September 28 (Day Sixteen)
This is to be a travel day. We are headed south to Piran, a town on the tip of a narrow peninsula (shown on the map as a hangnail spit of land) down the Istrian coast of Slovenia, roughly facing Trieste across the sea. Estimates for the driving time from Ljubljana range from fifty minutes to an hour and twenty-five minutes—probably seventy to eighty miles.
Miha has given us careful directions for unwinding through the labyrinth of the city. Lindy wanted her own rendition and waited ten minutes on line at the front desk to request duplicate directions from the morning clerk at Hotel Park. The two routes are not quite identical, but their variance gives us some leeway in case we get lost. However, between Slavic names, one-way streets, and fast-moving traffic, neither of the trajectories are possible to adhere to exactly; we lose any semblance of both of them almost immediately and end up on obscure streets I am not able to find on the map.
I think, when you are driving in a foreign country, it is hard enough but, if the local language is English, you get a lot of help without even thinking about it. If the road signs are not in English but in another Romance language (like Italian), you can figure out some things, for instance the basic syntax and intent of instructions. Here, the only thing we have going for us is the alphabet, that it is not Cyrillic or Arabic or Japanese, so we can read street names, more or less, but there are no cognates otherwise. All it takes is an unexpected fork not quickly identifiable on the map, or an alphabet soup of information on an overhead, for us to be clueless as to where we are and which way to go. We are several forks and unreadable signs into chaos when Lindy elects to pull into a gas station. It turns out that we are actually not that far from the main road out of town. Two turns put us on it NS in a massive traffic jam.
A curious thing I have not encountered elsewhere: the radio turns on automatically to give traffic information. I know that the Slovenian words contain traffic information because: 1. What else could they be?; and 2. There is always construction or an accident immediately afterwards. If you are listening to a CD, a voice breaks in, pronounces its bulletin, and then the sound system returns to where you were on the CD. The same is true of a radio station—something we almost never listen to here, as the language is inaccessible and the music not very interesting—but trial-and-error proves it; any station is eventually interrupted by a message. In this instance the radio and CD player are both off, as the radio turns on and spits out a brief incomprehensible bulletin. Soon enough traffic comes to a halt, and we creep along a nondescript industrial road on the outskirts of town that could pass for the American Midwest about thirty years ago except for the language on signs. Up ahead we can see the flashing police lights, so we know it is not interminable. When we get to the spot, we see an upside-down car in the center of the street—tow truck, ambulance, police cars. Luckily right past it is the entrance to the highway—Zagreb, Koper, Trieste.
A style of road sign that is very helpful (once you get onto its method) is the negative-information place name, not unlike U.S. signs telling you not to exit a particular ramp. On such signs the name of the place you are leaving is crossed out. As long as you realize that the road sign means that the name displayed is behind you, not ahead, this can be very reassuring. On the way to Ljubljana, for instance, a negative Trieste was quite worrisome, as we thought for a while we were mysteriously headed back toward where we had already left. Soon enough, the meaning was obvious and welcome. Now it is good to have it absolutely confirmed that we are leaving Ljubljana. Likewise, after each choice of what we hope is the correct fork, it is reassuring to see towns crossed out as we pass them: Dragomer, Vrhnika, Logatec, Postojna—confirmation.
Before entering the highway, in encountering the accident, it was evident why there were so many policija. Yet, as we drive in the direction of the Italian border, it is not so clear why police cars and motorcycles, lights flashing, pass us continually, in fact all the way along down the coast. Policija are not only all over the highway but parked in convoys alongside it. The radio keeps turning on with Slovenian bulletins. Has there been a jailbreak, a terrorist attack? Since no roadblock intervenes, we just keep with the fast-moving traffic, wondering what surprise awaits us.
