If on a whim I decided to let you rummage through some of the Word documents on my laptop, you might stumble upon a spartanly titled “goals.doc”. Your curiosity and nosiness would undoubtedly get the better of you, and you would soon discover a list of twenty or so “life goals” that I hope to accomplish before I clock out forevermore. Some, like my desire to visit over 100 countries, are relatively attainable, while others, like my dream to conduct an opera in spite of my glaring musical ineptitude, are, admittedly, downright silly. But go on. Laugh.
The list is consistently updated, and goals are erased and added, but one mainstay of the lot, number 6, has remained untouched for years. Snugly flanked by “fluency in 5-7 languages” and “if still single by the age of 45, resign yourself to marrying rich and romantic unfulfillment”, my personal goal of drinking tea on a Darjeeling tea estate is, I am happy to announce, within days of being realized.
The Makaibari Tea Estate of Darjeeling, India, is widely known in the “tea world” as the producer of the most expensive tea ever sold in auction (a whopping $400 USD for a kilo of tea). The plantation is also famous for being one of the first tea estates in India, the very first to go 100% organic, and also one of a select few to be FairTrade-certified as well as biodynamic. Its teas are regularly featured in Starbucks stores, bottled Honest Teas, and are reportedly the Dalai Lama’s estate of choice. It is also where I have decided to live, work, and learn about tea for a week, as for only $13 a day I am fed and housed with a local family and have unrestricted access to the grounds andprocessing plants. I have even found myself plucking tea leaves and carting around wheelbarrows of tea from one processing station to the next.
Visitors come to Makaibari for a variety of reasons. A Dartmouth grad student is here to complete her dissertation on FairTrade, a Japanese photographer is building up his portfolio with candid shots of factory workers and tealeaf harvesters, and a doctor-to-be from Scotland is offering medical assistance to local villagers. I, far less nobly, came with the sole desire to learn as much as I could about tea cultivation, drink ungodly quantities of tea, and check off the next “must-do” on my list. Naturally.
Days usually start with a hearty breakfast in my host family’s kitchen, followed by a brisk walk to the factory, where Makaibari’s second flush Darjeeling (first flush leaves are harvested in March) are being processed everyday. I observe and assist with plucking, drying, rolling, fermenting, sorting, etc. andthis generally ends at around 4 in the afternoon. This is all meant to keep me occupied before the final event: the tea tasting that is slated for my last day on the estate. Under the tutelage of colorful Rajah Banarjee, owner of Makaibari, I will be indulging in and assessing some of the rarest and most expensive teas ever produced.
Mark my words: Number 6 in “goals.doc” will be complete before I leave for Thailand on July 2nd.
One need only look at the abject trajectory my blog has taken to know the sad truth: the more I’ve traveled, the lazier I’ve become. From its ambitious start, my blog entries were an almost weekly ritual, something to which people could refer relatively often and almost always be surprised with something new. Sadly, my blog has deteriorated to an unspeakable low.
The reasons are numerous, but a hearty dearth of motivation is probably the most obvious one. Sometimes it’s just impossibly difficult to sit myself down and churn out a well-organized blog entry when there are so many things outside my doorstep that remain unexplored. The increasingly common lack of quick, reliable Internet connections is a second reason for the slowdown, but it’s nothing a good ol’ prewritten entry in a Word document couldn’t fix—so I have no excuse.
But I digress.
I am (finally) writing you from the tranquil banks of Lake Dal, the body of water that surrounds the largely unknown Indian city of Srinagar, the capital of India’s hotly contested Kashmir region. For anyone following the news, India’s parliamentary and presidential elections have been taking place over the last couple of days, with a few pockets of unrest in Kashmir, but I am far away from the hotspots. So rest assured I am still in one piece.
I arrived in India ten days ago after wrapping up a two-month journey in the Middle East, of which one month was spent entirely in Egypt, where I unashamedly lived out my childhood dreams of being an intrepid, bearded Egyptologist, exploring the ancient temples of Luxor and the Pyramids of Giza in Cairo, with breaks on the beach in Dahab as well as the sun-soaked, nostalgic Alexandria.
