You say potato...

One of the things about Croatia that I love is the more relaxed attitude toward work.  Kristian works 30-hour weeks, and that's considered full-time.  People take long breaks for coffee.  It's probably written in the Croatian constitution that everyone gets at least week at the seaside every year.  Of course, salaries are small and people are poor.  But working AS MANY HOURS AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN is not the cultural virtue that it is in the U.S.  People here like to slow down and spend time with friends and family.  If you "drop in" to a Croatian's house, even if she's a stranger and you're making a business call, she will drop whatever she's doing to make coffee and serve cookies...and you better not say you aren't hungry or thirsty!!

Of course, this easy-going, relaxed attitude is very annoying when you want something done.  We have been without internet at home for two weeks.  The tenant before us had the same kind of internet, and a guy came out to set up the modem and router.  But at the main office, they can't be bothered to switch on our service.  All they have to do is TURN ON THE DSL.  It's guaranteed to be on within 30 days of us requesting service.  Thirty days!!  To make matters worse, they don't quit sending you a bill, whether or not you actually have internet.  So we could be billed for a whole month of internet service that they didn't give us.

Since Kristian does freelance web design on the side, and I teach online, we both require internet for our jobs, and it's really a hardship not to have it. Croatia isn't like the US in that there's free wireless at every coffee shop, gas station, and fast food joint.  There are a couple coffee shops in town that MIGHT have internet, but it's down as often as not.

Oh well, the 30 days will be up by the time we're back from the sea--we're leaving tomorrow--so at least the annoyance is almost over.  But I was just thinking today....it takes about 1 day of no-internet-at-home for me to quit thinking "Croatians have such a healthy, balanced attitude toward work" and start thinking, "Croatians are so damned lazy!!!!"  :D

Eclipse happened here, too!

Last night, My long-suffering husband and I went to see Eclipse at the theater in Varazdin.  It had opened in bigger cities a long time ago but just made it to our theater: it's in this cool old 18th-century building a couple of blocks from our house.  I hadn't been in there before, but I was sooooo excited to go to what I imagined to be a cool old-school movie theater with historic charm!

Plus, the tickets cost only 15 kuna--less than $3--so I was thinking, "we should go to the movies more often!"  In a Croatian theater, you get a reserved seat with your movie ticket, so you can buy your ticket early and waltz into the theater at the last minute without having to worry about getting a bad seat.

Well, we sat on the last row, which, in retrospect, wasn't a good decision.  The theater was full of young teenagers, about half of whom were intoxicated, and the back row smelled of vomit and other bodily fluids that you might expect to find on the back row of a cheap movie theater attended mostly by teenagers. Ewwwwww!!!!  The theater did have some of those cool features I was hoping for: a balcony, a stage, and box seats in the back.  It's a great old building, but the sound system was simply a stack of stereo speakers on the stage, under the screen.  Honestly, I had trouble hearing the dialog.  Yes, yes, all the expected jokes about how Twilight movies don't have any unmissable dialog.  I don't care: that series is one of my guilty pleasures, and I want to eat up every line of teenage-melodrama-fraught dialog!

All in all, it was a fun evening, especially when Edward finally proposed to Bella, the teenage girls in the audience cheered and clapped, and Kristian slapped his hand over his face and groaned.  It really was a heroic sacrifice for him to go to that movie with me! But, as much as I wanted to be charmed by the historic theater, I think that when the fourth movie comes out I'm going to drag Kristian with me to Zagreb to the fancy multiplex.

I have bought the mansion of a love but not possessed it; or, Good news comes in threes!!

The two big clouds on my Croatian horizon have been this hateful apartment and my inability to find a job, and it looks like they're both dissipating...but on both fronts I'm in that tenuous phase when the step has been taken but the results haven't come through.
1.  We are currently paying rent on this adorable cottage:

I could not be more in love with it! It looks bigger than it is: the attic is unfinished, so we just have the bottom floor: bedroom, living room, little kitchen and 1.5 bath.  But, more importantly, a rose garden

And over the garden walls, a castle view!

