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Like in 'Treasure'
"Though we may come from different places and speak in different tongues, our hearts beat as one." - Albus Dumbledore (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire)
To visit Croatia is to travel back in time, and not just because of the shepherds and stone-walled green mountains dotted with castle ruins. The Croatian language itself is a relic. It contains phonemes which no longer exist in English. This, along with the fact that written letters correspond to different sounds than they do in English, is one of the reasons pronunciation is perhaps the hardest thing to get the hang of in Croatia.
I lost count of the number of times I was laughed at in train and bus stations on the way here. "I need to get to Rijeka." I would sound out the word phonetically, then have to write it down when the ticket agent responded with a blank stare. Turns out Rijeka, one of the larger towns in the North, is correctly pronounced re-yay-ka, Crikvenica is pronounced something like srick-ven-its-a and Jozica yo-zhits-a (zh like the 's' in 'treasure').
Jozica, the woman who'd generously offered for me to stay at her house in Crikvenica for the week, was in the garden gathering salad ingredients for lunch when I arrived. She spoke no English, but her granddaughter's husband who picked me up at my hotel did, and was able to serve as a translator. The first thing she wanted to know was if I was hungry. Here we go again.
If I thought the Protestant Cemetery was the most edenic place I'd seen in Rome, I was living there now. Situated on the cliffs of the Adriatic coast, Jozica's house was an open-concept, Spanish-style villa with three stories of apartments stacked on top of one another, each with its own balcony overlooking the water. There was a courtyard with an outdoor dining room and a vegetable garden furnished with pink roses and irises, an ancient olive tree and a fig tree. Coming here I'd expected to be given a bedroom in the family's home. Instead I got an entire apartment with my own private kitchen and bathroom.
"Everyone else is still at work," Alan told me as he helped me carry my bags up to the third floor.
"Everyone else?" I echoed. I'd already met Jozica and her husband, her granddaughter Iris and grandson Branimir, Iris' husband Alan and their two children David and Jackov (pronounced daw-veed and yack-oh). Who else lived here?
We had lunch out on the second-floor terrace, and over a hearty bowl of homemade beef goulash, my hosts and I got to know each other via a half-coherent conversation filtered through Alan and Iris. Once Jozica picked up on the fact that I spoke Italian, she took advantage of the opportunity to speak to me directly, having studied Italian in school herself. Like Filomenia, though, I'm not sure she realized I hadn't been learning it long enough to be fluent, and still only understood about half of what she said. Ultimately we ended up conversing in some bizarre Croatian-English-Italian hybrid entirely our own.
"She wants to know who you are," Alan translated when Jozica asked me something I couldn't decipher. It took a while, but eventually we made the connection; my mother's sister's husband had a grandmother who was a cousin of Jozica's, or something like that. Jozica waved a hand as if it didn't matter. Family was family. After spending almost a month on my own, it was good to be in the warm embrace of a family, whosever it was.
At four o'clock Jozica's daughter (Iris' mother) and her husband arrived home from work, and I found out who the other residents were. I went with them later on an outing to the nearby town of Tribalj, where Jozica grew up, and they showed me the power-generating reservoir which doubled as prolific fishing grounds.
Gesturing across the manmade lake, Iris pointed out a church tower on a distant hill and said it dated back to the Middle Ages. The surrounding wilderness, she told me, used to belong to vineyards and olive farms, but became overgrown when it was bought-out by the government to build the reservoir. "Now," she explained, "only the bears live there."
We hiked up a nearby hill through a particularly dense patch of forest so Iris could show me the house she grew up in. David zigzagged along behind, Iris' mother close in tow. Out of the corner of my eye I watched her chase the three-year-old through mud slicks and stalk butterflies with him in knee-high shrubbery, and her breezy, devil-may-care playfulness reminded me of my own mother. She was about the same age, too.
We came to a narrow cobblestone road lined with old-world stone farmhouses and quickly picked up a tail of two sheepdogs. They followed us all the way to the arched gateway of Iris' old house, where I stood for a moment gazing at the sun dancing on the lake, the mountains in receding shades of blue-green as they faded into the distance, as far as the eye could see. It's so beautiful here it hurts, I thought. Then, just when I was thinking it couldn't possibly get any more seductive, Iris pointed out the wooden pulley-system water well in her family's old yard. "Do you know what is?" She asked, and I nodded.