From Alexandria I flew to Dubai, where I spent a mind-bogglingly expensive two days wandering the gilded streets of the world’s current hotspot for the rich and powerful. In all honesty, I found it to be one of the most disgustingly commercial and “plastic” places I had ever laid eyes on, in some ways even putting Los Angeles to shame. Besides, where else on Earth do tourists go primarily to see a couple of malls and a super-deluxe hotel? In any case, the most fascinating aspect of Dubai was its ever-present diversity. This emergent land of opportunity has attracted droves of Indians, Pakistanis, Iranians, Egyptians, Americans, and Europeans, all coexisting against a backdrop of plastic, gold, and desert. As such, the cuisine is excellent and varied, every third person you see has a completely different ethnic background, and English is bar none the de facto operative language of a city that is already bursting at the seams with expatriates. It was absolutely fascinating to see.
After the jarring extravagance of Dubai, I arrived in Delhi, where I quickly realized I was no longer in the Disneyland of the Gulf. Delhi (and, arguably, India as a whole) is an assault on the senses, a place that irreversibly alters all notions of personal space, noise, cleanliness, propriety, and in some cases, shame. The heat is intense and unforgiving (reaching well over 100˙F/40˙C every day), and compounded with unceasing traffic and impenetrable pollution, Delhi, in the words of a dear friend, is certainly not a “city for beginners”. Nevertheless, I somehow managed to stay there for a little over a week (in no small part due to my awesome CouchSurfing hosts, François and Naresh).
After Delhi I knew I wanted to head north to some of the well-known “hill stations”, where tourists and Indians alike come to seek refuge from the oppressive temperatures of Delhi and, in these months, the rest of India. I started reading a bit on Kashmir, a region better known for its turbulent political situation and carpets than its stunning natural beauty, for which it should be duly recognized. I was sold on the place after seeing a series of photos taken in the region, and promptly bought a plane ticket (my alternative was a 35-hour bus ride) to Srinagar, the region’s capital.
Kashmir is a whole other world. As I was landing in Srinagar, I saw nothing but towering green mountains, misty villages, and lakes as far as the eye could see. In fact, I am staying on one such lake, the gargantuan Lake Dal, where I have a room in a house—er—boat. Well, a houseboat.
During the British Raj, the sovereign of Kashmir outlawed foreign ownership of Kashmiri land, so in a clever attempt to circumvent this law, wealthy Brits summering in Kashmir constructed and lived in ornate houseboats, which obviously do not require land. Currently I am staying in the Baktoo Palace, a floating residence complete with a cook, transportation when I need it, and the opportunity to explore the Himalayan Mountains on full-blown mountain treks.
In that spirit I have decided to use this houseboat as a base until the middle of June so that I am able to fully and adequately explore a region of India that has so much to offer. In addition to countless other detours around Kashmir and Ladakh, toward the end of May I will be embarking on an epic, two-week-long trek through the Himalayan Mountains with the help of experienced guides and the Indian equivalent of a sherpa, all the while relying on the generosity of Tibetan Buddhist monks to house me along the way.
The trek will lead me from Srinagar to Leh, a city with more Tibetan exiles than mountains, where I hope to spend a week or so. After Leh, the plan is to head down to Dharamsala, the seat of the exiled Tibetan government and the Dalai Lama, venture to Amritsar to bask in the glory of the Sikh Golden Temple, bite the bullet and stop off briefly in the sizzling cities of Agra (Taj Mahal) and Varanasi (the holiest city in Hinduism), and, finally, end my two-month Indian odyssey in Darjeeling, the most famous tea-producing city in the world, for where I am desperately trying to arrange an extended stay on a tea plantation to learn more about the cultivation of my favorite drink.
India has been one of the more anticipated destinations on my itinerary, and despite the difficulty of traveling here I was well-prepared for the chaos of this place. Call me contrived, but I have no doubt I will leave this country with a completely different worldview and enhanced sense of self. I can only wait.
For the last couple weeks I’ve been traveling throughout the Middle East with Jesse, a twenty-something from Oxford who shares my ribald sense of humor, and is generally just a perfect traveling companion.
After a week in Lebanon Jesse and I decided to head to Israel. Seeing as Israel is technically still at war with both Lebanon and Syria, our plans had to be kept under wraps lest we be found out and thrown into, of all places, a Syrian or Lebanese jail. In fact, if there is any evidence of a trip to Israel on your person (Israeli passport stamp, hostel business cards, etc.), you are systematically refused entry into either country.
From Beirut we discreetly headed back to Damascus (braving expensive Syrian transit visas, border checks, and a hefty departure tax), and spent the night in Damascus to rest up for what promised to be a grueling journey the following day.