Actually this is not the ideal schedule or itinerary for Piran, as we are having to drive much of the way back to Trieste before getting to head down the Istrian coast. Our original strategy, provided by Roger and Eda while we were sitting at the deli in Freeport, Maine, was to enter Slovenia from Trieste and head immediately down the coast to spend two or three nights there, using Piran as a base to explore further, for instance into Croatia (Piran is less than an hour from Trieste, while the entire Slovenian part of the Istrian coast is barely thirty miles long before the Croatian border). Roger had been quite confident that we didn’t need a reservation in the off-season but, not wanting to repeat our difficulties in Lucca, Lindy explored Istrian hotels from Lonely Planet on-line while we were in Siena and I emailed Roger her list of candidates. He replied that none of them sounded good—“probably German tourist dives”: his kiss of death—and instead recommended Hotel Tartini, a site at which we got an immediate reservation by email for the 25th and 26th. However, when Miha informed us that the only night on which I could read at the Writers’ Guild was the 26th, we had to change the reservation.
Later he offered Saturday, the 30th, as a day he and Irena could take us on a trip in the other direction, north to Lake Bled and the castle there. Since their company and expertise were desirable whenever available, we accepted the invitation at the expense of the coast. Thus, as we were now invited to be outside Hotel Park at 10:00 AM Saturday morning, we really had only one night left for Piran, making exploration into Croatia all but impossible.
Koper is our benchmark road sign (shared with Trieste until we veer sharply south and Trieste is crossed off). Koper usually appears with its Italian name, Capodistria, a more distinctive alternative than Pirano, our destination. Koper and Capodistria are two flavors of the same town, two histories converging and sharing the landscape. The guidebook says that Capodistria comes from Caput Histriae: “capital of the Istrian peninsula.” It also happens to be the place of origin for Bostjan Nachbar, the single Slovenian basketball player the team I follow, the New Jersey Nets, though he came in a trade near the end of last season and was pretty much invisible, the last player off the bench.
After Koper, the coastal highway gradually disappears, and we are on a narrow winding road that feels like the entry to every beach town of my life: Long Island in my childhood, Cape Cod during college years, the northern California coast. The inexplicable police presence is not only undiminished; it is increasing by leaps and bounds. Deep in the countryside we pass six or seven police cars parked in a row at a minor intersection, crammed onto the shoulder. After that, there are police gathered every 500 meters. As it becomes unclear to us where we should actually descend into Piran among confusing road signs (we keep worrying we have passed it), Lindy stops to ask one of the policija standing along the road. His role must be important because he seems unamused and merely mouths a few syllables without a change of expression or movement of a hand. She gets it that Piran is still straight ahead.
Both Miha and Lonely Planet warned that we should park outside of town and walk in, something that is hard to picture before getting there. Then things materialize so quickly that almost as soon as we see the sign for entering Piran, we have come to a gate, are given a ticket, and find ourselves driving along a thin strip of highway between the vast sea to our left and hotels and restaurants to our right. We have obviously violated the warning and are “in town,” so we begin looking for the Tartini.
There are lots of hotels and restaurants to the right, but the location of ours is not evident. Just as we are about to reconsider our choice or at least ask directions, we pull into a town square were the distinction between road and sidewalk has become negligible. This marks several things simultaneously: the end of the road, the center of town, and our destination. The Tartini commands a central place at the beginning of a central piazza, which we enter counterclockwise. At the spot where the Tartini sits, the edge of the piazza comes closest to the sidewalk, constricting the road to an isthmus, but we wedge in there behind another car that is unloading, our tail sticking well out.
The scene we step into is the epitome of charming and inviting. If the oval-shaped piazza is a wheel, all but its outer hub is marble, and the stone gives off a polish that has a faint reflection, making it appear clean and luxurious, though it is really just sidewalk. A fairly typical statue of an upright figure graces the center, surrounded by an iron-railed enclosure. Later we learn that the “square” is Tartinijev trg., and the statue is Giuseppe Tartini, a local eighteenth-century violinist and composer.