Okay, it's only sort of a castle view, if you peer real hard over the neighbor's shrubbery.  But I LIVE NEXT DOOR TO A CASTLE!  

Kinda.  But we are still staying in this dump of a Jugoslavian sardine can.   Why? We're waiting for them to switch the internet service from the apartment to the house, and, like a good telecommuter, I follow the internet.  We could, in theory, go ahead and move, but then I'd have to come back to the apartment every day to work.  I'm not sure what could make grading more unappealing than it already is besides walking 20 minutes and climbing 5 flights of stairs to a stinky gross cave where there is no longer a coffee pot.  

2. It looks like I may have gotten a new online teaching job! I got an email yesterday from Rasmussen college saying they wanted to tentatively schedule me to teach starting in October, pending of course the requisite phone interview, paperwork, training, etc.  No word about how many classes or what it pays, but still, I'm so happy: if I do get this job and it pays about like my current online job, we can get a car!!  Plus, I'll actually be working something closer to a normal workweek instead of finishing my work at 9:30 and then twiddling my thumbs for the rest of the day (i.e. playing video games).  However, this job is not a done deal by a long shot, 

so it could all come to naught.  But in the meantime, I'm going to just hope for the best and enjoy my dreams of car ownership!

3.  Best of all, three week from today I'll be on the island of Vis on my honeymoon!!  Kristian and I are married, legally, but it doesn't feel like we are because there wasn't a religious ceremony and our parents weren't there.  I don't feel any more or less committed to him than I did before we signed the papers.  (after all, I sold my car and moved to the sardine can for him, and as distasteful as those things were, I'd still rather be here with him than in the U.S: comfortable but lonely!)  But on August 23rd we're having the ceremony with our parents on one island, and then hopping a ferry to our honeymoon on another one! It is going to be really nice to put on a white dress and stand in front of our parents and say our vows for real.

Let us all bask in television's warm glowing warming glow

I was never much of  TV-lover back home.  I'd have a few shows I'd watch, plus college football, and other than that--and The Weather Channel--I could take it or leave it.  I eventually gave up on LOST because it was too much of a commitment.  Our new house has a 30-year-old TV with 6 channels, and I think of those 6 channels as an unbelievable luxury: I can't wait to watch bad american sitcoms (The Nanny), bad Spanish soap operas (My Sin/Moj Grijeh/ Mi Pecado), and Croatian versions of American reality TV (Hrvatska Trazi Zvijezda: Croatia Seeks a Star, AKA American Idol), all with helpful Croatian subtitles!!

As gleeful as I am about my precious six channels, I'm still grieving my inability to watch the premier of Mad Men, Season 4 tonight and of Season 8 of Project Runway later this week.  I've loved PR for years, but I just started watching Mad Men this summer on the website SurftheChannel , and I absolutely fell in love.  I dislike the main character--if Don Draper really IS the main character--but for me the show is about the female characters: the sexy husband-hunting managing secretary, the depressed housewife, the career girl fighting for  respect and equality in a misogynist 1960's working world.  The show explores all three roles with sympathy and sophistication, and that's what I watch for.  Well, that and the clothes.

Hulu doesn't work overseas, and neither do Lifetime's online episodes.  Both Mad Men and Project Runway will eventually be posted on SurfTheChannel--which, FYI, is 100% legal as far as I can find out and has partnered with the Discovery Channel, so I feel like it would be shut down if it were illegal...it's no secret.  What drives me crazy is that the first episode of Man Men, Season 4 will be playing in Times Square tonight, and I WILL BE MISSING IT!!  I'll have to wait two or three days at least to watch it here.

I can always comfort myself with a book or a video game--my preferred forms of entertainment--or, you know, go for a walk in the beautiful city I live in and visit the castle or cathedral or other marvels of medieval or baroque architecture less than five minutes from my apartment....but Mad Men, readers, MAD MEN!!!!

