18 Hours in Venice

My first post about Dubrovnik was actually the 4^th day of our trip. So let me rewind and take more of a chronological approach from this point forward.

First, let me explain something about “jet lag”. This was my first time traveling anywhere where some form of jet lag could result – although I swear those Monday mornings on the East coast are a form of jet lag after traveling from the West coast on Sunday. Anyway, before I left, people told me to take sleeping pills, eat some crazy herbal flower, stand on my head…yadayadayada. I did none of the above and I had no jet lag. Here’s what I did (unintentionally, but it worked), which is what I call the recipe for beating jet lag:

• Get 4 hours of sleep each of the two nights before travel
• Travel for 29 hours with two flights and an 8 hour train ride
• Sleep 3 of the 29 hours traveling
• Go to sleep at destination at 1AM
• Wake up at 9AM the next day feeling great

If you’re counting, that’s 11 hours of sleep in 77 prior to arriving. So the moral of the story is – get really tired and you won’t have any problem sleeping.

I arrived in Zurich feeling very tired. The first thing I noticed about Zurich was that it’s clean. Really clean. The second thing I noticed about Zurich is that everyone is fit. You’re hard pressed to find more than a couple overweight people in Zurich (I’m still haven’t figured out why considering all of the cheese and chocolate they eat). The third thing I noticed about Zurich is that it’s cold. It was July 2 – I was in some plaid shorts looking like a total goober and freezing my arse off on the 50 degree, rainy July day. Hopping on a train in Zurich, I cruised (first class – which is worth it, I highly recommend it) through the Alps and down into Italy.

Ben, who is Romania and lived in Romania until he was about 7, had spent a couple of weeks in Romania with his mom – visiting family and friends. Seth had joined Ben in Budapest, Hungary when Ben’s mom flew home and the two of them spent 4 days in Budapest. Our plan was to meet in Venice on the night of July 2. None of us had brought a cell phone, so I (who am generally not an anxious person) can honestly say that I had a lot of anxiety about whether or not I’d be able to find them in Venice.

8 hours later I arrived in Venice, walked out of the train station, and saw Cotter’s big smiling face – which was a huge sigh of relief (I had had visions of sleeping on the floor at the train stations). At that point, the trip (for me at least) had begun.

“It’s Impossible”, the guy working at the hotel kept telling us in his thick Italian accent. Well, it’s not really “impossible”, I said, one of us could just sleep on the floor. Cotter and Benny had checked in to a 2 person room, thinking that one of us could just sleep on the floor or a cot or something. When the guy working the desk saw 3 of us walk in, he started telling us it was “impossible” for us to get 3 in a room. After debating with this guy and his manager for 15 minutes, we started to realize (through some shoddy broken English) that there was a city ordinance that did not allow more people to stay in a room that was designated for a certain number of people. Hence, “impossible”. The pissed off manager essentially “fined” us 10 Euros for taking a shower in the room and kicked us out. From that point on, anything we didn’t think we could do was coined “impossible” in our thickest Italian accent.

We grabbed some beers and started walking around looking for a room to rent. After about 30 minutes we found a room with 3 beds for 87 Euros – definitely our most expensive night of the trip. If there’s one thing we learned about Italyh the Dollar in the tank right now. – it’s expensive, especially wit Towards the end of our trip, I believe the Dollar was down to about $1.45 for 1 Euro. Painful.

I was pretty euphoric the first night in Venice. We walked around, took pictures, found a little café – had coffee…just wandered around talking to people and taking pictures.

What really epitomized our trip, and, one of the reasons that I loved it so much was that we had a general itinerary, but we had no reservations and no concrete plan. We figured we’d just “figure it out” – and we did. So about 5 hours after I arrived, we were retiring to our 87 Euro glorified hostel room and we didn’t have a concrete plan for getting to Croatia the next day. We knew we wanted to go, but we weren’t really sure how we’d get there. Should we take the ferry from Venice to Pula? Should we take a train to Anconand take a ferry all the way to Dubrovnik? a

What we did have was a map and some ferry schedules. We looked at maps, ferry schedules, car rentals, and prices and 5 minutes later, we had made a decision. In about 15 hours, we’d catch a ferry to Pula, Croatia, we’d camp for the night, rent a car the next day and take off. Done.

The next morning we had breakfast a café, walked around Venice and visited St. Mark’s Square. There were a billion pigeons in St. Mark’s Square. I individually hated every one of them. There was this kid who was laying the ground letting birds eat stuff off of him. The kid was weird – so I took a picture of him, partly because he was weird and partly because I was thinking about my sister Annie, who, (don’t get me wrong, I’m not a bird lover by any means) has an unnatural abhorrence for all things foul. Hey sis, this one’s for you ;)

After getting our fill of the birds, we headed off for some lunch – a Panini of course, and off to find some gelato. Although we talked to tons of people, we didn’t take a lot of pictures with people. One girl we did take a picture with was Valentina. She was sitting on the dock – writing and tanning at the same time. We wandered her way, found out she was studying English (she was Italian) – so we invited her to come to Croatia with us. She said she couldn’t leave her classes so we took a picture with her and went on our way.