Encircling the piazza are tightly hugging ornate stone buildings brightly colored, none over four or five stories: lemon, pink-gray, orange-brown, umber rust—an Italian palette. The piazza immediately rises into a hill so that much of the town hangs over the sea. A tall, thin pointed clock-tower commands the next tier of immediate foreground, “a 1608 imitation of the campanile of San Marco in Venice,” Lonely Planet tells us. People are picnicking on the marble with drinks and food, and kids are chasing one another in zigzag dashes at high speed. Some are kicking a soccer ball in a game that has no shape and traverses the whole piazza. The ball bounces off oblivious adults, even the legs of Japanese tourists working their digital cameras.
This has the feel of Santa Cruz back in the Bay Area—a beach town serving the sea, a place of recreation, with dozens of paths likw here, all leading to the water. For some reason I had pictured the Istrian coast as dark and ancient, small towns, old buildings—Miha spoke of coming here often as a child, so I imagined the late fifties. The Tartini in my imagination was a faded ramshackle spa. But this is not the case. The Tartini is sleek and modern, diners at elegant tables on its patio, a spiffy lobby. I now recall a guidebook phrase I didn’t explore imaginatively enough because it suggested an elite opulence that didn’t go with Yugoslavia: Adriatic Riviera.
I am the one checking in while Lindy guards our non-parking place with car. The young woman at the desk is speaking French to a guest she is just finishing with, and she switches to almost un-accented English for me. I tell her where we are parked and that my wife is with the car, and she says we can leave it there while unloading; then we should drive back, park outside of town, and either walk or take the free bus back. “It is only a ten-minute walk,” she recommends. She explains that we will not be charged for the present auto incursion because you get one free hour, and she gives me a coupon that will get us through the parking lot at no cost when we check out. Then she prepares a card-style key while I run back to tell Lindy the car’s okay and we should carry our stuff in.
Lindy goes to fill out the form, and I begin grabbing our things and depositing them in the lobby. Then we take the elevator to the fourth floor, the top. The machine actually goes a little higher and then does a brief dizzying drop. This will happen each time we take it, and it is about the only thing in the Tartini that I will not mind leaving behind the next day.
The room is the largest and most tasteful of our trip, not lavish but very clean and thoughtfully designed—rich aqua carpet, bed set off-center toward a corner with a thin Scandinavian headboard, stylish contemporary lighting, abstract art worth examining more than once, and a balcony onto which Lindy immediately opens the drapes. We are looking at a small inlet with motor-powered fishing boats parallel-parked on either side of it, crammed into the space so as to be almost touching one another; beyond that, majestic old stone buildings in the shape of museums or factories; beyond them blue-green water to the horizon, sailboats, and a liner. The vision is rich green (trees), white (boats), orange (the last building on land) wrapped in spectra of brilliant blue (sea and sky).
Not wanting to exceed our hour, we don’t dawdle. Passing the front desk, I ask the woman about the police we have been seeing. “Is it always this way?” I add.
She laughs. “No, we do not have police protection every day. There is a NATO meeting in the next town, Portoroz. It is only a few kilometers from here. Mr. Rumsfeld is there.”
“Oh, I thought maybe a terrorist incident.”
“They are supposed to be meeting to prevent that.”
We continue our drive around the circle, reenter the narrow road into town, figure out its method of exit after a brief wrong-way foray that elicits shouts from the toll-taker, hand him our ticket, and then continue a few meters further to a very crowded lot that requires maneuvering even to get up and down the aisles to look for a parking space. We are lucky to find a departing car right away. Lindy squeezes in, and then we head back toward the center of town.
Our thought is to take the bus but when, despite two in sight, we cannot figure out where it boards, we start walking along the spare strip of sidewalk along the sea, initially looking for the bus stop and then simply heading back toward the Tartini because it is hardly far. The vista is so dramatic that, were we not so hungry and walking-weary from prior days, we would have welcomed the stroll. Giant rocks are piled up in a makeshift seawall. They are so rugged, compact, and similar to one another that the wall has the appearance of something artificial, as though concrete was poured into this shape in order to give a natural appearance, paper maché rocks on stage. However, any close look reveals that they are very large stones of every imaginable possible shape and degree of jaggedness, like a pile of lunar meteorites, probably fitted together here by primates over centuries if not millennia. They are steep and irregular and individually huge, but there is not a very thick zone of them separating the sidewalk from the sea. Like in Trieste, intimacy between water and land prevails.
