Summertime

Lungomare

Summer has arrived on the Adriatic.  I've gotten tan and it's not even June.  The temperatures have been in the upper 80s all week.  The change in seasons from spring to summer was most evident along the lungomare yesterday.  For the first few months of our stay here, it was fairly empty, businesses and restaurants were closed, and the breezes off the Adriatic were chilly.  But yesterday, we noticed a sea change (pardon the pun).  The actual promenade was buzzing with people (I heard German and Italian), the beaches along the coast were full of sunbathers, some topless, the restaurants were not only open, but they had people eating in them, and there were hundreds of swimmers sprinkled all along the lungomare.  When we approached the end of the promenade, near a little town called Lovran, there were a group of probably high school-age boys diving into the water from a high cliff.  They were obviously performing for the large group of sunbathing high school girls.  Even though it wasn't for our benefit, this peacock exhibition was fun for the kids to watch too.  It was only a matter of time before the girls noticed that NO ONE wears one piece swimming suits here.  Old, young, fat, thin, foreign, Croat...  bikinis are the only female swim attire.  Mostly with the top, but sometimes without.  Sometimes just without while the women get dressed after a swim.  The girls seem to be ok with their bathing suits for now, but I'm sure I'm sending conflicting messages about how foreign women take nudity less seriously, they don't feel ashamed of their bodies... while telling my girls that it's appropriate to not show too much skin.  Someday, I'm going to get called out on this one, but that day seems far off now.

Adam, Darko Stefan, and Julie

Earlier in the week, we went to Pagliacci at the Rijeka Opera.  We went with our downstairs neighbor, Darko Stefan, who works for the university and gets all the credit for finding us this wonderful apartment.  The orchestra was excellent.  On the way home, we stopped at Adam's favorite bar, where you can often find him working (because his office is shared and not as pleasant as this bar), and we had his favorite Croatian wine (Galic Crno).    Darko has lived in our building for nearly 50 years, and he told us that when it was built, it was the fourth tallest building in Rijeka.  We also learned that the kids used to play ball games in the street outside our building because it had the only streetlamp (correction:  it actually had a string of streetlights) in the area.  He shared a lot of Rijeka history with us on the way home.  It was like having a guided tour, and you can't help but become a little more endeared to the city after hearing about its turbulent history.

Last day of school

A week before the opera, there was high school graduation.  We were taking the kids to their acting class last week, and noticed huge groups of high school students, clustered in matching t-shirts.  Then another cluster of kids would go by, wearing a different color matching t-shirt.  They were all covered in a white substance, and a lot of them were throwing this white stuff.  All the untaken outdoor coffee shop chairs were covered with a white film.  The whole Corzo was powdery white.  One kid with a huge water gun pounced right in front of me and aimed as though I would be his next victim, but instead of shooting me, he just laughed.  His prank was successful without having to get me wet.  I had to admit that it was funny, so I lightened up and laughed too.

As we later learned, we chanced upon the last day of high school, and these students have a tradition whereby they throw flour onto each other while parading down the Corzo.  Ivan, the acting coach, told us that every year, the homeless advocacy groups complain to the students that instead of throwing flour, they should donate it to the homeless shelters.  And while the weather was nice on this particular day, when it rains on the last day of school, the flour makes the pavement very slippery, causing people to fall, and gluey when it dries, creating a huge mess.  Still, it looked like fun to me.

My cold-blooded swimmers

George

Lucy

Rijeka Opera

Fuzine, Croatia

Fuzine, Croatia

Yesterday, we had a taste of some amazingly generous Croatian hospitality.   We spent the day in Fuzine, about an hour’s train ride from Rijeka, with Adam’s law school colleague Vesna Tomljenovic and her husband Edwin Tanzabel.    They have a summer/weekend home in Fuzine which they had just opened up for the season, and we were their lucky guests.  We had admired this village from the highway leading from Rijeka to Zagreb, and had planned to take a day trip there even before Vesna’s invitation.