We headed to the port to board our ship. At 5 PM we pushed off from the dock, bound for Croatia.

Croatia (Part I)

If a picture says 1,000 words - then let this tell the story of Dubrovnik. Ok, so maybe it's a little trite to suggest that a picture of me jumping into the Adriatic in any way signifies anything about Dubrovnik - it's simply a "belligerent American" (which is how we referred to ourselves on this trip) mindlessly and reckless trying to get a little thrill (which I did and, yes, I have health insurance). I will admit though that one of the highlights of the trip was roaming the city walls of the Old City, looking for new places to cliff jump.

Constructed in the late 12th century and situated on the coastal southern tip of Croatia, the Old City of Dubrovnik was a leading trading center for centuries. The world watched in horror as the Old City (Stari Grad) of Dubrovnik was blasted by over 2,000 shells in 1991 and 1992 during the civil war that ravaged the former Yugoslavia, causing damage to 68% of the 824 buildings in the Old City. We noticed no effects of the shelling as the Croatians had carefully and meticulously restored the Old City to her former glory.

Let's get this out of the way...Croatian women are beautiful - there's really no other way around that. We pretty much referred to it as a "joke" the entire time. I mean, really it was a big joke. With that said, as three Christian young men, we did our best - and were quite successful.

From the slick marble city streets to the cathedrals, the architecture in Dubrovnik was intricate and stunning. The city walls jet out of the Adriatic forming a barrier about a half mile square protecting the city from invaders. We wandered around the city during the day, cliff jumping, wandering through the old city streets looking for cool retro Croatia T-Shirts and, of course you can't forget the backpacker's patches - which we picked up in every country to sew on our packs.

We found the fish in Croatia to be prepared slightly different than we were used to, but good nonetheless. After wandering around the Old City for a day, we headed off to find a Sobe - Croatia has a huge network of people who have converted a room in their home to a guest room - and they denote it with a sign out front that says "Sobe". If you walk down any Croatian street near a tourist location, you'll see Sobe after Sobe. We would walk up any house with a Sobe sign, knock on the door and see if they had a room available. That was probably one of the coolest things about Croatia - we didn't have to book or worry about hotels or hostels - we just knocked on people's doors and found places to stay.

After leaving the Old City, the 2nd house we came to had a Sobe sign. We secured our room for the night with 45 Euros and headed off to jump off of more stuff. Cotter, pictured below - poses in mid-air.

Our Sobe turned out to be amazing - we had an epic view of the Adriatic from where we had our dinner. Trying to conserve money, many of our dinners consisted of some sort of sandwich we threw together at a local market, cheese, and wine. The girls at this market were kind enough to make us sandwiches to go. 3 sandwiches, a bar of chocolate and a bottle of Croatian wine = 70 Kuna, or about $13. The girls at the market were also kind enough to laugh hysterically at us the entire time we were in the market...we still don't know why, but we found that to be a common theme...so we just laughed along - because if we were laughing too, then, in our minds at least, they were laughing with us and not at us.

After a some dinner and a shower, we headed down to the city to enjoy a Dubrovnik sunset. We watched the sun set below the sea and toasted a glorious Dubrovnik day. After the sunset, we headed back within the city walls for some espresso. European coffee is good. It was kind of hard to put our finger on the different coffee experience we were having...but we decided that for Europeans, coffee is more of an "event" than it is here in the States. Something to be savored, not guzzled. I'm not sure, maybe we were just sort of euphoric about the whole thing - either way, we loved it.
None of the three of us are the clubbing type, but being in Europe for over 2 weeks, we figured we had to go "out" at least once. So we "put our shirts on" as we said (each of us brought one nice shirt which were collectively referred to as "our shirts"). Anytime someone wanted to look a little more than a scummy, smelly, American backpacker - they would suggest that we put "our shirts" on and go out.
At any rate, we headed back to the room to put our shirts on. Being my little brother's birthday, I had promised before I left that I would propose a toast to him with Croatian Plum brandy "Slijvovica" (the Croatian locals are famous for distilling their own, so we figured, when in Rome...). I had picked up the brandy from a farmer on the side of the road on our way to Dubrovnik for 40 Kunas = about $7.50 US. It was...powerful...to say the least - but we forced it down as I proposed a toast to James.
Feeling warm, we headed to Club Latina (which is a misnomer because there's nothing Latina about it...Croatians love to dance to remixes of 90's rock music). We clubbed it up, Croatian-style in Dubrovnik and capped off, what was my favorite stop on our trip.