First day in Croatia

Porec, Croatia

11th August 2007

This morning we woke up at 3:55am and caught a minicab to Stansted. The drive only took about 45 minutes since there weren't many cars on the road and the driver knew where every speed camera was. When a camera was coming up, he'd slow down to a normal speed, otherwise he'd push the car to it's limits.

The flight was really quiet, most people were sleeping. It was interesting looking over the Alps at all the small villages as we flew to Croatia.

We picked up a car at the airport in Pula and as the rental chap was explaining everything to me we saw military fighter jets fly right over us. The sound was unbelievable. The chap told me the airport is used both for civilian and military purposes. There were signs all around saying photography is prohibited. In one of the information packs we got it said most of the inhabited areas of Croatia have been de-mined following the war during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia but it also warned that wondering off into unmarked areas could still be risky.

We then drove up to Porec, the town where we were going to be staying for the next week. Along the way we realized the speedometer was broken and it was waving +/- 30KM from the speed we were doing.

We got checked in to our hotel and went to get some lunch. The town was quite busy with lots of tourists walking about. The majority of them were either German, Italian or from a neighboring state. Throughout this trip I only saw about 6 english people and 4 black people. I saw cars with license plates from a huge range of countries, from Ukraine, all the way to American (god knows how they got their car over). The only 2 countries I didn't see were Finland and Estonia.

Ordering food was interesting. I can converse and comprehend German very well but obviously I speak the language with a Canadian accent so the waiters keep switching back and forth between English and German. When we bought our lunch we ended up needing to use some Italian phrases just to convey what we wanted to eat.

We walked along the coast line afterward. There aren't really any sand beaches around, just rocks on the shore but loads of people still sun bath and swim in the sea. There were a lot of people going topless, I saw a couple of naturists and there was an FKK (nudist) beach on an island opposite our hotel.

In the evening after the sun went down, I went running along the shoreline. The running in Porec is really good and it's a nice change from my typical routes here in London.

The only English TV was the news so we ended up watching a lot of German TV instead. We caught an episode on wife swap where a woman from East Berlin and a Moroccan immigrant from West Germany were swapped. The Moroccan woman locked up all her lingerie in the house and said he wouldn't want anyone to see them as they were private and she did this by packing them in front of the camera and holding them to her body and she described what it's like to be a conservative Arab in Germany.

The real kick came when the East Berliner went into her house and found to giant dildos in her bedroom within 2 minutes of entering the house. I was quite shocked to see that given one of them was so big it could be used as a "giving birth simulator". The Moroccan woman also left notes everywhere explaining various aspects of the house. Every single note had a spelling mistake. She even misspelt the German word for "not" writing "nischt" instead of "nicht".

We didn't sleep much the night before we came here so there was this feeling of being paranoid that stayed with us for a day or so. Normally I'm so busy when I go abroad that I don't have much time to reflect but here I do and it's a bit mad all the things that can pop back into my mind that I buried years ago.

I did wish I had some of my friends with me there. I saw 3 Estonian girls chatting near by when I was walking around in the evening and another woman was wearing the same perfume as one of my friends. I guess if you can miss your friends, it's a good thing. I felt whatever bit of Canadian identity I had left in me was washing away quickly. I felt I had to integrate into German culture more here than in Germany. Given everyone in the service industry her speaks German as a second or third language it's not so bad.