That's All Folks!

I went for a final walk this morning, took my trusty camera along with me, wanting to record this beautiful time of the day, and the lovely walking track.

It is still quite shadowy at 7.30 now, and the water temperature has cooled sufficiently that I am not tempted to jump in without a towel to dry me and some sunshine to sit in. There are less people on the track – back to almost the same number as there were when I first arrived here six months ago – hard to believe that it is six months.

The café where we sit and drink coffee (guilty admission, sometimes we don’t walk far, just sit and laugh in the café) seems to have us as the only customers at this time of day.

I’ve started dishing out extra bits and pieces that I have gathered during my time here, and even went as far as doing the NZ thing and made some jars of pesto as gifts for people.

I was planning on taking the bus to Split tomorrow afternoon to start the trip home, but a friend has offered to drive me there, although it just prolongs the goodbyes – another round of drinks with my friend in Split and then onto the overnight ferry to Ancona.

And I’ve just found out that twenty members of the Planinara Klub will be on the same ferry heading for the Cinque Terra – ha, company for the journey, not just the standard fare of people returning from visiting Medigore!

So there it is – I did it. Six months. It has raced by, it has been wonderful in so many ways. It has made me evaluate the way that I (we) live in New Zealand, the culture that we have and the things that are important. It has shown me that I can live in a small space with very little around me, and shown me that I need the luxury of work in my life. And I see that it is a luxury when you don’t have it.

It has shown me that wherever you go in the world, people are wonderful. They open up their lives and their homes to you – and wherever you are, it is a smile and an open heart that are the keys to the whole shebang!

Thanks for coming with me – who knows what will happen to the long ramblings that have kept me company over my stay in Makarska – I’ve enjoyed knowing that you are there with me.

I’m sitting in a café with wi-fi (my internet in the apartment has finished) and the radio is blasting out a Croatian version of ‘Honky Tonk Woman – it is “Honky Tonk Zena” - - love it! Vidimo se, moguce druge godine!

Two Days to Go - oh my!

The air is filled with the sound of concrete mixers and concrete cutters – and everywhere you look you can see the signs of Concrete Reincarnation. The rule is here that if concrete has been laid, any man can cast it asunder and the paths are testament of years to this. Now that the tourists have gone the builders are busy.

The gym classes are busier too –women who were tied up during the sezona are now free to attend fitness classes and generally think about themselves (to a certain extent, sort of). I walked home from pilates with one of the women in class the other night ¬ - she had always said ‘hi’ with a shy smile but didn’t really say much more – having presumed that she didn’t speak English I was surprised at the conversation that we had walking home in the dark.

I asked what she did for work, and she said that she was a konobarica but that she knew that there was more to her than that. She has been working every day for the last 5 months, with not a single day off. She cannot ask for a day off or extra pay because she knows that there are others lining up behind her who would like her job. She knows that, her boss knows that – an employment issue impasse. She said that the time at the gym is the only thing that keeps her going, that she is tired and her body feels like ‘f***** sh*t’ (see, excellent command of the English language) and that she has decided to move to Zagreb and start some study. I commended her on her attitude and her English, and made the speech about the ‘world being your oyster and believing that you can do anything’. It’s the speech that my children have heard many times…. But maybe it is truer in New Zealand.

Now that the sezona has ended the first cracks of the PSS (Post Sezona Stress) are showing, with marriages falling apart and people needing counseling for depression. You see, it’s the old ‘idle hands’ thing. Having been ridiculously busy for the last three or four months¸ working up to 12 or 14 hours, 7 days a week¸ now there is nothing to do (unless you are a builder or related tradesperson), particularly if you no longer have job . That’s looking down the barrel of a long winter with nothing to do, and no money to do it with.

One thing that we talked about at dinner tonight is the financial cycle -

here’s how it goes. You don’t trust the banks because many of them collapsed during the recent war¸ so everyone deals in cash. Hardly anyone puts money in the bank – this means that not many people pay for purchases in shops by way of debit cards (our EFTpos cards) (because they have cash in the pocket not in the bank account). Shops encourage this by offering a discount for cash. If you have apartments, you make your guests pay in cash, Euros please. None of this goes in the bank, and it simply flows into the hands of builders for more apartments, or new cars, boats etc. If you are accounting for your apartment income to the tax department (a few do, ok, maybe 4 do), you underestimate the occupation rate and the number of rooms that you have – easy to miss that corner apartment. The sum total of this cycle is not very large if you are the government trying to collect taxes to support the infrastructure of the country.