Train passengers

We woke up at 6:00 (this is diabolically early for us) to make it on a 7:30AM train.  This was the kids’ first train trip. 

The train was on time.  We later learned that the train was on time only because Rijeka was the first point of departure.   Vesna and Edwin met us at the train station and we walked to Fuzine’s center, stopping by the market where Vesna bought some breakfast and a hanging basket of flowers.  Because people here don’t have a Home Depot or Meijer Garden Section, and in fact I don’t even know if the concept of nurseries exists here, flower vendors bring vanloads of annuals and perennials to outdoor markets in the downtown areas and sell their stuff. 

Flower market

We walked to their adorable house in the woods above Fuzine and had a nice breakfast, but the clouds looked threatening.  Within a half hour, we were in the midst of a downpour, and this was going to be a major crimp in our morning walk.  But we dodged the bullet.  The storm passed and we had sun and fresh clean air the rest of the day.

It’s worth mentioning that Lucy and Georgie fell in love with Vesna and Edwin’s dog Rinka.  They held the leash as much as they could, played with her all day, and at one point, had even dressed poor Rinka in Lucy’s shawl and Adam’s baseball cap.

Salamandra salamandra

Vesna, Edwin, and us at breakfast

We started out our walk with a Salamanra salamandra (European Fire Salamander), who came out of the undergrowth after the rain, and even climbed Lucy’s leg.  She was unharmed by the salamander’s toxic skin secretions (no muscle convulsions or hyperventilation occurred) that I later learned about on google.  Then we walked up and down hills, around lakes and rivers, for what was actually only about 3-4 kilometers, although my legs felt that we covered twice that distance.   The scenery was almost Alpine and so green, and the air was super fresh.  Our hosts were in great walking shape and by the time we got back to the house, I was glad to have the excuse to sit with Jonah and do math.   Adam had been carrying either Lucy or Georgie on his shoulders nearly the entire time, so he was on the exhausted side too (but he likes the feeling).   Our hosts, working with some energy reserve we did not have, got to right to work making a three course dinner.  I was amazed at their stamina.  After the walk, we were joined by another of Adam’s colleagues at the law school, Vesna Crnic-Grotic, and a law school student from Poland named Rafal.

Outside Fuzine

Orata

Dinner (chef Edwin standing in back)

Our ambitious chef was Edwin.   He made a scampi risotto from scratch, with a scampi broth, and that was our first course.  I had almost as much fun watching him make it as I did eating it.  This is a dish we see frequently in restaurants but I hadn’t yet tried.  The kids loved sticking their fingers in the risotto get the scampi and de-carapace it, and those fishies were a great hit with them.  Then Edwin started the wild orata course, best translated as gilt-head sea bream, bought from the Rijeka fish market.  Adam has made this fish at home for us and we all adore it.  I am sure that someone from an Adriatic nation coming to the United States wouldn’t even be able to fathom buying picking pre-filleted, frozen fish out of the freezer section of the supermarket – fish that doesn’t have red gills to inspect (if they are Bordeaux colored, the fish is not perfectly fresh, Edwin informed me), eyes that if dull, indicate the fish isn’t fresh, and fish that smells like the ocean and not a fish.  Georgie got to smoosh down the eyeballs  of the orata and she excitedly talked about it for hours afterward (this is a child who whimpers at the sight of a bug).  Vesna prepared the blitva (the Croatian national side dish, boiled Swiss chard, potato, garlic and olive oil), and that was our next course.  All five star, all the more so because they were working out of a kitchen considerably smaller than their normal one.

Done in

Then Vesna pulled out the tiramisu she (the pasty chef) had prepared, and Adam got moscato.  Soon after dinner (by now almost 8:00PM), we had to head for the train station to catch our 8:15PM train home, which turned out to be a bit late since it wasn’t the first stop on the route.   We got home around 10:00PM, and after Georgie un-velcroed her sneakers, she fell asleep splayed out on the floor by the front door.  We all followed suit shortly thereafter, and that was the end of our lovely day in Fuzine with Vesna and Edwin.

