Top Ten Things I’ll Miss
And now, with only a week left in Croatia, these are the things I am really going to miss about living here. There are actually far more than ten things we’ll miss, and we’ve enjoyed so many things about this culture, but I’ve narrowed it down to these ten things:
Car-Free Living
As I said in my other top ten list, I miss the freedom of having a car in a garage that I can use whenever I want without having to fill out a contract each time, but I also love not having one. It’s wonderful to be able to walk to the grocery store, the coffee shops, the kids’ activities, restaurants, public transportation, etc... This morning, like so many other mornings, Jonah has run to the corner store to pick up eggs or milk or bread, and he also can take himself to the soccer field, which is just around the corner from our building. We can’t do this at home, and we’ll miss this aspect of Rijeka.
Market
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| Rijeka Market |
Downtown, right near the opera house, there is a massive produce market. I know these are fairly typical, going back centuries, in European cities, but this one must rank among the largest. All together, it comprises about a mile of stalls and stands overflowing with heaps and heaps of local fruits, vegetables, mountains of salads, dried figs, potatoes, dried plums, herbs, garlic, flowers, nuts, honey, and everything imaginable. When wild asparagus is in season, you see a lot of wild asparagus. When cherries are in season, they are everywhere. So you can really see what is in season and how it changes over the weeks and months. There are also little stores mixed in with these microstands that sell eggs, bread, sandwiches, coffee, and pastries, but there are also three large buildings built in the last century especially for the purpose of selling fish, meat, and cheese. Even though Adam has typically been the one to do our shopping at the market, usually on the way home from his morning jog, I love going there. I love the sights and smells and the colors and the atmosphere. But we’ve all really benefitted by having this really fresh and local food available every day.
Tap water
Before we came here, we knew the tap water in Rijeka was famous.. There is a saying that goes something like: “Those who have drank the waters of Rijeka, will someday return.” Initially, we were just glad the tap water was safe to drink, which it is not in a lot of other places in Europe, but we never expected to take a drink from the tap and think, “WOW! This is really excellent water!”. Yet everytime we drink from the tap, that’s exactly what goes on in our mind. There is no chlorine, plastic, or chemically aftertaste. The water really is amazing, perfectly refreshing, cold even when coming from the tap, and absolutely delicious.
Coffee shops
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| Coffee and hot chocolate near the opera |
You can’t come to Croatia anymore and think it’s a steal. The prices here are western European, even though, sadly, Croatian salaries haven’t kept pace. The two exceptions to the rule are coffee and gelato, both of which are insanely delicious and really cheap. But it’s more than just the price of the coffee that I’ll miss. There is a culture here of really slowing down and enjoying a cup of coffee (which by the way, is very tiny by American standards – don’t’ think mug, think demitasse, and that’s a large!). There are no Starbucks, and “coffee-to-gos” are just a novelty offered occasionally in the tourist areas. There are no portable coffee mugs for sale in the stores. Why would you need one? You can sit down in a café, which are everywhere, order a coffee, and sit there undisturbed for three hours. Sometimes I would go with the kids and they would have hot chocolate, sometimes I would go alone when the kids were at acting class, and it was always relaxing and the coffee was always beyond delicious. And another things I like about the café culture… the coffee almost always comes with a glass of Rijeka’s excellent water, it’s always served in real ceramic (never plastic or Styrofoam), it never comes from a pot (it comes from a machine, one at a time), and there is never artificial sweetener in little paper bags on the tables to with which to mess up the taste of your perfectly prepared coffee.
