There's no better way to spend the last day of your vacation in Croatia than by having your wife break her toe, then go to the hospital for an x-ray. But what a value! Only 55 Kuna for an x-ray? ($10.00) Heck, I'm moving to Croatia! At that price, I felt like breaking something of my own. Maybe get a bypass. How expensive could it be? (American Healthcare System discussion anyone?)






The actual hospital we visited was built during the Communist era and actually had sort of a dingy, "communist" look to it. Mirko said that he'd worked on it as one of his "peoples'" projects.

Deborah's limp gives her a lot of character. Good for strolling through the airport toward the gate.

Careful not to slip on the slippers.

It must be a Balkan thing. My mother always insisted that when someone comes in from the cold that they should take off their boots and put on some slippers so they wouldn't catch a cold.

Well, here we are in the Balkans. We get to my brother's house, watch him take of his street shoes and slip on some slippers. We follow suit, being thoughtful guests, and remove our shoes.

He then asks if we'd like some slippers of our own, pointing to the floor. I didn't see any on the floor that would fit me, so he opens a drawer filled with slippers, pulls out a big pair and says, "How about these?"

Essentially, there are enough slippers concealed around this house to accommodate a marching band if necessary.

It was a long wait since I'd first contacted my long-lost brother Mirko in the 3000 year old city of Pula, Croatia. I decided that I and the fellow that, up to this point, had only existed in old black & white family photos should get to know each other. I wasn't even sure that he knew who I was, let alone whether he had any interest in meeting me, but the simple act of sending a Christmas card brought a torrent of jubilation and well-wishes from a place most people don't even know exists.

If you ever laugh at foreigners in America as they butcher our sweet, melodious language, consider how you sound to them while you butcher theirs in their country. Fortunately, my command of the Serbo-Croatian language is good enough that people generally answer the question I just asked and then give me what I just asked for.

Now my Italian... that's another story. Boro and Chichi's kid's don't speak a word of English. When they ask me something, such as, "How much did your iPhone cost?" my answer is "____."

That was my answer: a blank. That's because, despite spending weeks of listening to language CDs and memorizing words and phrases, that one particular phrase didn't register in my mind. I assume that the look on my face - which I could actually sense as it was forming - was probably much like the look on a stuffed teddy bear's face if you asked him if he wanted another cup of tea.

I need to call my nephew to tell him that we're ready to go tour Pula, but I can't seem to dial his Italian cell number from my American cell number. I've searched the internet for hints, none of which are working.

Right now it's 9:54 AM and I started the process at about 9:20. I told Deborah that by the time I figured it out, they'd be knocking on the door of our hotel room. That should happen any minute.

We were on the way to Pula, Croatia from Milano - a quick little jaunt of six or so hours -  so I could meet up with my half-brother, with whom I'd never shaken hands and into whose eyes I'd never looked before. That was one of the key reasons for this trip. Would it be anti-climactic? Who would know until we actually got there? The only thing I knew for sure was that we were stopping at a local variety store in Milan to pick up some Santa Claus (a.k.a. Babbo Natale) decorations that we thought were so cute at Boro and Chichi's house.

In case anyone was wondering if Christmas was just some overblown American commercial conspiracy, it's not. It's also a money-sucking, child-hypnotizing monster in Italy. And who knows where else? The store displays were indistinguishable from anything you'd see at any Target or Sears in California as far as artificial trees and ornaments were concerned. The prices and descriptions were written in Italian and marked in Euros, but amazingly, many of the ornaments and decorations had written on them, "Let it snow!" and "Ho, ho ho!"

It's a smallish world.

Then there was the rest stop on the thruway, not unlike the restaurant chains on the New York State Thruway rest stops. This restaurant had a hot food bar where the main items were pasta. (It is Italy after all.)

After our meal we moseyed over to the coffee bar for an espresso. Interestingly, there were very few eating establishments we visited that did not have complex coffee making contraptions behind the counter. This highway stopover was no exception.

We each ordered a demitasse of coffee afterwards in cups that would be considered to have been Lilliputian by American standards. Here in Italy they were just the right size.

We then carried them over to a series of high tables where we and other customers stood and sipped them. I told my nephew, Boro, that this was something that you'd never see in the US. He said, "Really? Why not?" I wasn't sure how to explain. After all, I live in a country where people crave Dunkin Donuts coffee.

In general, I believe the word "holy" is rarely the wrong word to use when referring to the inside of a church. When I saw the inside of The Duomo in Milan, I included another word you're not supposed to say in church.

If you ever need a reason to go to Italy, this would be it. The immensity of this building alone, is jaw-dropping. And whatever I said about long reverberation times in the previous post about St. Peter's Bacilica should be forgotten. Reverberation, or reverb as musicians call it, is the time it takes for a sound to die in a room. In a very large room, the sound will ring for quite a long time as opposed to the sound in a smaller room. This sanctuary has a reverb that creates an entire acoustical entity of its own, another symphony resembling one you just heard a few seconds before, making you think you're trapped in an eternal musical deja vu.