On the walk

Homeschooling

Homeschooling in Losinj

Every day, we load up our book bags and head to a scenic, peaceful beach, where Adam and I, together, homeschool the kids.  The kids start with a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, sing a patriotic or other culturally relevant song (such as Bye Bye Miss American Pie), Jonah zips through his two different math curriculums, reads a little Shakespeare, completes grammar exercises, plays a geography game, and then we discuss the differences between Hapsburgian and Venetian architecture.  Lucy completes a similarly rigorous curriculum, while Georgie plays educational preschool games.  They play chess in their breaks, which I must urge them to take, because they work so diligently on their assignments and hate to stop school.  We finish up by mid-morning, and then have the rest of the day free to spend in coffee shops sipping machiatos and hot chocolates, or on educational outings, such as the art museum, the natural history museum, and the planetarium.

That is how I thought homeschooling would be.

Homeschooling in Losinj

In reality, homeschooling here is not at all a well-oiled machine.  It’s a very squeaky process and there are work interruptions, boycotts, and strikes.  The union is powerful, and management is weak. 

Adam usually has to work so the bulk of the schooling has been on me.  We typically start in our pajamas around 9:00AM, after I've cleaned up breakfast, researched hotels for our next trip, and hung a load of laundry out to dry.  We're open for business after I've stacked up Jonah and Lucy's books [Jonah's are math, spelling, writing, handwriting, reading comprehension, some sort of novel, world history, an aloud book (I've read almost all of the Narnia series to them), and occasionally grammar and science].  I write their assignments on a sticky note on the front of each book.  Lucy has Singapore Math, reading outloud to me, the Narnia book, world history, and writing in her journal (which gets posted to her blog).

Command Central

By far, the squeakiest cog in the wheel is the union boss, Jonah.  His most difficult subjects are math and writing.  When I say difficult, I don’t mean that they are hard for him to do.  He’s a very fast learner and smart as a whip.  But he doesn’t like to do these subjects.  After a lot of yelling and frustration, we negotiated that Jonah has to complete ten pages of math per day, out of four different books (three books are Singapore Math and one book is Everyday Math for his school, so he won't start 4th grade with any math gaps—we’ll risk other gaps but we didn’t want to risk any math gaps).  In a typical day, when the math isn't thrilling for him, Jonah will work on math for ten minutes, then I'll work with Lucy or Georgie on something and lose track of time and Jonah's ipad break has turned into a 20 minute break.  I call for him to come and do his math and he yells back, "just one more minute", which becomes five minutes.  Then we start the whole cycle over again:  math, ipad break, yelling, math, DS break, yelling, math, snack, yelling, math, electronic game, yelling, etc. etc. etc.  Occasionally, he'll take the soccer ball and go to the field with a sister for a break, and other times, I'll send him to the grocery store to get bread or eggs for an ipad-free break.  With a three bedroom apartment five floors up, an extremely limited collection of toys, no English-language television shows for kids, and three kids who spend way too much time together... there is really no way around the electronics if I am to maintain my sanity.  Get rid of the electronics and I’ll need a psychiatrist within a week.   

Lucy's journal

 

Jonah wants everyone to know that lately, he has been doing about 15 pages of math a day (20 today!) with far fewer complaints and requests for breaks.  It's true, and it's entirely due to the fact that he likes fractions a heck of a lot more than he likes multiplying and dividing big numbers.

Georgie working

While managing this back and forth with Jonah, I also have to oversee Lucy's subjects.  She has fewer of them, and she is a much more conscientious student, so it takes a lot less energy.  Lucy is now so far ahead of her cohorts in math, that we're probably going to need to work with her teachers to get her some more challenging work when she starts first grade.  Georgie has gone through several pre-K books, but she also enjoys coloring and playing with Lucy during Lucy's breaks.  She listens to the Narnia books and the world history, although I'm not sure how much she's absorbing.  She loves to compare the clothes worn a long time ago.   Corset, crinoline, pinafore are words in her vocabulary. 