"Yes," I replied, a charmed smile on my lips. "We don't have them much in Canada, but I know from stories." My voice was quiet as I said this, my tone almost tired, as if nothing she could show me could surprise or delight me more than I already was.
I was very surprised, however, when we came upon Jozica and her husband working in the house's courtyard. Iris' grandfather was weeding the lawn while her grandmother, dressed in hip waders and a garden apron, was hand-mixing mortar in the cellar. This was between slaving in the kitchen for hours over a from-scratch lunch and going home to start dinner. The woman was over eighty!
Iris explained they were renovating the 300-year-old house to try and get it into livable condition again. "Maybe for tourists," she shrugged. "But many people go elsewhere, to Dubrovnik or Split." I was glad. Tourists would ruin this place.
"Please tell your grandmother," I said to Iris, "I admire her energy."
Walking back to the car Iris said we needed to pick up some goat milk because Jakov, who was still breast-feeding, had a lactose intolerance and Iris couldn't drink cow's milk. Expecting a pitstop at the supermarket in town, imagine my consternation when we drove into a fly-riddled farmyard with a pasture full of goats, a pregnant cat and the biggest sheepdog I'd ever seen lounging on the porch. The farmer was out back herding the flock inside as it started to drizzle rain. "The goats can't get wet," Iris explained, "because of..." she struggled for the word, then pulled out her iPhone to look it up on Google Translator. Still unsure of the proper pronunciation, she handed the phone to me.
"I didn't know goats got pneumonia," I remarked, reading the screen.
We paid the farmer's wife in cash in the kitchen and she handed Alan a canvas bag that clinked with the two glass bottles of goat milk inside. She also threw in a small plastic container of fresh cheese for Iris to try. If she liked it she could come back and buy more.
From there we stopped at Alan's cousin's house in town. "We are a big family," Iris explained, almost apologetic as I shook the hands of four more adults and ruffled the hair of children who moved too fast to count.
"That's okay," I assured her, basking in the unexpected company. "I have one, too." I went on to explain that I had five older siblings, and Iris' cousins wanted to know if they were travelling, too. "No," I said. "They are all getting married and having babies. I am the family defect."
Their cousin's wife put out snacks and glasses of homemade rakija (Croatia's national liquor distilled from fermented fruit - this one was made from cherries and had a sweet flavour similar to amaretto) while the kids occupied themselves with an animated game of hide-and-seek in the living room.
I was further surprised (not to mention relieved) to learn that English was compulsory in Croatian schools, so the majority of the younger population spoke it relatively well.
"So where did you say you were from?" Alan's cousin asked when we were on our second round of rakija.
"Canada."
"Ah," he raised his eyebrows. "Very far."
I nodded. "Yes," I agreed. "Very far from home."
"Long flight?" He wanted to know.
"No," I answered, explaining that I'd taken the train from Florence after spending three weeks in Italy. From there it was a natural segue into the full confession of my round-the-world trip and a detailed account of everywhere I'd been and everywhere I was going.
"So what do you think of Croatia?" He asked, curious, and I replied that I thought it was even more beautiful than Italy, and that the people were very nice. I went on to tell him about the man who'd given me a ride to the hotel the night before in his car.
"Yes," he concurred, "In Crikvenica is very safe. Don't do that in Athens." He asked where else I planned to visit in Croatia.
Not even prepared to try and pronounce this one, I spelled out the name of the town in Istria where I'd booked a food and wine tour.
"Ah, Brtonigla," Alan's cousin nodded, pronouncing it exactly the way it looked. Of course.
"Yes," I said, "but I'm not sure yet how I'm going to get there. I think maybe I can take a bus from Rijeka but it's a small town and -"
"Forget the bus," he interjected. "We will get you there. Don't worry." So I didn't.
In that moment our conversation was interrupted by a battalion of shrieking children exploding into the kitchen. Jakov spit up on Iris and David leapt over the back of the couch and climbed onto the table to plunge his hand into the snack bowl, sending Napolitanke wafers skating in every direction.
"I'm sorry," Iris laughed, embarrassed by the chaos. "We are like a gypsy family!" If only she knew, I thought, that there wasn't a family in the world that didn't think that about themselves.
You know that feeling of being alone? It's gone now.
- comments
Zio You are not a defect and i can relate to being with family for when i traveled home to San Martino alone i felt loved in many ways, like she said family is family