The flow on from that is that if you have a legitimate job, you pay a huge amount of tax to cover the others that dont. The formula is that the population is declining (able bodied men who hadn’t yet gone forth and multiplied were killed in the war, and women are having less children, often only one) plus the high unemployment rate, less the cash society means that those suckers who are doing the right thing are taxed within an inch of their paypacket to ensure that there is money under the government’s mattress to run the country. No mean feat when corruption is high and personal pockets are being lined…

Today was my last day with the rowing kids – just starting the goodbyes.

Had coffee after rowing with a rowing mother who has become a friend - Dinner out tonight with friends… lunch tomorrow with friends…part of me just wants to creep away, jump on a bus and disappear, (I hate goodbyes) but another friend wants to drive me to Split and stay and have drinks until the ferry sales in the evening. I feel privileged to have made such lovely friends and I will miss them. (this is one of my girl rowers!)

Zagreb - Finale

So, final dissertation on Zagreb, then I will stop.

I decided to take a cycling tour of Zagreb, despite my misgivings about bike seats (based on French experience).

They said to meet in front of the Mimara Musej at 10. Adila, our guide, was pleased to know that I was from New Zealand as it would seem that the results of a survey (apparently not the same guys from Contiki who decided that NZ women are promiscuous) were in the paper that morning, and that NZ was listed as fourth in the world as the place to do business – easy administration, trustworthy, absence of corruption, (loose women) etc- , and feeling disillusioned that morning, she had googled our country to see if she and her husband and children could emigrate there (immediately). The population of our country may increase soon by four… (your thoughts Diana?)

There were only two other customers, an American couple, so the four of us set off. I wanted to see if I could sneak the bike into my backpack, it was so wonderful! Such a seat, such handlebars!

The tour was three hours of basically getting the layout of the inner city – stopping at various places for history lessons, comment and local themes – you know, politics, Tito etc. It made us appreciate the real town planning that went into the city at its inception. There is a wonderful horse-shoe shaped green belt with glorious trees and ponds with statues and fountains, all donated by the founding citizens. These parks were full of people sitting, walking, relaxing in the sun, and staring at the idiots on the bikes.

There are university campus’ scattered throughout the city and so the streets are full of young people, which adds to the dynamic feeling of the city. People from Zagreb compare the city to Vienna. People who don’t live in Zagreb say that the people who do live in Zagreb and say things like that have delusions of grandeur…

We followed the trams along the tram tracks, wended our way through pedestrians on the footpaths (the Americans kept ringing their little bells), and glided through parks.

At the end of the three hours, I doubled back to check out the Museum of Broken Relationships. The concept of this museum was dreamt up by a couple as they separated, to deal with various things left from the relationship that they couldn’t decide what to do with. It has developed almost into a therapy of sorts for people from all over the world who have items left from relationships that they wish to put ‘somewhere’ to emotionally close on what has perhaps been a traumatic severing.

Interesting concept, and I thought that it would be quirky and amusing, which it was for the first few exhibits. (Aside - The original (separated) couple have continued to travel the world together exhibiting the museum and there are all sorts of whispers about whether they will get back together – the world loves a happy ending).

The reality of it was slightly different, because never having personally been vitriolic at the end of a relationship, I was taken aback by the emotions in the stories which accompanied the exhibits!

There was an axe – the donor, a guy, had been in a relationship with a woman who decided after a few months of moving into the guy’s house( with her furniture), that she had fallen in love with the neighbour (a woman). They confessed, said that they were going to go away for a fortnight together and then she would be back…. And so for each day that she was away, he chopped up a piece of her furniture!

There was a wedding album with the accompanying message – ‘married 2004, cheated 2005. If you ever develop enough culture to visit a museum, I hope that you will understand what you did to me!”

There were 9 different rooms each filled with themed momentos, each with their own anger and their own story. When I left, I felt infused by a negativity that I didn’t recognize as mine.

To move on from that feeling, I decided that a visit to the Mestrovic Gallery (with a ‘sh’ and a ‘ch’) would be a good solution, which it was, thankfully. Mestrovic was a twentieth century sculptor and architect from Croatia and is arguably the greatest sculptor of religious subject matter since the Renaissance. He is the first living person to have a one man show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

His work is situated in what was originally his house in Gornji Grad. It is a beautiful setting, and his work is magnificent, worked in brass, marble and wood. The statue of Gregory of Nin in Split (you know, the one that the tourists (including myself) have photos of themselves taken whilst rubbing his big toe) is one of Mestrovic’ works, as is the Fountain of Life in Tito Square in Zagreb. Come to think of it, I think that that is one of the suggested name replacements for the current reference to Tito!

Basically at that point I had run out of time. Dinner and wine were calling before the late flight back to Split. *sigh*. Yes, Zagreb. Lovely.
(Big shout out to my friend in Zagreb - thanks, it was wonderful!)