Why is this Birthday different from all other Birthdays?

Cool Hat!

It all started with us driving down the coast of Croatia with boob-dice hanging from our rear view mirror. Wait, no, let me try again. I will start by saying that my roommate and frequent travelmate, Chris, may be the luckiest person ever.

But before I get there, I'll just give a quick recap of the weekend before the one that left me on a 40-hour trip from Zadar, Croatia to Oslo, Norway. Soon after I arrived in Norway, I joined a choir. We ended up participating in a Norwegian Choir Festival that happens every 3 years in Trondheim. So me and Fiona (my American friend who joined the choir with me) headed up to Trondheim on a night bus, arrived in the early early morning, and walked around Trondheim in the rain. But the festival itself turned out really cool. Yes, we did have more singers on stage than we had in the audience, but it's been a really long time since I've sang with a choir that big (400 people, maybe?). But, since all the choirs were Norwegian, Fiona and I were the only ones who didn't know Norwegian. We sat around, clueless, isolated, and void of any choral direction. I picked my nails. However, as I mentioned to one of the other guys in the choir (it's mixed-gender, ages 18-70) that I had no idea what the director was saying, one of the guest choir members turned to me and said, "Neither do 70% of the rest of the people here. Her dialect is awful." I let out a laugh, and I continued, apparently along with 70% of the rest of the choir, into blank stares and cluelessness.

The rest of the weekend was walking around the excited-about-spring, quaint town with the oldest cathedral in Scandinavia, a huge student population and 1 of the 2 synagogues in Norway. We also had a banquet full of Norwegian traditions and toasts. We sang one song in English. It was called, "Sit on my Face." The rest were songs everyone else knew and screamed in drunken merriness. I ate my food quietly lol. But it was really awesome to experience something so rooted in Norwegian choral tradition. Everyone, and I mean everyone (20 years old, 50 years old, 80 years old) got drunk. We were not the only ones drinking in the coat closet ; ).

But as the weekend came to a close, Fiona and I took a gorgeous bus ride back (about 8 hours) full of sun, mountains, flowing icy rivers, and steep valleys. When we stopped halfway through, we realized it was warm enough to wear just a T-shirt. Then we pushed it even further and bought ice cream. Spring's comin'!

View from the bus back from Trondheim

Our first stop in our drive from Zadar to Dubrovnik

But back to Croatia. 2 months ago, I found a $35 round-trip flight from Oslo to Croatia, and decided to go to Zadar to celebrate my 21st birthday. I spread the word around my friends and roommates, and Chris (Canadian), Aurelien (French), Ellen (Australian), and Kaitlin (Chris's Friend from Canada) decided to join me, making for quite an interesting and multi-cultural group. We took a 6AM flight in which I got an hour of sleep all night. As we walked out of the airport, we saw a bunch of car rental huts. I turned to Chris and said, "Yo, we should look into renting a car. There are 5 of us, a bus can't be much cheaper." An enthusiastic "Yes" landed us Kroner the Car. No age check, cheap, good gas mileage. We were soon driving with the windows down, headed to downtown Zadar to walk around downtown a bit, pick up some cash, and hit the road for an 8-hour drive down the coast to Dubrovnik. We picked up some pizza, some nipply car ornaments, and got on the glorious and sunny road.

The drive was easy and fairly deserted. Just small towns and pretty views. At one point, we all got texts from Lebara (our Norwegian cell phone company), "Welcome to Bosnia and Herzegovina." We all laughed, figuring it was a mistake. Yet 30 minutes later, we were going through a border check. I rolled down the window. She said something in Croatian. "English?" "Oh, English. Go ahead." So off we rolled, seeing whole-roasted pigs on the side of the road, stopping for cheap alcohol and CDs for our car, and weaving through windy highway.

Dubrovnik

Dubrovnik

Soon, we arrived in Dubrovnik, a stunning port city with an old city in the middle surrounded by a thousand-year old stone wall. No cars, carts, or police in the old city. Just people, squares, steep side streets, and the friendliest of stray cats. Anna, the woman who owned the flat we stayed in, met us at the car and took us to a flat just for the 5 of us. She left us and we went to get fresh, uncleaned mussels from a sea-side restaurant. Then we went back to begin drinking Maraschino dessert drink (Though we believed it was brandy, and drank it as such). It soon began to taste like the worst cough syrup you have ever had, but we kept going, and made it outside fairly drunk to look for a club to go to and to celebrate me turning 21 at midnight. We sang outside, and soon realized that the city was pretty dead. Off season, Wednesday night, and a bit rainy, we soon found an open hookah bar. I was having a fantastic night. Then, before the hookah was ready, I passed out from lack of sleep, driving all day, and dessert drink. So, they tried to wake me up. I didn't wake up. They took pictures. They played me like a drum. I dreampt of artichokes and beef jerky.