Unfortunately, we got off to a late start and arrived at the bus station around 10 AM, spent an hour waiting for a service taxi to fill up, and didn’t get on the road until 11:30 or so. The trip to Amman was comfortable but long, and the driver was unfailingly eager to stop off for coffee, snacks, gasoline, and on one occasion—a speedy carwash. All in a day’s work for a Syrian taxi driver.
Arriving in Amman at 4 in the afternoon, we were informed that the King Hussein Bridge, the very border crossing to which we were on our way, had closed two hours prior to our arrival. Desperate to get to Israel, we snagged a $20 taxi ride to another crossing 125 km away, and got there with more than enough time to get through security, hop on a bus, and arrive in Jerusalem at a decent hour.
Or so we thought.
The Israeli border is the strangest place I’ve ever been to. The sterility of the building aside, nothing is quite like seeing teenagers no older than you sporting military uniforms, stone cold countenances, and giant m16s. They yell at you, boss around the travelers behind you, and don’t bat an eye at being the unreasonable you-know-whats they are. These guys are tough, and the girls are badass with a capital B.
After I put all of my belongings through a metal detector a little smaller than a Ford Excursion, I approached an attractive but ill-spirited passport attendant flanked by two guards. As soon as Jesse and I presented our passports with Syrian and Lebanese stamps, the whole office seemed to go on high alert and so set the stage for an episode of questioning that I don’t think even Law and Order could top.
To make things worse, we were bearded and horribly disheveled. We also both had two passports (one of which had evidence of extended trips to the “enemy”).Thirdly, the person we were staying with in Jerusalem was on CouchSurfing.com, a concept that was evidently totally foreign to Israeli border control:
“Who are you staying with in Jerusalem?”
“Lara”
“Lara who?”
“I don’t know”
“How do you know her?”
“CouchSurfing. It’s an online organization.”
“So you’ve never met her in person.”
“No.”
“Hm. Please wait here some more.”
Some other gems of theirs included:
1)What is your grandfather’s name?
2)Where were your parents born?
3)What are your parents’ birthdates?
4)What is your student ID number at UCSD?
5)Why did you use your Croatian passport in Syria and Lebanon?
6)What is there even to see in Syria and/or Lebanon?
7)Tell us every country you have been to in the last six months
8 )Do you have any Syrian and/or Lebanese contacts or relations?
The questioning had lasted several hours by this point, and if it lasted any longer the border would close, meaning anyone with an incomplete security clearance would have to return to Jordan, purchase another Jordanian visa, and figure out where to spend the night in a desolate Jordanian border town. The Israeli border security process would then start from scratch the following morning. That’s when the pressure really started to mount.
Meanwhile, throngs of generous Israelis passed us by, offering lifts to Jerusalem “if we wrapped up the security stuff within 15 minutes or so”. This happened three times—and all three times we had to see them go while some 18 year-old guard determined which terrorist organization I belonged to.
In the end, we got our clearance about three minutes before they closed, but by that point we had no choice but to take a taxi all the way to Jerusalem from the border (which set us back about $50 USD each). I was fuming, but I eventually accepted it as a necessary blow to my budget.
But these are all things that happen on the road, and luckily our host in Jerusalem was so great that we forgot about our troubles at the border. Well—nearly.
In Eastern Orthodoxy, Mount Athos is quite possibly the holiest place on Earth. Alleged to have been blessed by the Virgin Mary herself, this small, remote peninsula with twenty Orthodox monasteries is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and getting there is only possible by boat and only for those with permits.
A permit (diamonētērion) for the oldest monastic state in the world isn’t easy to come by. For starters, only men need apply. The peninsula is dedicated to the Virgin Mary, so any female presence on the Mount, human or otherwise (yes, that includes livestock), would, according to the monks, desecrate her name.
Secondly, priority is given to Orthodox Christians. Like Islam’s hajj to Mecca, coming to Athos is a sacred pilgrimage, a journey that all Orthodox males are encouraged to make at some point in their lives. But thankfully, unlike Mecca, the “Holy Pilgrimage Bureau of Mount Athos” also gives permits to Hell-bound non-Orthodox applicants, but only on the condition that they satisfy requirement numero uno (that they are male) and provide a legitimate reason for their pilgrimage. Also, it should be noted, at any given time on any day of the year, only ten non-Orthodox pilgrims are allowed on Mount Athos. During peak seasons non-Orthodox permit seekers can expect to wait anywhere from six to eight months before being able to enter. But once armed with a permit, a pilgrim is granted a period of five days on the Mount with unrestricted access to all twenty monasteries.