Almost from the parking lot, people have somehow contrived ways to use these boulders as a beach. Every few meters, a man or woman in a bathing suit is sitting or lying atop stones on a towel or blanket. Other people are out swimming. They are mostly older folks with old-fashioned swimming caps. They have the look vaguely of walruses, or those clubs of Arctic swimmers that come out in January to bathe; here, most are women. It is amazing how close to parked cars these ostensibly desirable bathing spots are. Ladies dozing on the rocks could reach out a foot and tap a parallel-parked car. I am assuming there are real beaches somewhere else but, if there were, I never found them.
The matter of a restaurant is foremost in our mind, but the riddle is whether we stop at one of these beachy joints along the road, purely out of hunger, or go into town and pick one of the recommended establishments out of the Lonely Planet book. One fast-food outlet right on the water does have attraction, not the least of which is color photographs of its dishes on the outside wall, most of which are fish and shellfish, including whole fishes on platters. The most striking to me is a larger-than-life poster of what appear to be broad grilled sardines. Fast food albeit, they look quite appetizing lined up silvery in a dense row. However, indecision about whether we can do better if we hold off leads us to keep walking, all the way back to the Tartini where the woman at the front desk names three good restaurants around the point that we can see from our window.
We cross the square, cut between the buildings on the other side, and find ourselves on a stretch alongside the sea, Presernovo nabrezje. To our right are mostly restaurants, one after another, running together continuously with outdoor patios and umbrellas such that it is not entirely obvious where one ends and the next begins. Tinted stone buildings, many with canopies of elaborate grillwork, rise above the restaurants, apparently ordinary apartments overlooking the bay. Their two-tone colors include off-white, dark green shutters; pale blue, white shutters; pale yellow; medium ochre; pale green. Gulls circle these buildings, and the landscape has a sandy feel, though there is no beach, only a continuation of the rocky façade, with occasional openings every sixty feet or so for simple, direct entries to the water, much like the Trieste harbor. Here they are stone steps flanked by hollow silver-colored guard-rails. You can descend along these modest gateways right into Pirano Bay. People are sitting or standing on many of them, but others are vacant. The condensed scale of the landscape continues to be striking. The rocky ledge is wider than most walls but quite narrow by any seawall standard, and it is close enough to the parallel-parked cars to be eligible for a car barrier if this were a lot. The cars and boulders are just across the sidewalk from tables where people are dining.
I know that I want to swim here, so I worry about the hour getting late. Our lunch is beginning at 2:30.
We pick Tri Vdove, The Three Widows, finding seats on the outer rim of the dining area, away from most of the cigarettes. There are not that many people at this hour, but the ceaseless insouciant smoke is a hazard. The waiter is a grumpy, impatient old-timer, and he turns out to be little help on the food. They list sardinos here, so I order them, but he insists in broken English that they are only an appetizer; he practically demands I get another dish. I pick the least expensive of the other fishes: devilfish tail. Lindy holds her position on just soup and a salad.
An hour and ten minutes later, long after Lindy has finished her food and we have polished off two bread baskets by dipping their contents in olive oil, the fishes come, first sardines and then, when I am halfway through them, the devilfish. Each is an enormous platter with potatoes and vegetables too, the appetizer no less gigantic than the main dish. There is no way I can eat both of these, and I feel both frustrated and pissed that this has happened. Nonetheless, the sardines are very good, much more interesting hot from the broiler than raw from a can. They have a fuller, more trout-like taste. When I am finished, my plate looks like a cat has been at it—racks of thin bones. Completely stuffed, I pick at the devilfish, trying not to waste it altogether. It seems a shame that a fish died, plus that someone labored to prepare this plate, and there is no one really to eat it (Lindy is also full and not really attracted anyway by fish in such a blatant form). The bill is the final insult, much larger than the cumulative prices on the menu and scrawled in indecipherable glyphs. In fact, it is not clear what we are being charged until the credit-card slip comes. We decide not to dispute the matter but leave no tip. The sardines were good, and so was the seafood soup, but we have been scammed in much the manner the guidebook warned.