After an hour or two, when the sloppy answers are made neat and the wrong answers corrected, his math is finally done.  Then Jonah will work on spelling.  After another break, he may do a couple pages of cursive practice. 

Then I'll gather all the kids together and we will read about 2-3 pages of world history, and then I'll read a chapter in the Narnia series.  We're up to The Silver Chair, and we aren't planning to read the last book in the series, the preachy one.  At this point in our day, I insist that everyone, including myself, get dressed and brush teeth.     

After another break, he very grudgingly pulls out his journaling notebook to write about things we've done here, or maybe an essay on some cultural difference he has observed.  Good writing is not his favorite thing to do.  Getting him to do a good job requires a lot of undivided attention, a scarce commodity.   The knowledge that it will be posted on his blog has not turned out to be the incentive for good writing that I hoped it would be. Then he'll have to read something on his own for 30 minutes.  When Adam gets home, he will work with Jonah on grammar and identifying parts of speech, or he'll help correct mispellings and confusing things in Jonah's essays.  

On rainy days, we can draw out these assignments until 3 or 4 in the afternoon.  On nice days, we try to finish early so we can go to a beach, a park, go on a hike or get gelato, but there have been more than a few gorgeous days that we've spent entirely inside when Jonah decides it's a good day for a school strike.   On these days, management has the last word, but it can take until dinnertime to get the day’s assignments all done.  These are very long days. 

Reading for 30 minutes, but not at a desk

So you can see that homeschooling has been a little more draining than I expected it would be.  There's a lot of nagging, negotiating, cajoling, bribing, and yelling.  Admittedly, it's nice to know exactly what your kids excel at, and where they need extra attention.  It's nice to be able to whiz through concepts that take weeks in school.  It's nice to be able to take off for a day, or even a week without feeling guilty that you are pulling your kid out of school.  It's nice to skip guidance counseling and eliminate all the wasted hours in a regular school day.  It’s nice to have art, culture, language, architecture, and world history right at one’s fingertips.  What other nine year old can tell you what the Pragmatic Sanction is?  There will probably be gaps in his education, but I’m fairly confident that we’ve covered all the main bases.  What we’ve missed can be learned later.  Jonah might not know what year Michigan became a state, but Adam and I are both hopeful that in the end, this experience will have planted some knowledge, life skills, and a little curiosity about the world that will come in handy some day.    I just hope that I haven’t done too much damage with my high-decibel teaching style.

Homeschooling is very hard, but it’s been good, too.  One thing is certain.  When school starts in the fall, I'm not likely to be the mom in the dropoff line suffering from separation anxiety.

Homeschooling

Losinj, Croatia

On the ferry

After spending over a week traveling with my parents and five days of sightseeing in Vienna, we badly needed a trip to relax from those trips.  We chose Losinj, an island located about two hours from Rijeka.  Getting there required driving over a large bridge from the mainland to the island of Krk.  From Krk Island, we took a ferry to Cres Island, and then we drove across a very narrow channel (dredged in the time of the Romans) to Losinj.

Path to the beach

Our hotel, the Hotel Aurora, was slightly more luxurious than what we're accustomed to, but after all, we went there to relax and it came highly recommended.  Apparently, the greater Losinj population also thought it was a great place for relaxation, since it was the official Losinj Prom location.  That evening, we saw all sorts of fancy girls walking uneasily in high heels, most carrying a single long-stemmed rose, and we saw uncomfortable boys in tuxes.  Lucy and Georgie were fascinated.