Soon, they were ready to find some food. I was woken up, hoisted on Aurelien and Chris's shoulders, and dragged through the streets of Dubrovnik like a hovering banshee. They ran into a guy who said he knew where we could get food. We wound up at a small local bar full of Croatian war veterans. I was semi-awake at this point when they put a vat of Croatian liquor and told to finish it. That it was on them. That 20 years ago, Dubrovnik had no running water or electricity because of the war. And now that they had things to share, they wanted to share it with us. I took a shot, passed back out. I woke up mid-carry on the way back to the flat. I saw a stray cat. The plan from the get-go was to bring a stray cat back, and that's exactly what we did. I don't remember how, but I woke up in my fancy button-down red shirt, jeans, and Coconut curled in a ball at my knees, purring and rubbing himself on me. In a fantastic daze, I cuddled with him (or her, we're not sure) until he realized that we had no food for him :' (. But I let him out of our front door, as he was ready to leave. I forgot to open the downstairs door though. So when we left to get breakfast, the hallway reeked of cat piss. Whoops.

But we then went to grab breakfast (complete with a stray kitten named Tina sleeping in a ball on the extra chair). After omelets and coffee, we decided to walk around the wall of the city in one of the nicest days I've ever experienced. The air smelled so fresh. So we walked around, getting better and better views of the old city, the surrounding city, and the surrounding cliffs and beaches until we decided to get ice cream and dinner.

After dinner (Pizza), we drank Croatian beers and made our way to a local bar, searching for Coconut the entire time. We chased him onto the scaffolding of a renovated building, but he just stared at us. At the bar, we talked Croatian history, politics, and other highly intellectual things. On our way back after the bar closed, we soon realized that a dog was following us. Not new to housing stray animals, Dubrovnik Dog was soon being fed pretzels in our flat. Now, I was a fan of Coconut, so I left the doors to our apartment open and prayed. Soon, we heard a bark. Dubrovnik Dog saw Coconut creep in before we did! So we kicked Dubrovnik Dog out, cuddled with Coconut, and chatted the remnants of my birthday away.

The next day we drove back to Zadar, slowly realizing that we were not going to get a flight home. We stopped in Split (where we saw wild peacocks), and made our way to the hostel in Zadar. As we pulled in, we saw a whole group of Croatian college students and their professor having a party. So we checked in, grabbed wine, and mixed the red wine with coke (new for me, guys). Soon, we were having a grand ole time at a local club with a live band. I made an effort to learn Croatian. Hvala - 'thank you'. Pusho Mi Corat - 'Suck my dick'. That was it. I said each of them quite frequently. Great time.

The morning was a bit of a panic trying to figure out how to get home despite a raging Icelandic volcano. We checked the rental car place, trains, buses, flights, news. We ended up finding a bus to Sweden from Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, that we had no intention of visiting. But after a mellow last night of dinner and looking at all of our pictures from the trip, we woke up at 6 to make the 4 hour drive to Zagreb. And by we, I mean that I drove while everyone slept. But we got to Zagreb, parked the car, and walked into the shadiest bus station I've ever seen. At the counter, we were informed that "There are no seats left on the bus. The next one is in 5 days. But you can go to the platform an hour before and see if you can talk your way onto the bus." So, in a panicked-stricken few hours, we became thoroughly excited and pleading for a 35-hour bus trip through Europe.

This is where Chris comes in. Somehow, as he always manages to do, in a slew of Croatian, Russian, German, and an all-around English void, he managed to find some help and get us on the bus in the last spots without reservations, tickets, or ability to communicate. Not that he did anything special, but I now truly believe in the luck of the Irish.

But the next 35-hours were a blur of driving from Zagreb to Slovenia, entering the EU, driving through Slovenia, Austria, all of Germany, taking a ferry from Germany to Denmark, driving to the Denmark-Sweden bridge, standing on a bus from the bridge to Malmo, Sweden, then riding for free to Gotheberg, Sweden, where we caught another bus to Oslo, followed by a half hour trip more from Central Station to our place. Wow. A 21st birthday like no other. Fo sho.

Port in Dubrovnik

Love,

Jonathan