Lindy decides to rest in the late sun pouring over the sea into our room while I go back out in my bathing suit, towel in hand, seeking my own perch among the bathers. The lady at the front desk suggests I continue around the point where the old fort sits, as there is more of a beach there, so I pass by numerous untenanted entries in hope of something more bountiful. Many walruses are sunning now, most of them asleep on the boulders, a few in pretzel-like positions.
Around the point by the imposing fort ruins, I see no obvious beach. In fact, it is rather deserted, perhaps because waves are hitting the shore with a great deal more force. It is not where I want to risk swimming alone.
The most notable thing here is the cats. There are so many of them, as if this is the meeting place for felines of the town. Along the water, each one commands its own boulder, and they perch there like turtles, absorbing the warmth. I count them, seven in a row on seven rocks, each distinct on its throne.
I retrace my steps along the bay and pick a vacant entry ramp, making sure that I am also out of immediate sight of our untipped waiter. I talk off my sneakers, socks, and shirt, set them in a pile willy-nilly in a crevice, and step down into the water.
It is mild, a sweet smell blowing in off the bay. I paddle around, staying close to the shore, occasionally bumping into a taller boulder underwater. Gradually I work my way deeper, though aware of “no lifeguard.” A gull hovers directly over me, and I am filled with a powerful image of swimming in the old Mediterranean, the planet’s ancient Western Sea. Though it has been used by so many cultures for so many centuries, the overall effect is not, at least not blatantly, heavy pollution or a sense of collective debris and pulverized rot of shipping and urban life back to Phoenicia and Troy, but a clearness. I can see right through the water to the rocks on the bottom, even away from shore where my feet can’t touch them. It is almost virginal. If Rome and Atlantis are still here, they are now homeopathic.
The waves toss me a bit, and I dive under, a somewhat daring move. I am on my own No one knows where I am. No one is going to rescue me. When I am underwater, I don’t exist for the world. It is transparently murky and quite mysterious—my imagination goes to Greek myths and Cretean vases. I taste the salt that burns my eyes.
I lie on a rock on my towel in a sublime state in the sun in a semi-trance, drying off, while a number of mostly chubby men and women work their way down the same passage into the water around me.
Walking back through Piran Harbor, I see the people working aboard their boats in the inlet. Many of the fishermen look like young hippies, though that is probably not at all who they are. In America they would be NASCAR more than beat. Two boats are occupied by whole families. A man and a woman work on large heavy nets. On another craft the equivalent man and woman are adjusting large flagpole-like sticks with black plastic on them.
Lindy and I decide to go for an exploratory restaurant walk before dinner and, heading in the other direction, behind our hotel, end up on Frederich Engels Street, its name a Yugoslavian throwback. One narrow, narrow alley leads into another, like in Siena and, as it is getting dark, we decide that we are better off looking for a restaurant by the water. Giving Tri Vdove a wide birth, we chose the second of three recommended by the desk clerk—Ivo. We are sitting down not long after a big lunch, so we order only bowls of soup. Each of us picks the seafood one, quite a different stew from the lunch variety, a new, rather indescribable fishy taste.
Cats dominate the patio the way that pigeons did in Ljubljana. Several patrol the tables, looking and begging for droppings. One even jumps up on the chair of an adjacent table and manages to paw a scrap before being shooed away by its diners. I want to make an offering of something solid from my soup, but Lindy, despite her love of cats, declares, “Absolutely not!”
After dinner we sit in Tartinijev trg., watching couples in romantic daguerrotypes, another juvenile soccer melee in progress—a kind of festive air all about. We go to the gelato place around the corner and each of us gets a fruit one. In trying to pay, we discover that we are both out of coins, European or Slovenian, and the smallest note we have is 20 euros. The counterman gives it back, waving us away. “Pay next time,” he says. (In the late morning I will try, but his replacement does not speak English and refuses the coins I offer. I guess that he won’t take money unless he understands why—so the gelatos were a gift of the town.)
