. The making of plans and arrangements for accomodation have been enormously so. Consider these facts, and myriad mini-hells I have experienced (stuck on wrong train, dropped reservations, a bus station full of shady characters), and you will understand that while I have had a very fine adventure, it has not been paradise.

So hate me for this. I'm in sunny Dubrovnik in a private room that costs me $15 a day. I have opened the doors on both sides of this room to enjoy the crossbreeze. Skies are bright blue and the sun is shining. Temperatures (in the sunlight) are in the 70s, and in the relative cave of my room they might be a slightly-chillier than comfortable mid-60s (brrrrrr). Yesterday, I drank a beer while surveying the blue-green Adriatic from atop the famous city walls. Today I spent three hours lying on a pebbly beach with a light sweater over my face as sunscreen, with a gap opened just a peek so that I could watch the waves lapping the shore. I just finished the best ice cream cone of my life (vanilla with Snickers bits). I have good company from some American and Aussie travelers.

Dubrovnik, like Split, is another seemingly all-tourist-driven city. There are signs for rooms for rent everywhere. From the hostel where I am lodging to the Old Town it's a 60-minute walk. It's a pleasant walk, with pastry shops and stores selling fruit along the way. I usually pick up a Coca-Cola Zero and 1.5 liters of water during this stroll (Coke Zero, incidentally, has nearly eliminated Coca-Cola Lite [Diet Coke] in Croatia; I hope Croatia is not a test case for Coke's eventual plans to drop Diet Coke outright). The day is too short for walking in and out of the Old Town every time, so once you've gotten the hang of things you hop onto the number 6 bus, which whisks you to the Old Town in no time.

The Old Town is a gorgeous network of red-shingled, white marble Roman buildings, adhering for the most part to a grid, enclosed within a mighty wall. A 70 kuna ticket ($13) is required in order to walk on the wall. If you skip this ticket to save money then you've fucked-up your trip to Dubrovnik, because the wall offers another city atop the one you explore for free below. The views alone are worth it, and there's coffee and beer up there as well. In the Amazon there are arboreal laboratories where scientists study the action of the treetop canopy; this is the spirit with which you should explore Dubrovnik's walls.

I've sometimes felt a bit like Charles Darwin as I've poked along rocky shores and focused my binoculars (which I finally made use of after hauling them for three months) on various bird species. I added a new "lifer": the alpine swift, the largest swift species I have seen. They are common in the Old Town, where they swoop over the main promenade like fighter jets as they enter and exit the various holes in the old buildings which contain their nests*. Alpine swifts clearly prefer the easy living of Dubrovnik to the Alps.

You hear a lot of English, including much American English. I am surprised by how many Americans are exploring the Old Town. Most are retirees, but there were also some "Gossip Girl" sorts ohmigawding on the bus back from town last night. Because of all the English-speaking tourists, plus all the other tourists who use English as their fallback language, one can get by with English in Dubrovnik. In fact, it almost feels unnatural to say "Dober dan" here, as one would in Zagreb; in this sunny, Mediterranean paradise a simple "Hi" seems more appropriate.

Some cities are dominated by feral dogs with cats being the rare exception, and some are dominated by feral cats with dogs being the rare exception. Dubrovnik is a cat city. (I would imagine a cat city is also a birdless city, but cats cannot easily reach the nests of the aforementioned alpine swifts, so at least one species is safe from such predation.)

A kitten romped around our table during lunch. As I watched it, I imagined that newspaper articles should be written about such things. "31 March - In Dubrovnik, Croatia, a small kitten played around the tables of two local restaurants to the delight of patrons of all ages. One observer remarked that the kitten was spotted like a cow. A mother pointed out the kitten to her 2-year-old son while saying, 'Meow! Meow!' The kitten approached several diners, but turned suddenly and adorably shy whenever a person reached out to it. The whereabouts of the kitten's mother are unknown, but the kitten appears healthy."