Lunch above the beach

We arrived too early for check-in, so we walked down to the restaurant on the beach.  The hotel property was located on a tiny little bay with the cleanest, most turquoise waters we've seen yet.  The area was just stunning.  Adam and I got to enjoy our wine and grilled fish while the kids combed the beach and got their feet wet just below our patio.  We took the kids to the indoor saltwater pool complex, which also had a kid pool and two massive hottubs.  Then we took advantage of the Losinj "lungomare", which stretched for miles along the rocky karst coastline.  One of the reasons why this area is so striking, is because of all the conifer forests along the water.  But it wasn't always like that.  In 1886, a Croatian named Professor Ambroz Haracic, a teacher at a local school, spearheaded an effort to afforest Losinj (he also documented how much healthier the Losinj climate is than neighboring areas which prompted the Austrians to vacation here).  Over 300,000 black pines and Alepo pine trees were planted.  Those trees took off and spread vigorously into the abandoned (due to a blight) vineyards.  But they are not a native species.

Salt harvest

Losinj, Croatia

The next morning, after the huge breakfast (including a crepe buffet!), we took the kids to these massive slanting rocks along the bay for homeschooling.  The kids alternated between doing their math and fishing for these little crabs that lived in these holes in the rocks.  We did see several swimmers, but the water is still really really cold.  We could have stayed there for hours, but we eventually took a longer walk along the lungomare, aiming for a pizzeria Adam scouted out on his morning jog.  On our walk, Jonah thought he saw something like plastic sparkling on the rocks, but it turned out to be salt.  Knowing my fondness for salt, he called me over, and I managed to find a baggie in my purse, and with the kids, we harvested about an ounce of pure white flaky sea salt from the Losinj coastline.

Coming home, we mistimed the ferry, but they let us on the boat and the ferry was actually pulling away from the dock within 30 seconds of our parking.  We drove through some rain, but the sun was also shining directly on the white bora-blown coastal hills of Krk.  The combination of early evening slanting sun and overcast skies made the hills look like they were snow-covered.  My camera couldn't capture how striking it looked, but we enjoyed the tricks the sun played on the scenery on the ride home very much.

Losinj, Croatia

Losinj, Croatia

Homeschooling

From our hotel room

"You Can't Judge a Gelato by its Color" (Venice, part II)

Birthday Boy

The only place in Europe that is actually LESS crowded now than it was at the end of February is Venice, Italy, and that's because Carnivale is long over.  We went to Venice because that was the departure point for Tom and Sue, who were headed to Naples, and that departure point had two benefits:  it allowed them to get a direct flight and it let my dad see a bit of Venice.

Our car rental company was supposed to have secured a seven-passenger SUV-type vehicle for us, but they failed and we ended up with a 9-seat bench-style, manual transmission passenger van with a plastic floor and a luggage storage area the size of a walk-in closet -- exactly the kind of vehicle used by airport shuttle services and sightseeing tour companies.  Luckily, we weren't planning to be on any narrow serpentine roads; we just needed to get from Rijeka to Marco Polo airport and back.  I have a feeling that when I get home and sit in the drivers seat of my Honda minivan, it's going to feel as if I'm driving that 9-seat passenger van -- we've grown very used to small cars with manual transmissions.

While Adam was driving this massive vehicle to our apartment, we sang Happy Birthday to Jonah over  three chocolate napoleons that we picked up at the grocery store in the morning.  One of the napoleons had 9 candles sticking out of it, and Jonah blew them all out in one breath.  Together, Adam and I have celebrated 19 kid birthdays.  This was the first kid birthday ever that I didn't have to make a cake, and truthfully, I kind of missed it.

After the birthday lunch and the 3 hour drive to Venice, we found our way from the Marco Polo airport (dropping off my parents' bags at the luggage storage at the airport) to the Arsenale stop by water bus.  From there, our hotel, Nuovo Tesson, was just a few minutes away.    While Adam did a little bit of work, we took a short walk around our neighborhood and scored birthday gelato for Jonah.  It was there that Lucy made the comment, "you can't judge a gelato by its color", which I think is a brilliant comment on so many levels.

San Marco Piazza

We walked back to the hotel to pick up Adam, and started to find our way to the Campo San Margharita, which was the location of a pizzeria that came highly recommended.  Our route took us through San Marco's Piazza, where for a long time, the children attempted to get the pigeons to eat out directly of their hands, up to and over the Academy Bridge, up and across dozens of smaller canals and bridges, until two hours later, we finally stumbled into Ai Sportivi, famished, thirsty, and exhausted...  it was the pizzeria we were aiming for.

