Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Tomorrow we will get up early, drive over to the other town on the island, and catch a 9 a.m. ferry for Split.  We still  have a couple  of days of vacation left, so we will move slowly  toward Prague, seeing a few more things on the way.
In honor of our last day here, we made it a three beach day.  One which we liked a lot and two we hadn’t tried yet.  The last one was rather spectacular, it covered a whole bay and had an area of large, flat rocks where you could lay  your towel.  I saw a school of fish leap  from the water, like a living rainbow.  But, I was the only one who saw it.  The kids were looking the other direction  and Helena was on shore.  Sort of the opposite of yesterday’s dolphin experience.
We also had lunch at the restaurant we’d enjoyed the most of those we tried here, and it did not disappoint.
I am now absurdly tired.  It’s not that there was a tremendous amount of physical  exertion today.  But there was a lot of heat, and a hell of a lot of time spent in the water.

The first day we were here I got an idea for a poem and I haven’t fleshed it out yet, so it’s hard to say if I will.  The idea is that every island is a world, complete unto itself, with its own unique geography, population, climate, economy and lifestyle, but on the other hand every world is an island, isolated in space.  What’s small  is big, what’s big is small, but both are complete, and both are isolated in the vastness all around them.
Our Air B and B contact came over, to collect payment, and brought us a local dish, sort of a vegetable pie, which we’ll take with us and enjoy  on the road.  We told her how much we loved it here and she said, yes, it’s wonderful for tourists, but kind of a boring place to live, which didn’t surprise me.  She said she tries to go to Split almost every weekend.
We all  crave what we don’t have.

This is, I am hearing, the hottest summer since they started recording the heat of summers, and next summer is likely to be hotter still, and so on until we all burn up and die.   Of course, if we’re still  talking weather instead of  climate, there may be some years it swings back the other direction and we’ll get a brief respite, it might be hundreds or even thousands of years until all human life on Earth is extinct, but that is still way too close for comfort.  The general trend is  hot,  hotter, and OMFG I ain’t going nowhere  that  ain’t air-conditioned (and air-conditioning, while it might alleviate the immediate misery, is a long term part of the problem.)
I heard some thunder in the distance earlier this evening.  I  would love it if it were to rain tonight but I’m not holding my breath.
Today, we took a boat trip to the island of  Bishevo, and there transferred to a different (smaller, because fitting into the entrance is hard) boat to see the blue lagoon.  Same thing as on Capri, sunlight on a white sand bottom inside a cave leads to weird, blue light.  Very  beautiful.  Then we whiled away  the afternoon on the beach in Bishevo (population  about 15.  That’s it.  The whole island.  There are a couple  of restaurants, and the dock with the whole cave tour industry, but only 15 people actually live there full time), had a lovely lunch (octopus salad) and took the boat back home.  A couple  of people  saw dolphins (Helena did) but by the time everybody was shouting ‘dolphins!’ and they turned off the boat so we could look, the dolphins were gone.  I  didn’t see them.
Still, the boat ride there and back, at high speed, bouncing along the waves with the wind in  our faces, was the highlight of the day, I think for all  of us.  Even more than the cave, and the cave was spectacular.

The left-right dichotomy is world-wide, it is fundamental, and it has been around for a very long time. It is basically those who believe “we’re all in the same boat” vs. those who believe “it’s every man for himself.”  Full disclaimer here:  I am definitely in the ‘all in the same boat’ camp.

There is some poetic truth to the other side.  We are individuals, each one distinct from the other.  We are born alone, we die alone, and each person has some responsibility for their own success or failure.  We could have a total world welfare state, with a universal basic income, and some people would find a way to blow it.