Dubrovnik is so much a tourist destination that I cannot detect the city's own personality (all tourist cities have this problem; what is Niagara Falls's personality, for example?). Tourist cities unfortunately come with tourist prices (most of the dishes at a Lonely Planet-recommended vegetarian cafe cost at least $10; the only cheap eat is a slice of pizza). The people who aggressively court you to come to their restaurants are a bit annoying. But these are small laments. Dubrovnik is pretty perfect, and once the ferry service to the nearby islands gets going it will be a spectacular summertime destination for those fortunate enough to know about it.

From Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia

As that number of aware people grows, the city will get worse. The several dozen souvenir shops will transform into people wandering around the streets selling plastic representations of Dubrovnik landmarks the way those guys pacing under the Eiffel Tower sell mini-Eiffels today. The already high food prices will rise even higher. A nearby waterpark seems inevitable. The escalating kitsch factor will soon see folks wandering through the crowds in historical costumes, maybe with some staged Roman gladiator sword fights for good measure, and thus Dubrovnik will become a parody of its historical self.

Nearby the monastery is a memorial to those who died defending the city during the shelling of 1991 and 1992. It's a single room with photographs of the dead. Lots of young faces, feathered haircuts and mustaches from another place and another time. Their heroism then paved the way for the souvenir sellers stationed just outside the memorial today.


* These holes, an aspiring German architect named Daniel told me, might be for scaffolding, but he wasn't sure since it seemed to him that the holes were not regularly-enough spaced. Here is a photo of these holes/alpine swift nesting spaces for your own consideration.

Friday Night Clubbing at Club Fuego, Dubrovnik

From Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia

Club-curious visitors to Dubrovnik face in insidious choice at the bus stop outside the Old City's walls. Should one catch the last bus back to the comfort of one's hotel room or hostel at 11:55 PM, or should one gamble that the quiet Club Fuego, just across the street from that bus stop, will turn into a lively venue sometime later in the evening? The price of failure: getting ripped off by a cab driver, or a one-hour walk back to your digs. Add to that the prospect of another brutal all-nighter, thanks to one's bizarre decision to take a 7:30 AM bus back to Zagreb the following day, and one faces quite a bind.

Last night my hostel mates chose to return to their beds. I don't blame them. At Fuego's entrance, where 30 kuna ($6) tickets to the club were sold by a weary Kurt Vonnegut lookalike and things seemed unusually quiet, there were no encouraging signs that the venue would amount to much. But despite the fact that life would have been far more comfortable had I gone "home" with my friends, I reminded myself that I am DJ King Pigeon, and I came here to conduct research into Balkan club life.

When I entered the main dancefloor area it seemed I had made a terrible mistake. A group of people running the gamut from 40 to 60 years of age sat at tables under flashing lights while Michael Jackson's "Thriller" played. When I am 40 to 60 I hope to still be hanging out in clubs, also. But it was an odd juxtaposition. Had I blundered into an 80s night?

But the stroke of midnight announced a change in music and clientele. As Beyonce's "Sweet Dreams" played, the older people got up at once and exited. This struck me as a fascinating idea; to run a nightclub that in the early evening serves an older group who wish to bask in the memories of clubbing days long past, then turn things over to today's young all-nighters who are manufacturing and oblittering new memories of their own.

The all-nighters were mostly students, few older than 30, fewer still older than me, though there was an apparent 40-something woman in a catsuit going crazy to the music as she danced with some youthful guys; a good night out for her. Some of the clubbers merely dressed, some dressed up, and some dressed to kill. Several young Britishers aggressively chatted up the many Croatian girls in the room, but they appeared to have no success.

Club Fuego is divided into several sections. The dancefloor is in the basement. Upstairs from that is a "Chill Out Room" which offers a great concept: a projection-screen TV showing a live stream of the dancefloor action on the floor below. A level above that one can take a seat and chat with a friend without having to yell over the music. It's on that highest level that one realizes why the club seems chillier than most; you look up and see the moon and stars and realize you are on a sort of patio; the whole club with its interconnected rooms and levels is thus open to the night air, which must make it a terrific place to be on a summer night.