Ai Sportivi, Venice

Nine fingers, Venice

You just can't imagine how delicious a liter of Italian red wine tastes after driving for three hours in a 9 passenger van, and trying to stay unlost for two hours on the narrow streets of Venice with a poor-quality map and three starving children (while trying to observe a birthday).  But the restaurant lived up to its billing.  The pizza was top notch for northern Italy.  There aren't a lot of wood-burning pizza ovens in Venice for fear of fire breaking out around so many wooden structures, but the pizza was very very good.  This particular "campo" was a little bit off the beaten path (if such a thing can be said within the Venetian city limits), and overall, it felt much more like a real neighborhood than what you see closer in.  We probably didn't leave the restaurant until 9PM.  For what we needed, the meal came fairly close to perfection.  But why stop there?  Remembering Lucy's adage, I ordered a very funny-colored, almost coffee-toned gelato -- licorice flavor! -- and it was superlative.  I now know that I love licorice gelato.

On the traghetto

The next day, though, the travelers fairy dust had worn off.  The morning staffer at our hotel had apparently taken a cranky pill, and he would give us no advice about gondolas or glass factory tours in Murano (something the night staff had offered to help us with).  After the kids again tried to make friend with the pigeons in San Marco, this time with pilfered bread sticks from Ai Sportivi, we headed to the Rialto bridge and from there, planned to splurge on a gondola ride.  But we soon learned that Italian law sets the gondola passenger limit at 6.  Adam tried unsuccessfully to pass Georgia off as a baby.  Then he tried to pass Lucy and Georgia off as half babies.  One gondola driver came running up to us, breathless, with a special offer.  He could let us take two gondolas (for double the price).   We gave up on the gondolas and took a traghetto (a gondola-like boat) across the canal (for only about 75 euro cents per passenger), and the kids hardly knew the difference.

Glass flowers on Murano

We headed back to the hotel to get our bags and try our luck on the island of Murano, famous for its glass factories.  We thought there might have been a luggage storage at the vaporetto stop, since the island is just one ferry stop from the airport, but there wasn't.  We thought there would have been a wide variety of factory tours to choose from (judging by how frequently one's hotel, excepting ours, offers to arrange tours), but we couldn't find a single factory.  We thought the glass museum would be easy to find, but it wasn't.  We gave up on Murano glass and parked ourselves at a restaurant which worked out just fine.  After lunch, we got back on the vaporetto to the airport, said our goodbyes, and then we went to our 9-passenger vehicle in the Marco Polo parking lot (where, because of it's height and overall hugeness, we had no trouble finding), and my parents, to their soon-to-be-on-strike Alitalia flight for the next leg of their trip.

Sue and Georgie on the ferry

Lunch in Murano

On the ferry

Throughout their visit, I think we maintained a really nice balance of seeing brand new things and revisiting things we hadn't got enough of.  Yes, we had spots of bad timing, bad moods, bad weather, and embarrassing kid behavior.  But we had enough delicious food, unparalleled scenery, adorable kid moments, and general good luck to balance those things out.   It was really nice to be able to show my parents a little bit of our beautiful and still fairly undiscovered (at least to Americans) part of the world, so, I feel lucky and we had a great time.

Cres Island and Dinner in Krk

Lubenice, Cres

For our penultimate day in Croatia with my parents, we decided they needed a flavor of some of the nearby islands.  We remembered our abbreviated hike near Beli on the island of Cres, and decided to go back there for a more thorough hike.  I'm going to skip over the part about not timing the ferry right, the misunderstanding about whether the ferry ticket was purchased for both cars (it wasn't), the confusion about whether the ETA on the GPS was wrong, and the friction about how much gas a rental car gas tank needs when it has to be returned empty.  The point is, we eventually made it to Beli.  We weren't arrested by the Croatian ferry authorities although we probably should have been.  The planning kinks were mostly worked out by the end of the morning, and even the hairpin turns on the narrow highway clinging to the side of the mountain got easier and easier.

