BootsnAll Travel Network



Archive for the 'grenades from the sky' Category

« Home

Schnapps Under The Grape Arbor Will Bring About World Peace

Friday, August 1st, 2008

My subjects are all over the place on this blog, aren’t they?  But, at their core, each one has “travel” in common.  Since I have my notebooks and albums out concerning my long (five years now) love affair with Croatia, I will continue the story that I started a few days ago.

As I work on the book which I’m about to publish, I am struck by the fact that most of it concerns  small interactions that I have had with interesting people all along the way. If I have nothing to say about a place other than tourist brochure material, well frankly, that city won’t make it into my story at all because in my opinion, “nothing happened” in that spot worth noting.  But, ohhhhhh, if a little story took place, then it gets captured in my journal and savored for all time. 

We never know, ourselves, as we stumble through our own lives, whether somebody has so treasured a momentary exchange with us that it gets written up in their diary or even just flagged in their memory.  But, it occurs all the time.  Here’s a sweet evening that happened to me in September, 2003, in Dubrovnik, Croatia:

One fact which makes this even more bittersweet, is to understand the scene.  Dubrovnik sits at the tip end of a long, skinny strip of Croatia, that is almost pushed into the sea by Bosnia.  Imagine that the big, chunky country of Bosnia was a bulldozer and that it had darned near done the job already. Geology has created an alps between the two countries, resulting in a long mountain which runs beside the entire cityscape.  During the Bosnian War, snipers and grenade-throwers occupied the top of that mountain and took aim on everyone walking in the streets below.  Most wood in the structures of the Old Town was burned away and many of the famous red tiles of the roofs were destroyed.  You can still see pockmarks in the marble left by all of this sharpshooting and grenade-lobbing.  That war was up close and personal. Now, for my story:

“The night I checked into my second guest house, I found myself invited to join the family for schnapps at the table under the grape arbor on the front terrace.  Schnapps were new to me but the bottle with its floating plant contents was so intriguing that I could not resist.  It was coughingly delicious and two shot glass fulls led to hours of deep conversation with my host, Vlaho and his best friend, Slobodan.  Vlaho is named for the Patron Saint of Dubrovnik and his wife’s family has lived in this mansion for centuries.  He is a Catholic and a Croat.  Slobodan, also born in Dubrovnik, is by birth a Bosnian Orthodox. 

This recent war tested their friendship extremely, but thankfully, did not break it.  If either of them had lost a relative, however, both agreed that they could not look upon the face of the other.  Neither one wanted the war, nor had anything, at all, to do with it; but each one said that they would have fought if their respective sides had called upon them to do so. 

What is the solution to this ethnic impasse?  They wished they knew.  Meanwhile, the two best friends drink schnapps at each other’s tables.  Slobodon went home with a little kitten from my host cat’s litter.”