The music included the usual top 40 dance suspects, including the requisite Lady Gaga "Bad Romance" remix, followed by a number of house tracks, including Martin Solveig's "C'est la vie," which reminded me that I had seen Solveig's singer perform in Kiev three months earlier.

Then, as was also the case at Club Saloon in Zagreb, the DJs switched to all-Croatian pop music, which seemed to alienate most of the expats in the crowd, but which gave me the most pleasure as here was a reminder that I really was far from home. The club's patrons sang along to Croatian Eurodance (there was clearly a lot of Croatian Eurodance made back in the day), and later Croatian rock tunes. The clubbers even assembled themselves on the steps on one end of the dancefloor like some kind of boisterous, drunken mixed chorus.

I left at 3 AM, an hour before the club officially closed. I chose walking over taxi, and had a great conversation along the way back with Cristina on my cell phone.*

I caught my bus back to Central Operations (i.e., Zagreb) with literally five minutes to spare (I had written down the wrong time, apparently), and today I qualify under three technical definitions of the word "dead." But as George Bernard Shaw, a man who loved Dubrovnik, once said, "Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; and do not outlive yourself."**


* The conversation had an odd start to it because she rang while I was sitting on a street corner talking to an intoxicated Croatian guy named "Doc," and Doc would sometimes punctuate Cristina's and my conversation with shouted exclamations. I gently extricated myself from him (he really seemed to be a nice guy, but Cristina wasn't paying to talk to him).

** For the benefit of my Romanian friends, "Foleseste-ti sanatatea pina la limita ei de-i nevoie. De aceea o ai. Cheltuieste totul inainte de a muri si nu trai mai mult decit ti-e dat."

Backdated Entry: Zagreb, 30 March 2010

Found this on my laptop today (10 June 2010).

This blog often serves as reportage, which I think is cheating, since I can hide my emotions behind a veil of facts and figures. I feel this is a betrayal of good blogging. Somehow, in the early history of the medium, the topical blog began to eclipse the confessional one, but it was the confessional blog that was the real ground-breaker (the topical blog is usually nothing more than punditry). The confessional, autobiographical blog was the true "revolution of consciousness," an acid trip that most of us took, as confessors and/or voyeurs.

I am back at my favorite base of operations, Zagreb. My girlfriend, Cristina, is in the United States, which is funny considering she was born in Romania and we now find ourselves on opposite sides of the pond on each other's respective birth-continents. Obviously that has proven to be a relationship challenge, but we seem to be doing well under the circumstances. Of course, she would prefer that I be with her as she wrestles with the myriad complexities and the enormous stress of applying for work in a foreign country. I remain because I was granted a once-in-a-lifetime experience to be in the Balkans and would hate myself if I returned earlier. We both make good points because we are both strong arguers, which is both exasperating and exhilarating. Cristina wins because she can argue beautifully in two languages.

Being in a relationship alternates between running a three-legged race, where we must run slower together; and a 24-hour car race, where the two of us can take turns sleeping and taking the wheel. Sometimes it's an inefficient way to move because you have to abandon selfishness in order to accomodate another person's needs, which much more than sex is the ultimate act of love. But other times it is a far more efficient way to accelerate towards life goals. The trick in assessing any relationship, I suppose, is to decide whether you are spending most of your time running three-legged races or driving (or more complicatedly, if you are ultimately covering more ground together during the driving portions despite those necessary three-legged race moments). The impossibility of knowing one's exact goal complicates things also. What are we running/racing to, anyway, and how quickly are we getting to that unknown destination?

I am greatly disappointed to be returning to the United States. If you read my earliest blog entries, you know that I was hoping a trip to Eastern and Balkan Europe would turn into a permanent stay. I love the culture here, particularly the music culture. My blog entries testify to my synchronization with things over here, from the political to the ornithological to the Eurotrashmusical. For the record, I never felt homesick in my three months of travel. Sometimes I was a bit lonely, or a little disoriented ("Am I in Belgrade or Zagreb?" I asked myself upon waking up this morning—and I was not hung-over), but moments of uncertainty were always quickly cured by a walk on a beautiful spring day, or a good night out.