We find ourselves back in our room with a lot of the evening left, but this is intentional. I planned to catch up on my trip journal, and Lindy wants the computer as soon as possible to stack up her email. Apparently we can then buy wireless time from the front desk.
I write a few pages of today’s notes, save (but don’t bother to back up on the flash drive), then hand the laptop to Lindy. As she changes the screen, the cursor freezes on her email, and we can’t get it to re-start. I do the only thing I know, take out the battery. Then I put it back in and restart.
The sound is horrible, a grinding noise like loose change. I immediately suspect that this is the dreaded hard-drive crash, but it takes many hours before this fact is ratified and its full ramifications hit home. All that will come up on the screen is the basic square-faced Apple icon alternating with an ominous question mark. The computer is saying that it doesn’t know what it is, has no context for itself, no beginning—nada of anything.
Because it has been behaving oddly the last few days, not responding to many commands and losing settings, I have been fearing a worm, perhaps picked up by my promiscuous wireless forays. So this is my prime consideration now. I call a tech person nine hours earlier in the day in Berkeley. Thus far, I have been avoiding the cell phone with its 99 cents a minute charge, but I suddenly have a sense of being cut off from the world down the Istrian coast. He runs me through a series of tests, holding down different keys while restarting, to by-pass systems, and “zapping the parameter ram,” as he puts it—but none of them work. I start the computer up while holding the option key down. All I get is a clock with a hand circling. At least it’s not the same old question mark, but it is actually even worse. “I can’t do anything,” hw says. “It’s a hardware problem.” He thinks not only that we cannot restore the computer but that we will likely lose all our information on the hard drive. Luckily everything important except for my last “trip journal” entry is on the flash drive, but this is still a blow and hard to recover cheerfully from. The journal was a big part of the trip for me, a way of logging each day.
Now I am slowed down to the reality of our situation here in the room. The computer is over with—and all the activitiers that go with it.
Rather glumly I take up my abandoned notebook and begin making shorthand comments about the day, so as not to lose my narrative or forget the details. After a while I resign myself to the obvious; I go downstairs and purchase computer time from the Tartini. The way it works—and I will find it is this way almost everywhere—is you get a password and a code, and you key it in when prompted on the screen—that allows them to log your time and bill you.
The first hurdle is the Slovenian keyboard. Many things about it are unusual, but two are very problematic: I do not know how to find the “@” key (the clerk, when summoned, shows me that it comes from holding down the alternate key with a letter not on an English keyboard)—and “y” and “z” are reversed. The latter is a continual problem, and I finally give up on the remedial hunt-and-peck solution and inform correspondents right at the outset that henceforth, y = z and z = y.
The first thing I have to get involved in is a complex business transaction involving a potential copublisher and, not only do I have the y/z problem, but the remote server I am going through in the absence of the direct connection on the laptop, fatcow, is losing half my emails before I can send them. Thus, I end up writing: “I just sent zou a verz long email, and it wouldnct send again.” (The “c” was actually a “c” character with an acute accent, in the place of the apostrophe I meant to type.) After another “send” failure (a lost email in which I tell him “zes, we can work together” and refer to a “yen” moment), I reconstruct the content from memory and then suggest, “Zou can call mz cell” and give him its number. Then: “Get me off this crayz kezboard.” Before the night is out, I will have run up almost $200 on the cell, but that can’t go on. I will need to get used to weird keyboards and rented time. In fact, I won’t use the cell phone for the rest of the trip.
Travel note: Most people know this, even me, but I had to rediscover it—it is better to do laundry little by little and hang it in a window or bathroom than to look for a Laundromat every time. Laundromats are hard to find, require lots of exact coins and dead time, and are fairly expensive (it cost us $20 to wash and dry our cumulative clothes in Siena). It takes about ten minutes to wash out a few items and hang them, as long as you have at least two full days for drying or, as in Piran, a hot sun with a balmy breeze and a balcony.