Five days on Athos can be used for a whole host of reasons. Some of the pilgrims I met had come to cultivate a deeper relationship with God, shake a drug habit, reflect, or, as was the case for yours truly, satisfy a burning urge to live with monks for a week.
I had dialed the “Bureau” while in Croatia to see if they had spots available for an affable heathen like me around the time I was planning on being in Greece. I sent them a copy of my passport and a brief note explaining why I wanted to chummy it up with monks (i.e., well-crafted half-truths about my path to spiritual self-discovery), and several days later I received an e-mail confirming my placement.
On the first of March, I took a bus to Ouranoupoli, a town whose only claim-to-fame is being Athos’ departure point, spent a restless night in a local hotel, and prepared for the wildest ride of my life.
The next morning I finally reached the gates of Dionysiou. I was greeted by Father Pavlou, a towering monk of fifty-five or so who seemed to laugh as much as he blinked. He put his hand on my shoulder and led me into the guest area where I signed the guestbook, helped myself to endless Greek coffee and Turkish delight, and mingled with a handful of pilgrims.
I have to admit, however, that my arrival in Dionysiou was untimely. It was the period leading up to Easter and the monks were living extra abstemiously. And they prayed a whole lot more.
In that vein, services were grueling and frequent. At 12:45 AM, church bells woke the monks and pilgrims of Dionysiou to announce the beginning of prayers. Services usually lasted until 3 AM, only to be followed by another 2-3 hours of prayer at 7 AM.Orthodox services entailed a calculated mixture of vespers, genuflections, and relic/icon kissing (Dionysiou is the proud owner of the right hand of John the Baptist, which kind of looks like a gaudy Pirates of the Caribbean prop…only holier…).I got most of the motions down pat, and actively participated, until it had transpired that I wasn’t Orthodox, and was then politely relegated to a kind of anteroom where I could observe services from afar. Who knows where I would have been sent if they knew how I really felt about organized religion.
Around 11 AM, we had lunch. It was exceptionally meager fare, usually just broth and rice with some olives, but it was nothing my cache of bananas and bread couldn’t supplement (rations I bought knowing just how little food we would be eating at the monastery). Meals were around 15 minutes long, or however long it took the monk reading aloud from the Bible to finish up. As soon as he was done, a bell rung and everyone was to stop eating. For those who didn’t quite eat fast enough, Greek coffee and Turkish delight always waited for us in the kitchen after every meal, a luxury I unhesitatingly took advantage of (even on a full stomach).
When I wasn’t sipping coffee in the kitchen, I was steeping tea every morning with Father Modestos, an English monk I met with largely because he was one of two people at Dionysiou whose knowledge of English went beyond “Yeah LA American boy!” Modestos, who presumably had a non-Greek name before becoming a monk, has been at Dionysiou for 15 years, and was just the person to answer all of my questions regarding Orthodoxy, the distinctions among Christian denominations, and the inner workings of “monkdom”.
As it turns out, being a monk doesn’t just involve prayer and renouncing all of one’s worldly possessions. Kind of like doctors, these guys are generally expected to specialize. At Dionysiou, for instance, Modestos is the icon painter, another tends the gardens, someone else cooks the food, and an “electrician monk” does his best to make sure there is no short-circuiting during services (lighting in Dionysiu is electric). But by far the coolest monk position, sadly discontinued, is that of the “look-out monk”. Like every monastery on Athos, Dionysiou is home to some priceless religious antiquities, so once upon a time one lucky monk was charged with scanning the Aegean Sea to make sure it was pirate-free. I still don’t know how he was able to alert the other monks from that cliff; my only conjecture is that he yelled, “guys…GUYS…PIRATES!!!” really loudly. Or something.
In general, the monks really surprised me with their knowledge of current events and understanding of how the real world works. I suppose it was easy for me to forget that they all at one point had day jobs, cars, and TV sets. I was also surprised to learn that some technologyhad in fact made it to the shores of Dionysiou. I was chatting with a younger monk about the tensions between Greece and Turkey when a digitized Für Elise cut me off mid-sentence, at which point Father so-and-so dug around in his pocket and whipped out a shiny new Samsung. He looked at the screen, looked at me, then said, “I need to take this.” What? A monk with a cell?
