Abroad in Budapest: April 2010

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

-Franz Kafka, read by Bubbles in the final episode of The Wire

Some of you who know me well will understand the true depravity with which I have consumed the entire five-season HBO series The Wire. I have rarely been fortunate enough to lay eyes on anything so engrossing and compelling. The Wire is literature -- truly the Faulkner, the Dickens of this generation.

I'm sort of a late arrival to the party if you're a long-time fan (the show ran 2002 - 2008), but the show is just incredible. If you've never seen it, see it. Immensely entertaining and culturally rich. People have basically written online all there is to write on The Wire (think one million monkeys on one million typewriters here), so I'll leave this short. If you want to know more, break out those Google skills. You owe it to yourself. Now that I've finished the show, I'm trying to think of my favorite character -- the complexity and personality of the characters is one of the show's best features -- but I'm stuck thinking of five to ten that I loved. Bubbles, the sometimes-recovering heroin addict, and Omar, the homosexual, principled stick-up artist, are probably my top two. Slim Charles is another I enjoy, but his character suffers from a background role.

Some classic Omar, just to taste. I guess this is a spoiler if you're a purist about that, but nothing major.

By coincidence, I noticed that David Simon, the creator of The Wire, has a new show called Treme, whose premier was this Sunday. The show focuses on post-Katrina New Orleans in the neighborhood Treme. It's HBO-only but may or may not have been downloadable moments after the premier on a popular peer-to-peer protocol whose name rhymes with "warrant".

I'm back on Hungarian soil, and naturally my editors at the Times are clamoring for my travel piece, so here goes. Part one, at least. To give you a sketch of my trip, I took a train down to Split, Croatia with a group of four others (Neal, Sam, Kumar, and Brett). We moved on to Dubrovnik for a while, then continued to Mostar. We scrapped plans for Sarajevo in favor of a little time in Zagreb and a more reasonable travel schedule.

A few general comments before we begin. First, while I enjoy traveling, my productivity heavily depends on routine. My routine takes a while to gain momentum, so to speak, so traveling does a number on my ability to do meaningful work. That is, while at home, all the basics -- where to sleep, what to eat, etc -- are more or less automatic, and this leaves me free to pursue more cerebral tasks, like tending to my organic sod farm. Second, I've come to a realization that my ideas about trains -- being "fast" and "inexpensive" -- are largely wrong. If you're looking to dive into the pictures, this album should be public (let me know if it isn't).

We took an afternoon train from Budapest, routed to a sleeper car in Zagreb, and arrived Saturday morning in Split. We five traveling companions rounded out a six-person cabin on the afternoon train with a Hungarian lady, maybe in her fifties. Of course, we planned to spend the train ride drinking and came prepared but didn't want to offend this lady's sensibilities. We figure Europeans won't mind a little low-key consumption, so we quietly dig into some beers. Brett begins opening a bottle of wine but struggles with the fake cork for a while. To our surprise/amusement/glee, our companion notices, gestures that he should bang the corkscrew down to loosen the cork, then indeed takes over and opens the bottle for him. This woman is all business when it comes to cracking bottles.

The sommelier herself

She even makes a 15 minute project out of shaving down the now-expanded cork and wrapping the crumbling carved end in plastic to suitably reseal the bottle should the need arise. Ridiculous.

As we cross the Croatian border, passport control climbs aboard, and customs officials follow. At this and each ensuing border crossing, we were amused the predictable exchange:

"Anything to declare? Alcohol, cigarettes?"

*shrug* [each holding a can or bottle and surrounded by empties]

*control moves on to next car*

I got the feeling that items intended for personal consumption were exempt, but we didn't know and they didn't care.

We get off the train feeling pretty jolly in Zagreb with two hours to kill before the night train. Neal and Kumar found a grocery store three minutes before closing time. In what precious time they had, Kumar fell in love with a clerk named Amela, who urged him to skip Split and stay in Zagreb. Charming idea but didn't happen.

We arrive a little after 7 the next morning in Split and make our way to the hostel. Sam and Brett hit the sheets, but Kumar, Neal, and I feel decent enough to wander the town, exhausted, in search of breakfast and coffee. I asked our hostel keeper where to find a coffee bar, to which she gave the Croatian shrug and said "everywhere." No lie, every street in every town we visited had a coffee bar, where all you could purchase was coffee and booze. Apparently they have not gotten the idea that food is a natural complement to beverage. The proliferation of these coffee bars convinced me thoroughly that most of Croatia's people are employed as professional coffee drinkers.

We kept day one to some easy-going sightseeing and napping, but day two demanded big plans. Armed with cameras and beach beers, we sought to test the Croatian coast's mettle.

Not a bad sight

The riva

The plaque below this supersized hook revealed that it commemorates the 1000th anniversary of the first written mention of fishing in Croatia. A candidate for strangest monument ever.

Following the coast, we came across this picturesque city park. Beautifully raw, filled with green and clover.

Further on, we found this nice perch...

...with a killer view of the Adriatic

The late-March water still ran a little cold...

...but Kumar successfully found his way out to sea

Lots of relaxation [I heartily encourage anyone considering study abroad to seek a program in Croatia]

That night, we went out in search of Split nightlife. After a semi-lame cocktail bar, we decided to follow the boots on the ground and found our way to a coffee bar that seemed decently occupied and stocked with draft beer. Acceptable. As we later learned, some unusual circumstances led the owner and bartender to start closing up around 11 instead of 12, but the bartender agreed to lock up and let us order a second round while watching some sort of Croatian rec-league soccer recap on TV. Normally, I wouldn't bore you with such a scene, but we ended up hanging around a little as our bartender cleans up and ask her where to find a good disco in Split.

The conversation that ensued was ridiculous and included the revelation that they were closing early because the bartender came to work hungover from Friday night and had been drinking vodka all day (and continued as she cleaned), incredulity that we would be interested in a techno club but didn't do drugs, the fact that Obama was a kurac (slang for, as she explained, "the third leg in between your legs"), and a rather abrupt change of tone, while we were laughing all the while at the ridiculousness of our situation, when she snapped at us and asked how we'd like it if she came to America and just laughed at us. We apologized but explained that really wasn't the case. Moments later, the conversation took regained rapport as if nothing happened, and we all left the bar with her promising to show us the best disco. Little did we know, our bartender-come-guide was (/was becoming) literally the drunkest person in Croatia. Our adventures involved drinking with a random group of Croatian high schoolers in a park, being introduced drunkenly as "the American people," finally finding the disco. To cut this story mercifully short, she was thrown out of the bar within an hour or two for being too drunk after breaking a bottle on the dance floor (and subsequently tried to negotiate her fate with the bouncers by literally picking up the pieces one by one). Our night ended sometime shortly thereafter, but not before a stop by a pizza vendor. On that note, Croatia sells fantastic thin-crust pizza. Absolutely amazing... the shrimp pizza from Planet Pizza Cut is not to be missed if you're ever in Split.

Sunday included some more exploration. Neal, Kumar, and I discovered a stretch of shoreline across a wall from our perch (see above) that we conjecture (half-jokingly) was an abandoned Serb naval yard. Judge for yourself.