postcard 2: finding our way

surviving our first week living abroad, scorpions and all.

Driving south through the Istrian Peninsula, the setting sun leaves the vineyards and olive groves bathed in pink light. The instructions for our rental car pickup give us a number to call and it's some guy’s cellphone. After a few back and forth’s, we find a man waiting for us in a dark Kia dealership in Pula. I hope Expedia isn’t leading me astray as he charges my card $1500 for incidentals.

When we unlock the door to the Airbnb, a little black scorpion clings to the wall. Topher diplomatically squishes it, but leaves the many spiders hanging from the ceiling for another day. The house is old, the mortar is crumbling from between the stone walls, the whole place smells like mildew and the promised AC is only in the bedroom. This is an adventure, we remind ourselves.

We walk up and down the block the next morning, looking for a cafe that had good ratings on Google. It’s nowhere to be found, a set of steps leads to what looks like someone’s backyard where the pin sits. Desperate for caffeine, I work up the courage to pop into the yard and, sure enough, it's a cafe. We order latte machiattos and sit on a patio under some trees, sipping them in the early morning light. Topher has to drive the van back to Munich this morning and we linger too long. The seven hour drive turns into 10 with traffic.

“You’re a 10, but you open packages like a velociraptor,” Topher calls over the vacuum as he cleans up spilled coffee grounds from a package I’ve mangled. This is a well-known fact, but here I feel like a baby velociraptor everywhere, my arms too tiny, my movements clumsy. The touchy gas stove is either scalding the pots and pans or the flame is extinguished in an instant, there doesn’t seem to be an in between. The sink and the shower are scalding or freezing, spraying great gushes of water everywhere. The kitchen is where I feel most at home usually, but here I smoke out the tiny space once, twice, three times and velociraptor my way through a bag of rice. The cheese we bought melts instead of grills, the yogurt is chunky, and we’ve come away from our shopping trip without half the list. It’s not just the kitchen. The humidity is foreign and new, we stumble over ourselves paying and hustle out, giggling embarrassedly and almost get hit by traffic. Hazelnut doesn’t fit on the tiny sidewalks and is constantly stepping into the street or trying to chase lizards or rats off cliffs. It’s so very awkward and exhausting.

But in between the growing pains of starting this new life, it’s also beautiful. We walk into the city center to see an ancient temple and follow signs up a hill and some impossibly narrow steps to a castle. Hazelnut jumps up on the wall above the moat to get a better view of the city. On the walk back we buy olive oil and deep purple figs from an open-air market situated under the first changing leaves of autumn.

The Adriatic Sea is the clearest water I’ve ever seen, fading from translucent to teal to navy as it gets deep. The beaches are either made of smooth white stones or non-existent, the sea meeting the land at big expenses of rock where the locals spread their towels, a 10 minute walk from our Airbnb. It’s still warm, even though it’s nearly October, and one morning before work we head down to a dog-friendly beach. I wade out to my waist and encourage Hazelnut, who I’m not convinced knows how to swim, out towards me. She dips her toes and then races around the beach, doing zoomies down the rickety wooden stairs. A Dutch couple from an RV in the parking lot watches us from above, their camp chairs set up on the patio of a shuttered beach bar.

I snag her and hold her afloat, wading out just deep enough that she can’t stand. She makes no motion to paddle, floating there with her paws tucked up in the sparkling water as we laugh so hard we can’t breathe. Finally she attempts a little doggy paddle and I think we might need to purchase her a life jacket.

Every restaurant has a patio where cigarette smoke wafts freely and dogs are tucked under every table. We feed her French fries and oblong meatballs called cevapi as sneakily as we can muster, but there’s no need for decorum. The waitress chastises us for leaving our leftovers, “take the meat home for the dog!”

We’ve found the bakery and the pizzeria around the corner, ordering pies topped with prsût, which translates to wind-dried ham, an image of thin slices of meat hung by clothes pins on a hill above the sea coming to mind. There’s construction happening at the lot next to the cafe from the first morning, but we feel committed and now this is our spot for a morning cup or an afternoon pick me up when the Mountain Time hours I’m keeping at work catch up.

It’s hard and a little bit gritty and not all aperol spritzes and coastal sunshine, but we are finding our way, or at least, how to navigate the grocery store.

-Mikaela