Springtime in Beli, Cres, Croatia

We showed my parents the Roman bridge at Beli, along a path dotted with pomegranate, olive, fig trees, and grazing sheep.  Although in the spring we only had about 20 minutes to explore this path, it turned out that those 20 minutes were the most beautiful.  Once we got deeper into the park, the forest grew thicker and we didn't have the beautiful vistas anymore.  So we walked for maybe an hour, but eventually decided to turn back and head for another part of Cres.

It was Adam's idea to to go Lubenice, a 4,000 year old town, now nearly deserted, perched on a cliff about 378m above the ocean.  The drive there was amazing, with mountains and coastline for over an hour.  But our knuckles started to get white when we neared the village.  For perhaps ten miles, there was a 5' high stone wall bordering each side of the very windy road.  The road was supposedly a two-way street, but in several areas, it was only wide enough for one car to pass at a time.  So on this little stretch, the fahrvergnugen was a bit diminished even as the scenery amazed.  

After we arrived and had a look around the town, we stopped for a beer on a loggia overlooking the ocean.  The grownups had cold beer, green olives, and Pagsi Sir (a delicious salty sheep cheese from Pag) while the kids had ice cream bars.  

Beli, Cres

We later learned that there are only about 18 residents left in Lubenice, none younger than 65, most all of them only speak Italian, and the residents share only two surnames.  Knowing how remote this village is, and even dangerous to get to, it's not hard to picture it becoming a sort of Croatian ghost town even in my lifetime.  Supposedly, one of the most gorgeous and secluded beaches in all of Croatia lies just below Lubenice.  The location of this beach will probably ensure that Lubenice has visitors in the future, even if it doesn't have any permanent residents.

On the highway to Lubenice

Dinner was knocking.  We headed to the other side of the Cres to catch a different ferry to the island Krk (which is connected to the mainland by the Tito Bridge).  We wanted to celebrate my birthday dinner at a restaurant in Vrbnik called Nada, which was getting renovated (and was of course closed, along with the entire island) when we were there in March.  At the time, we had a nice chat with the owner, who has family in the U.S.  We found the restaurant, got seated right away, and proceeded to have a fabulous birthday meal in the most gorgeous al fresco, sea-view second floor patio you can imagine.  Vrbnik is famous for its white wine, made from a type of grape called "Zlahtina" that grows only in the Vrbnik region, so we enjoyed a full liter of that with our view.  

Lubenice loggia

Lubenice

Klancic Street, Vrbnik

Meanwhile, the girls were smitten by a little pug at the next table.  After talking about the dog for awhile, Jonah asked the young and attractive owner if she could understand what he was saying.  She looked him straight in the eye and said, "Of course!  I understand every word you say!".  As it turned out, her name is Amalia, her mother Vlasta, and the pug Cookie.  They live in Zagreb but have a second house in Krk Town (not far from Vrbnik).  Amalia was an exchange student in Massachusetts.  Before the evening was over, she and her mother offered to show us the Narrowest Street in the World, Klancic Street.  Vlasta initially had trouble trying to find the street, so she found a little house with the light on, knocked on the door, and said something, including "amreechee", to the man who answered the door.  He smiled and pointed her in the right direction, and didn't seem at all bothered at being disturbed by a group of total strangers at 9:00PM.   I recently looked up the "narrowest street" factoid, and was disappointed to learn that, at least according to the Guiness Book of World Records, the narrowest street in the world is in Germany, and it is narrower than Klancic by 19cm.  But then again, the street in Germany looks more like a passageway than a street, so maybe Vlasta and Amalia were right after all.

 Amalia emailed us this picture from the end of our Vrbnik visit, which just proves that Croatians are very friendly once you've broken the ice.

Vrbnik, with Amalia and Cookie (taken by Vlasta)