I had a unique Athos experience, as one is normally expected to “monastery hop” from one holy structure to another over the allotted period of five days. That was my intention, but a storm hit Athos around the 3rd day I was there and I had no choice but to stay in Dionysiou and wait until the Θάλασσα (“sea”, a word the monks threw around like it was their job) had subsided. Initially the notion of being cooped up in Dionysiou for well over a week was a tad frustrating, but in the end it gave me the opportunity to develop meaningful relationships with the pilgrims, monks, and staff of Dionysiou monastery.
In sum, my time on Athos was a wonderful experience I wouldn’t trade for the world.
If you’re interested, my Dad made a slideshow of some of the pictures I took during my experience:
A video of me during the sunny “aftershocks” of the storm:
And, for your non sequitur of the day, me dancing in Athens:
It has been awhile since I’ve last written. But what with all the traveling, being lazy, and inability to find inspiration to update my blog—it was unavoidable. Ha.
For those of you who were unaware, a bit over a month ago I flew home last minute from Milan to attend my grandmother’s funeral service in California. It was a gorgeous ceremony, and a much-needed opportunity to catch up with friends and family, not to mention recharge my batteries a bit before continuing my journey.
From Los Angeles I flew to Rome, picking up where I left off.Rome was an incredible city; few other cities can pull off that curious juxtaposition of ancient and modern so well. I was very impressed.
My brother had warmed me about Florence, saying it was a city that only needed a night or so, but despite his advice I spent four nights in the former Medici playground. For the most part, I didn’t tire of it, as I also managed to explore a bit of Tuscany, visiting Siena and Pisa.
I then arrived in Padova, a worthy city in its own right, but also one that is conveniently located thirty minutes away from Venice. Accommodation in Venice is scarce and what little of it exists is expensive, so Padova just makes sense. Venice is probably one of the most surreally beautiful cities I’ve ever seen in my life, but it is bar none the most expensive place I’ve ever been to. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been to some very expensive cities, namely Vienna and London, but even in these cities you can still manage to escape 9-euro cheese pizzas and 18-euro + transportation passes (Venice has a “waterbus”, their equivalent of a metro system, only slower and a little wetter). I was so miserable knowing how much I was shelling out each day that for dinner I went to a supermarket, bought a frozen pizza, and abjectly dined on some ice-cold step somewhere. Earlier that day I had seen Venetian seagulls compelled to consume one of their own (out of frugality, I can only assume)—and I knew exactly where they were coming from.
But as they say, where there is manure there is a pony, and in Venice I came into contact with Katie and Jonathan, an American teaching English in France and one of her French friends. It just so happened we had identical itineraries for the following week so we traveled together to Trieste (more a via point than anything else), Ljubljana, Bled, and Zagreb. It was nice to have some travel buddies again; if you recall in Morocco I had a few and they all turned out to be great experiences. This was no exception.
After Zagreb we parted ways and I began my tour of Croatia, better known to me as “the motherland”. Croatia is where half of my family comes from, and anyone who has exchanged more than eight words with me is already well aware of this. What can I say? I’m proud of my roots.
Zagreb is a leafy, extremely livable city that resembles most other Central European cities. And for its size it has a fairly vibrant nightlife and a handful of impressive cultural institutions.
The Plitvice Lakes are around two hours or so away from the capital, so it was there that I spent a nice weekend with CouchSurfers after my stay in Zagreb.
My next stop, Split, is Croatia’s second-largest city. It plays home to Diocletian’s Palace, the 1700 year-old retirement home of a Roman emperor better known for his persecution of Christians than his Golden-Years digs. I saw the must-sees in a couple of days, but I decided to stay a little over six nights in Split to soak it up as much as I could. From there I saw the beautiful city of Trogir, and then made an unsuccessful attempt at finding distant relatives on Hvar island, the outcome of which was:
Dubrovnik seemed a logical next destination. George Bernard Shaw called it “Heaven on Earth” and I can’t say I blame him. Every night I ventured to the same cliff to catch the sunset with three fellow American travelers I met: Andrew, Andrew, and Gabe.
But I don’t think Heaven has con artists. When we first arrived in Dubrovnik, two innocuous-seeming elderly Croatian women approached us and offered something we couldn’t refuse: a room in a sumptuous guesthouse for 10 euros a night. As this is without doubt Croatia’s most expensive city, we bit. But when we realized that the city was not in fact “15 minutes away”(it was 50), that there weren’t “other travelers staying in the same guesthouse” (we were the only people there), and that heat and warm water would cost us another 10 euros a night, we left after two nights. Let me rephrase that: we were kicked out when we refused to pay for the heat that they had turned on without forewarning us.