What I like about returning to the United States, though, is the opportunity to earn some money again sans guilt (I've been on a generous paid vacation so far); to have a chance to reflect, from a distance, on the experience of these last three months; and, hahaha, to record a definitive sequel to my last DJ set showcasing all the music knowledge I have acquired these last three months. And I really look forward to reliable internet, and laundry, and knowing that when my train pulls into the station I will have a roof over my head that night—actually, not taking any trains at all, but rather my SmartCar to any destination I choose.

And Cristina, of course. But Cristina and I can get up and go anywhere together, and right now she has more momentum than I do, being especially smart and clever. Cristina and I are our own country. Wherever we wind up, we'll make it ours. I love you, my Mata Hari. See you in a couple weeks. :-X

Split, Croatia

From Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia

I travel in the off-season because it's cheaper and I love cold weather. Fortunately, the majority of the rest of the world travels only in summer, which is why I get to enjoy the lower rates of the off-season in the first place, thank you majority of the rest of the world. But unfortunately, due to the heightened popularity of some cities as summer destinations, some places should only be visited in the summer months. Split is one of those. Nonetheless, I had a pleasant stay there, even if my March visit felt like a 50% Split experience.

Split has a big music festival. Several Croatian musicians and pop groups hail from Split, as do a high percentage of Croatian Miss Universe contestants. But in the off-season, Split is a country of old men, a sort of Florida in Croatia. It's during the summer that, Daytona Beach-style, Split becomes a youth paradise.

People in Split sound exactly like Italians, only they are speaking Croatian, another demonstration of the blurred reality of humanity vs. political borders. That Italian-esque Split accent is distinctive. It made one self-conscious Splitter in a Zagreb hostel particularly nervous the night before a big Zagreb/Split football match. "The moment I speak they know exactly where I'm from," he told me.

As the train snaked up to the Split train station, my initial impression of the city was that it looked pleasant but not especially marvelous. That view changed when I walked down the palm tree-lined promenade facing the bay. The promenade is a lovely bit of city design work that I was told caused some controversy initially for its being considered too modern ("modern" in the Mediterranean sense of looking fewer than 500 years old). But as the voices of 1880s protestors over the then-new Eiffel Tower were quickly drowned out by the many more people who dug it, people in Split seem to like their promenade now.

The handsome facade facing the bay contains a variety of cafes and bars, most of which offer nice first floor (second floor American-style) views of the promenade and the water beyond. Typical bars here have a very narrow porch—not wide enough to accomodate even a small table—so one sits on a stool facing out towards the sea, beer glass set on a wooden slat counter. These porches are like garden boxes for beer drinkers.

That's really nice, but the real magic of Split lies behind that facade, for there you find the sprawling network of ancient Roman alleys and narrow streets that has earned the city its distinction as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This is the Diocletian's Palace.

If you've lost your sense of childlike wonder, you'll find it again wandering amongst these Roman ruins. The Diocletian's Palace is a maze of stone streets, and every time you turn a corner you discover something new to delight your eye. Best of all, it's not some dead museum. Life goes on here. There are cafes, bars, and stores of all sorts, nestled tastefully into the ancient ruins. It's fantastic.

Birds have begun building nests in Croatia, and the denizens of Solta Island, a one hour ferry ride from Split, were tending to their own nests, preparing their beds & breakfasts, hostels, cafes, bars, and discos for the coming summer season. I was the only tourist wandering aimlessly around the island. I had a nice meal at an otherwise empty restaurant while adult-contemporary Croatian music played in the background. It served as a painful reminder that my European adventure was coming to an end, for I could see how much fun Solta was going to be in a few months, and I knew I would not be here to enjoy that.

From Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia