postcard 3: swim the sea & drink the wild air

ceiling critters and exploring the Croatian countryside.

Hazelnut is seeing ghosts, we conclude uneasily. All day long, she’s growling at the wall, the ceiling, but there’s nothing there except for a lone spider that we promptly smush.

And then, night falls and while I’m trying to decide the feasibility of making falafel in our tiny, ill-equipped kitchen, we finally start to hear the noises she’s been picking up all day. The pitter-patter of tiny feet above our heads in the hall, something very clearly digging at the ceiling, and a squeak. This feels like the final straw. We hide in the bedroom and watch the Barbie movie (10/10) and try to decide if it’s worth eating the cost to move Airbnbs. Our host texts us back, assuring us it’s “just ordinary cats”. I can’t decide if this makes me feel better or worse.

The next morning, on little sleep and not enough caffeine, we set out to explore more of Croatia, a Google Map we’ve made with little olive and snowflake icons leading us around the country. We’re determined to find a town that feels like somewhere we could call home. There’s a series of beautiful new highways with fast speed limits and direct access to everywhere we want to go, but they come with steep tolls so we stick to the much slower backroads. Grove after grove of olive trees rolls past our windows as we cruise through the countryside. The first town is eerily quiet. There are more cats than people. We get pastries from a bakery and wander around the smooth, stone streets, catching glimpses of feline tails disappearing around every corner. Maybe, not this one.

In the next town up the peninsula, an old man stops us in the street. He speaks no English and we speak no Croatian. He’s enamored with Hazelnut and spends a painstaking few minutes miming to us until we finally understand what he’s asking. She’s a girl and no, she doesn’t bite. Bemused, she offers him her paw and he’s smitten. She shakes one side after another after another as he rambles on in Croatian and we smile dumbly. Finally we extract ourselves and wave goodbye, feeling like maybe we’ve just had our first real interaction of the trip.

We celebrate over pizza and a glass of wine (me) and Aperol Spritz (Topher) on a terrace heavy with clusters of grapes in a town farther north where we stumble upon an enduro mountain bike race. The ancient village perched on a hill is closed to vehicles and the streets are made of uneven chunks of stone. It feels like stepping back hundreds of years in time and yet, the town is filled with flashy mountain bikes and shirtless dudes in full face helmets and an inflatable podium. It’s the best kind of juxtaposition. We taste the local olive oil at a house down the road and come away with a bottle that we drizzle on everything.

The next day the backroads lead us along the coast as we make our way inland. A huge, sweeping curve reveals breathtaking views of the sea, with the country’s famous islands visible in the distance. We come down the hill into a place that feels like St. Tropez, all sports cars and designer shops, the streets flooded with visitors. Maybe not this one, either.

Through the dirty streets of Rijeka (definitely not) and up into the mountains we drive, stopping in little towns for cappuccinos, everyone seemingly focused on the same singular task: cutting enough wood for winter. The piles loom high everywhere and the quiet is punctuated by the sound of chainsaws. Our final destination is Zagreb, but an hour out my tailbone is screaming from all the sitting and we pull into a gas station and buy gummy worms and Red Bulls and decide to call it. When we come back out, Hazelnut is looking alarmed as the car a few spaces over billows smoke and the fire department hoses it down.

In a random town off the highway we’ve splurged on to get home faster, we settle onto the terrace of a restaurant I’ve read about. Their ravioli is supposed to be incredible and when it comes out swimming in a pool of sage-flecked butter, I have to agree.

The beaches here are beautiful, but tiny and few and far between. Most of the coastline is made up of cliffy rocks and the water goes quickly from turquoise to navy blue as it gets deep, fast. One morning we make our way out to where the waves lap surprisingly gently along the coast. A natural indent makes a perfect pool for Hazelnut to splash in, but she watches with concern as I hop off the rocks, into the deep water, and paddle out. It’s October and the morning is cool, yet the water is perfectly warm. It’s so salty here, I float without any effort. Between waves I can see deep, deep down. It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever swam. I stay out there for half an hour, but then, a fish touches me and I decide maybe I’m done for now.

A large portion of the city’s many billboards are dedicated to Knopper’s Nut Bars. They look like a Snickers ice cream bar and we’ve become obsessed with finding them. We check every grocery store and gas station cold case and make up a song about them to pass the time in the car as one does when you don’t get enough human interaction in your own language. We’ve tried chocolate covered banana ice cream and strawberry cheesecake bars in the interim, our skin covered in salt from swimming in the sea. It feels like summertime as a kid, but no Knopper’s Nut Bars.

Every grocery store has a massive amount of space dedicated to cured meats, which are apparently a large part of the Croatian diet. We could have our pick of plastic-wrapped prsut (Istrian prosciutto) or salami, but whenever we walk to the cafe, we pass a little store selling meats and cheeses and wine and olive oil and one morning we finally work up the gumption to go in. We’re the only people there and the man behind the counter hopefully asks if we speak Italian. We settle on his few words of English instead. “Cow,” he walks us through the cheese, “mmm-aaaah…” “Manchego?” Topher tries but he’s making the sound of a sheep, I think, so we settle on either a sheep’s milk cheese made from black sheep, or with a black, wine-soaked rind. It’s hard to tell. The prsut, luckily, is much easier to discern. A whole wall is full of legs of meat hung drying and he uses a serrated knife to slice us off thick pieces of the most delicious prsut to try. We order 200 grams and he keeps handing us bites to eat as he slices. I add a bottle of local white wine to the bag and we leave with a perfect dinner feast. When Topher runs to the grocery store for some fig jam to pair with it, he walks through the candy aisle and spies our target. It turns out, Knopper’s Nut Bars are just a hazelnut flavored candy bar.

Something skitters in the shadows when Topher takes Hazelnut out to pee and he rushes in while I’m on a meeting for me to come look. A softball-sized critter is munching on the fallen persimmons and Google tells us its an eastern hedgehog. Our home invader is the cutest possible culprit.

Two weeks in this strange and beautiful country and I think I’m falling in love, just a bit.

-Mikaela