The four of us then caught a bus to Montenegro, where we trekked around the Kotor Fjord (the southernmost in Europe) and basked in the curiously warmer Montenegrin sun (compared to the chilly weather we had in Croatia) before we all parted ways.
As I write I am now back in Dubrovnik, where I will take a ferry destined for Greece. I don’t have a cabin, so I will be sleeping on the deck for two nights. Wish me luck.
People have been asking about a recent Facebook status of mine that casually informed everyone that I was almost arrested in Slovenia. Well, it’s true. But it’s not so grave as you may think—and besides, it was all my fault.
You see, as an American passport holder I am allowed visa-free travel within the Schengen Zone (a coalition of several EU-member countries that decided it was in their best interest to make foreigners’ lives more difficult) for three months over a period of 180 days. If you are approaching your three-month limit, it’s no walk-in-the-park to renew: you have to leave the Zone for an additional three months before reentering.
In my travels so far I have almost exclusively been in Schengen-member countries (with the exceptions of Morocco, England, and Ireland). It didn’t don on me until halfway through my trip that I probably wasn’t allowed to be in Europe indefinitely, so I did some research and sure enough, my Schengen visa was to expire sometime around January 10th or so. Crap.
Luckily, I came up with an “ingenious” plan to foil Schengen immigration authorities. As I carry two passports, one American and the other Croatian, I decided that on my way to Italy I would pass through Croatia, spend a whopping three hours walking around Zagreb to get my American passport stamped out of the Schengen Zone, and then take the next train to Padua so that I could present my Croatian passport at the border, which would effectively give me another ninety days in the Zone. Theoretically, as far as they are concerned, I would appear to be just be another Croat coming to Italy for the holidays.
When I arrived in Zagreb, all was going according to plan. My American passport had a glorious Schengen exit stamp in it and I was having the time of my life cloying myself with čepavčići at a nearby restaurant. Sated and excited to play James Bond with border control, I boarded my train for Padua and slept reasonably well in my train couchette until around 1 AM, when we arrived at the Slovenian/Schengen border.
Time to check passports.
A towering Slovene arrives and looks at my unshaven, tired, and generally ugly face and asks for my travel documents. Somehow at that ungodly hour I had the cojones to hand him my Croatian passport and smugly put my feet up on the bed in front of me so as to give the impression that this was just another day at the office.
What I failed to foresee, however, was that these officers’ job is dealing with Croats crossing into Slovenia, and Slovenian is a Slavic language (very closely related to Croatian), so it is only reasonable that they know Croatian. Naturally, he sees my nationality and asks me a very basic question in Hrvatski. And naturally, I don’t understand.
“Što?” I ask. What?
He repeats the question.
Relying on the one word I did understand, gdje (where), I overenthusiastically reply, “Venezia!” Apparently, this is not the answer he is looking for, and asks another question. I shrug. He tells me to wait for him to return (in English, of course).
After a harrowing fifteen minutes, he comes back with two ludicrously intimidating border guards, one of whom speaks near-perfect English. “Do you know the consequences of traveling with a false passport?”
“Excuse me?” At this point I am sweating bullets.
“Do you find it unusual that you carry a Croatian passport and yet you are unable to speak Croatian?”
“No?” (What am I supposedto say?)
He comes at me with a flurry of more ominous questions and I answer each one to the best of my ability. After a taxing ten minutes of this he finally concludes, “I think we are going to have to detain you for more questioning. Please wait here.”
Now running only on adrenaline (my common sense had since departed), I interject, and passionately explain to him that it is a legally obtained passport issued by the government of Croatia in accordance with their law regarding nationality and Croatian descendants, and that it is clearly stated on the passport that I was born in the United States and received the passport in Los Angeles; hence my poor language skills.
My monologue leaves the guards unfazed. “So you are visiting family in Croatia, then?” they ask.
Looking to end what has already been a 40-minute delay at the border, I reply in the affirmative.
“Where exactly in Croatia?”
“…S…Split.”
Pause. The main guard looks at me, looks at his colleagues, looks at me again, then stamps the suspect passport. “Welcome to Schengen.”
All that comes out of my mouth is a sheepish “thanks.”
He turns off my light, shakes his head, and tells me to “learn some Croatian.”
I smile uncomfortably and bid him a glib “Laku noć” (Good night).No response.
vaga·bund·us 