One thing that I found equally stunning though, was that in a church of such uncompromising visual beauty, that the actual music being performed was so unspectacular. I suppose I've been ruined by all those Mormon Tabernacle Christmas specials. Maybe I'm just a musical snob. Or maybe it's just hard to get someone to sing for free at a Catholic Mass on a Saturday night regardless of where it is. Or maybe people really do only "listen with their eyes" as one surly music agent once told me when I was an innocent sprite many years ago.

(A note to eight-year-old boys: They have the mummified remains of cardinals (almost popes) in glass boxes at the Duomo in Milan. Tell your parents you want to go there.)

It's too bad we didn't get to the La Scala museum by 5:00. We'd gotten a late start simply because we were having such a good time at Boro and Chichi's apartment. La Scala's ticket booth closes at 5:00, but the museum itself doesn't close until 5:30. We figured we'd get there in time for three of us to jump out and buy the tickets while Boro found a parking space.

We didn't arrive in time. We got there at 5:02. The man at the booth said, "I guess you're just two minutes late, aren't you?" when we tried to convince him that he should sell us four tickets anyway.

We'd already failed at Plan B, which was to park outside the business district, then take the metro and arrive at 4:45. It's too bad Deborah was snoring in the back seat. She hadn't had a full night's sleep for three days and we thought it would be cruel to wake her up, so we decided to press ahead by car. Unfortunately, the traffic on that Saturday afternoon was nearly as tortured as a trek through a field of hip-deep snow.

Plan C was to simply forget about La Scala and move on to Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, essentially a sprawling mall built around 1890 with towering, monumental arches big enough to hold a dozen dirigibles. First we needed to find a parking space.

The space we found was just big enough for the car to be dropped in by crane. Without a crane handy, Boro, my nephew, handily tippy-tapped his way in, leaving an inch on either end of his car for the other drivers to slip out if needed. He mentioned later, that in Mlian, it's common for drivers to park their cars with the parking brakes off so that people squeezing into impossible spaces can simply budge them, causing not as much damage as they would have otherwise.

I didn't realize that Deborah's, nephew David the architect, was leading us to the Vatican and St. Peter's Basilica, until we actually got there. We had walked and walked and walked, then ended up in a square of some sort. There was a line of people a couple of hundred yards long and Deborah began to stand in it.

"What are we doing?" I asked. "It's the Vatican," she answered.

We crept a step or two forward every couple of minutes, not unlike a wait in a line at Disneyland. When we finally got to the security turnstile, the not-so-English-language-savy guards just flagged us past despite the fact that my cell phone and keys had set off the metal detector.

Everything about St. Peters Basilica was spectacular. One moment, we heard a crash at the other end of the huge building. Some workmen dropped something while setting up the Nativity for Christmas. My musician ears listened to the echo of the crash evaporate. I said to Deborah, "Hmm 'cathedral reverb - large.'" I snapped my fingers trying to see if I could duplicate the cathedral reverb, but nothing. The building was so large that there wasn't a single wall anywhere near us to reflect off of. It was as if I was snapping in a padded vocal booth; totally dry.

We eventually opted to climb the 300-plus stairs to the rotunda to look down, then eventually look out from the roof onto Rome. Looking at Rome from the top of the cathedral was certainly amazing, but not nearly as breathtaking as standing at the base of the rotunda, surrounded by priceless mosaics on the walls behind us, looking down at the floor of the basilica. It was frightening and wonderful at the same time even though we were protected from falling to the floor by a dense cage-like screen while my stomach did aerobatics hundreds of feet above the statues of dozens of dead popes below.

Last night at Thanksgiving dinner was when I was going to find out what an actual Italian pizza tasted like. Honestly, I didn't think they ate them here. I thought it was some kind of American abomination created by people pretending to be Italian.

In fact, pizza shops are everywhere. The little sit-down restaurant where we went had the most amazingly thin crusted pizza, almost like a cracker. Mine was onions, sausage and cheese. Very nice, not covered in the typical red sauce we get in the USA.

Across the street from our pizza restaurant was an Irish pub. Why? Because in Italy you need an Irish pub.

Their menu was a little more mainstream for the English-speakers in Rome: Turkey, stuffing, pumpkin pie. Not for us though. Not on this night.

By the end we finished off 3 pitchers of wine and and nine individual pizzas - one for each person. They were the typical 12" personal pizzas, but served on metal pie pans with a delicious puddle of olive oil at the bottom. I won't tell you that it was better than a Thanksgiving Turkey, but with all the activities up to that point and all the hiking from one monument to the next that day, it was easy to lose track of the fact that this was actually Thanksgiving.

Off we went then for the hotel. That is, until we spotted a pastry shop with chocolate tartufos in the window.

What's a tartufo, you ask? Or rather, what "is" tartufo? Who cares? They were wonderful. It was wonderful... chocolate and ice cream with nuts and some sort of cake stuff underneath.