Street Talk

It’s a peculiar pass time, but I like checking out the graffiti in towns – it’s like the newspaper in brief, and you can quickly see what is important or what is bugging people¸ at least you can if you can read it.
There is a lot of graffiti about Hajduk which is the football (soccer) team from Split and is the second top team in Croatia – the founding organization had roots in Croatian Nationalism.

(to be fair, this one isn't graffiti, just support for the team - but signs like this are everywhere, on the side of the roads, on bus shelters)


Lives can begin and end with Hajduk. Words like ‘ljubav’ (love) and ‘zivot’ (life) (with the z being a sound like the ‘su’ in measure) are words that hold hands with the Hajduk word. I don’t want to overstate anything, but football is huge here. Sitting in town the other day I saw three different groups of young school boys all in uniforms walking along the riva – turns out that they are football teams on Easter Holiday training schools. Oh, and the Germans are all here too – they seem to have all of their teenagers in training schools for tennis for the holidays.

Which reminds me to mention that along with casinos (Automat Klub) there are an inordinate number of betting shops in Makarska – betting on sports results, any sports.
Anyway, back to reading the tagging - there is a lot of the word Gotovina around – we will go there later, when you are Ready for Politics. Suffice it to say that there are planned demonstrations in Split, the Pope is calling for prayers and pilgrimages (to where I’m not sure) and one of the shoe shops in Split had a ‘15% discont za Gotovina’.

But I had to smile when I saw ‘zivi isus’ amongst all of the other words (use the same ‘z’ sound as in measure). Guess when you have a spray can you have to have a cause of some sort…