Words

Steve’s been asking me to post wurds. Here are some wurds. 

Boats of all condition are everywhere here. From the top of a hill in Pula, I can see a large ship building facility, and the tops of boats stick up above the building roofs. The roofs are also dotted with antennas. Steve thinks the antennas look like fish bones, floating in the blue blue sky.

It gets really blue every couple days here due to a wind called the bora, which comes in from the north. It pushes out all the clouds and the sky is left thick blue, no discernable pollution. From the top of a hill in Liznjan we can look out and see a hundred kilometers on some days, onto the calm blue Adriatic to a long coastal island to the mountains beyond.

Sunday we went to our hosts’ house. Milena made a plate of whole fish smeared with garlic and herbs, and a plate of calamari sauteed in garlic and olive oil. We started with a concoction of dried fish mixed with what I think is mayonnaise. Tasted like a zesty roasted tuna. I guessed that it was cod, and we looked up the English name and I was correct. While we ate the fish, Milena stirred up some pancakes, which she smeared with nutella. Yum!

I’ve always been hesitant to eat seafood unless I know what I’m eating. A lot of the seafood I’ve had in the States has just not been done correctly or the fish isn’t fresh. But here I’m learning that even if it has tentacles, I’ll like it. So I don’t question, I just open my mouth and gobble it up.

Milena taught us how to make coffee on the stove. We have a special water pot which is tapered as it goes up to the neck. We fill it about 2/3 with water, and boil. Then remove from heat. Add ten heaping teaspoons of expresso coffee, and mix it slowly at the top until all the clumps are dissolved. At this point, Milena takes a teaspoon of the top coffee grit and puts it into each cup with a teaspoon of sugar. Then heat the coffee a little more, allowing the coffee granules at the top to sink in a bit. No straining of the coffee, just pour into the cups. It’s really, really strong and I can write lots afterwords.

Watching MTV this morning with Steve. We see some type of small concert venue and Northern Light is playing. I’m looking at his performance, I like it. But I think our friend Blue of Urban Jellen would do better. It’s so cool to have met him.

Croatia vs. Krakow – I want to write more extensively about this. Immediate thing that comes to mind is that Croatia is just so beautiful. I’m getting my eyes saturated with nature. Krakow had its own beauty, but it was urban, grimy. In Krakow, you can tell that it was a former communist country. Croatia is different, people seem happier.

Practically, we can’t settle in Croatia because there are not enough people here. We need a place with a large English-speaking community. It would take me a long time to learn enough Croatian to be able to satisfy my yen for conversation. And I think it’s an imposition for me to expect Croatian intellectuals to speak with me in English.

That said, I love love love talking with Sabina, Milena’s daughter. She’s preparing to go to graduate school for economics. She has a genuine interest in it, and she is interested in the world and ideas. She has not spent any significant time in an English speaking country, yet I am constantly floored by her fluency. She speaks English very well.

We’re thinking of returning to the US later next year for a poetry tour. Also, I want to interview some people, get more material for Steve’s biography. It’ll be an opportunity for me to retrieve the info in his journals as well. So probably a month in Cleveland, and a couple weeks to a month in Boston, W. VA and Chicago, and also a few days in New York and some western cities. Then we have a rough idea that we’d like to spend a couple months in Mexico.

Also during our time in the US it seems a good opportunity to submit manuscripts. I’m getting together three manuscripts: Steve’s stories, his poems, and my poems.

We think maybe in the spring we’ll return to Krakow for a bit because we know some people there and it seems to make sense to return.

We’re also interested in traveling out East, but it seems difficult to arrange and expensive to get there as well. We need to go to an embassy to get visas.