Digestives
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| A completely staged photo |
One of the things in our cabinets that took us awhile to get the hang of were the digestive glasses, little 1 ½” tall glasses with an etched design on the outside. Before we came, we had read about slivovica, plum brandy, and how ubiquitous it was. We were unprepared for the variety of grappas and brandies that are sold everywhere from the downtown market to roadside stalls. One of our favorites is medica, honey brandy spiced with herbs like fennel and rosemary. We were offered walnut brandy on the embassy cruise around Split. We had lemon brandy, similar to limoncello, in Rovinj, Istria. I fell in love with borovica, a type of wild blueberry brandy, when I got a complementary sip in the island Krk. We’ve had fig brandy (they have to do something with all the figs!), but my current favorite is maraschino cherry brandy. Most of these are sweet, and they are just the perfect way to end your day, in one of those dainty little glasses. It’s a tradition that will be easy enough to adopt once we’re home, but it’s the variety of the brandy that I’ll likely miss. I better go have one right now.
Simplicity
In moving here, we downsized from a four-bedroom house on an acre to a three-bedroom apartment with a tiny balcony and no storage area or garage. Things were bound to get simpler. We have two trashcans to empty, one in the bathroom and one in the kitchen. We have one TV (which we never use). We have oak floors that don’t show dirt. I’m embarrassed to admit that I haven’t mopped once (just spot-cleaned). There is one small refrigerator/freezer, but no spare to make you feel guilty for not freezing the summer bounty. There are six plates, six bowls, six salad plates, and a few serving pieces, but the cabinets are not stuffed with things we rarely use. We can’t recycle very many things, so there is no array of recycling bins. If someone is going to drop by, it literally takes a half an hour to entirely straighten up and surface clean the whole apartment, and it only takes a 60 minutes to do it properly. I’m going to miss that!
Adriatic
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| The Great Fiumanka Regatta 2011 from our balcony |
We have a 180 degree view of the Adriatic from our balcony. We can see Mt. Uchka on the right, and Istria farther down. The lights of Opatija and the other fishing villages along the Kvarner coastline twinkle at night. We’ve seen a regatta, cargo ships, sailboats, fishing boats, kayakers, passenger ferries, yachts (even Tito’s Presidential yacht) come and go from the Rijeka harbor. We can walk ten minutes into the old city and be on a bus to the Lungomare, a 12K seaside promenade where you can jump in the breathtakingly clean water wherever you feel like it. In fact, we took that 12K walk today and the kids are still in their swimsuits. Looking out at our backyard pond in Michigan will just not be the same thing.
Trips
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| Orata from Vesna and Edwin's |
We calculated that of the five months we’ve been here, we have travelled about 50 days. That’s an average of 10 days per month. Some were 5 or 7-day trips, but most were day trips. If we were stationed much farther south, getting to Vienna or Budapest or Venice by car would have been too far away and too expensive to fly to. That Adam could largely work during our travels, thanks to the internet, allowed us to visit all sorts of places throughout Croatia (including 8 islands) and beyond. It’s a pace we couldn’t have maintained for much longer, but I’m really grateful that we were here in Rijeka, and that we were able to see so much of this part of the world. I’ll miss the proximity to adventure.
Fish
There are no-frozen fish in Croatia. There are no pre-filleted fish in Croatia. You buy the fish whole, so you can see the clarity of the eyeballs and look under the gills to see if the color is fresh-looking. You smell the fish to make sure it smells like the ocean, and not fish, so you know it’s fresh. In restaurants, fish is usually divided into the first-class “white fish” (such as sea bass and orada) and the second-class “blue fish” (sardines), but both are excellent. I’m afraid it can’t be avoided, but I am not looking forward to visiting the frozen fish section of Trader Joe’s to pick out the pre-filleted, frozen salmon.
Pizza
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| Truffle and arugula takeout |
One of the legacies of Venetian rule is good pizza, especially along the coast. While there are some exceptions to the rule (I’m thinking a certain thick-crusted, barely-baked ketchup and cheese pizza in Karlovac), the pizza in Croatia is marvelous. It’s typically wood-fired, and the crust is always very thin, and slightly charred from the hot temperature of the oven. It’s usually one pizza per person, just like in Napoli. Even the pizza-by-the-slice places, which you can always find across from a high school, are far better than what we get at home. We are going to have a hard time adjusting to typical American restaurant-style pizza.