But, that’s a harsh view of reality, and not one I like.
We all live on the same  planet, all 7 billion + of us.  If there is too much carbon dioxide in the  atmosphere, we all could die.  Every one of us.  Together.  That is not a good option.  This is why we need to plant lots of trees and urban gardens, switch to electric cars, regulate the living fuck out of industry because they sure aren’t going to make the changes themselves, and put solar panels and windmills everywhere that a solar panel or a windmill might fit.
Most of those 7 billion people live in cities, so co-operation with other people is essential in everyday life.  You cannot take an ‘every man for himself’ attitude in traffic.  Some people do, but they are a constant annoyance and threat to everyone else.  You have to have zoning restrictions, and noise regulations, and an organized system of waste disposal, or life would be hellish.
So, unless you are out in the woods of Idaho or somewhere, living completely off the grid, you are in the same boat with everybody else.  And, it’s the only boat we’ve got.

I got stung by a jellyfish today, so that was a first in my lifetime experience.  At least, I assume it was a jellyfish, as that’s the only thing I know of that stings in the ocean.  I was snorkeling, and it was lovely.  A sandier beach than  the last one, and so the bottom didn’t have the interesting mix of rocks and valleys and seaweed and schools of little fish as the last beach, but the lines made by the sunlight were a shimmering grid, there were some flat fish on the bottom who looked so much like sand they were almost indistinguishable from it, a couple of mounds with holes which housed some unknown sub-aquatic creature, and one very industrious little guy who was burrowing away like mad. I’d swum out to the deeper water, to where they had the floating barrier line, and then I saw a couple larger fish on the bottom and then  something brushed my arm and I turned and swam like hell for the shore.  There was half a moment when I thought maybe I was panicking for nothing, maybe it was my imagination, but the sting was real and in a minute I had a sizable red welt on my forearm, which is gone now but lasted the better part of the day.
That was on the far end of the island and on the way back we found a restaurant we liked very much, huge bottles of water for a reasonable price, and the food was all very good, and it was outdoor, on a terrace with greenery growing up the sides and over the ceiling.  We were hoping for someplace shady and cool and in there it was downright dark, we were totally shielded from the sun, and there were only about 3 tables with customers and I suspect the others were local.  Then we stopped at a scenic overlook, picked some blackberries by the roadside, and visited the cave where Tito hung out, hiding from the Nazis, in WWII.
Then we came back to our place and we had planned to go swimming again in the late afternoon but just never got around to it.
A couple of hours ago, there was a total power blackout, so I had to get off the computer and we wound up playing ‘guess the famous person’ with the kids, which was fun except  Sam always picks some obscure sports person nobody has ever heard of and then says “But, he’s a LEGEND.”
In a way, the power blackout was my favorite part of the day, and it was a day with many good parts.

It was a lovely, lazy day on the island of Vis.  We spent all morning swimming and snorkeling at one beach, a good part of the afternoon at another, but noticed that there are little pockets, small beaches, almost everywhere you look.  On our first foray we passed up one  beach because there was a single girl there and it would have  seemed rude to move in with our family and totally change the environment on her.  Lots of these little  beaches had almost nobody.

But today I want to talk about yesterday’s blog.  My wife read it (which she doesn’t, usually) and said “No, you’re wrong.  The old town in Split is nothing like the old town  in Prague.  There’s a completely different architecture, Split is Mediterranean.”  Of course my kids agreed with her because whenever there is  a choice of agreeing with her or agreeing with me, I have about as much chance as Gary Johnson ever did of becoming president.
“But,” I said,  “How many cities in the world even have an old town, a historical center where cars are forbidden and tourists can walk right down the middle of the street like cows in India?”  The answer is  actually quite a few, but they’re almost all  in Europe and, outside of the fact that they exist, yes, they are all different.
A rose is not a tulip, but they are both flowers.  Vis is nothing at all like Manhattan, although both are islands.  I write a blog, lots of other people write blogs, but  that doesn’t mean  we are similar, except in that one way.
So, I stand by yesterday’s blog, but must admit she does have a point.

In the learn something new every day department, I learned (while reading the signs in the supermarket) that the Croation word for fresh is Frisko.  People in San Francisco should take note.  I’m sure it’s a coincidence, but  it is a positive one.