Well, if you're watching it tonight, think of me and enjoy it extra for my impatient sake  ^_^

Falling down in the dumps and getting out

I got married on Saturday, and I really need to write about it on here: it's a surreal experience getting married in a strange country in a language you don't understand that well!  But for the past couple of weeks I've been feeling so down in the dumps that I haven't felt like trying to write about a joyous occasion. I've been feeling incredibly anxious and worried and stressed out.

I think it's normal to have these down periods when you're adjusting to so many changes in your life.  Kristian and I are are gathering papers together for both our visa applications: mine for here, and his for the U.S. It's very expensive, and it's incredibly stressful to have your future with your spouse hung up in paperwork in government offices.

Plus, I got a pay cut.  As many of you know, I teach English online, and I get paid by the class.  For the past six or eight terms, I've gotten five classes or even more, but this time I only got four.  It's a manageable pay cut, and I don't mind less grading.  But it's worrisome because if I lose another class next term, or two classes, we will start being in trouble, and if my salary drops below $18,000, then I can't sponsor Kristian's entry into the U.S.  That would mean that I would have to enter the US alone and find a job before we could really even get his paperwork underway...which could be a year or more of separation.  That, or getting my parents to sponsor his entry, which they probably would do, but neither he nor I (nor they, I'm sure!!!) want to involve the government in their financial status.  It's better for us to handle it ourselves.  So, I've been looking for additional online jobs for the past month or so, and NOTHING.  I got one interview with the first job I applied for...and it was cancelled two days after it was scheduled because all positions were filled already.  That was crushing.  I've gotten no other feedback except for form emails saying my CV was received...then silence.  

Finally, I hate our apartment, and I can't imagine many things worse than working from home in a home you loathe.  It's dirty, old, dank, cramped, and stuffy.  The bathroom has a constant stench wafting up from the 50-year-old Yugoslavian drains.  The refrigerator doesn't get cold enough, so our food spoils almost instantly, and two weeks ago I spent three days with a very unpleasant stomach ailment probably garnered from something I ate.  Kristian had it for a day as well.

I've let this stuff get to me.  It's a mental and spiritual battle, really.  I've never been one of those head-in-the sand Christians who suggest that trusting in God means things stop sucking, and I've noticed that it's usually rich people or the highly medicated who express that sentiment.  Maybe I'd be a cheerier person if I could embrace that viewpoint, but I'd feel like I was lying to myself and everyone around me.  A thin veneer of cheerfulness has little or nothing to do with a real faith in God, and I challenge anybody to think that it does after they spend some time in the book of Job!

What DOES have to do with a real faith in God is being willing to leave the future to God and live in the here and now.  I've always loved that verse in the Sermon on the Mount that goes "Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.  Each day has enough trouble of its own" (Matt 6: 34). What really gets me down is not all the little manageable issues today, but fears for an insecure future and potential disasters  like Kristian and I being apart for months or years because of financial problems and immigration issues.  But there is no point in worrying about that future...let it worry about itself.  Today we're together, we have work, and we have food to eat and a place to live.

AND today we get the keys to our new place!  I'll write more and post pictures of its amazing perfections ASAP.  It's tiny to the point that I bet most American newlyweds would be horrified...maybe....but it's bright and airy and sunny AND....well, I won't give away its best features until I get some good pictures!!  ^_^ Point is, we're about to move into the little European cottage of my dreams.  That still leaves us with the job issue, and the immigration issue.  But there is no sense in ruining today because I'm worried about tomorrow.

How's my Croatian? It depends....

Yesterday was a good day for me, language-wise: I got three compliments on my Croatian! One of them was especially exciting because it came from the woman who translates the documents for my visa, so she's fluent in several languages and knows what she's talking about.

But when people back home would ask "How's your Croatian?"  or "Do you speak the language there?"  I'm not sure how to answer.  I really struggle to put sentences together.  The words are hard to pronounce: too many consonants.  Like the word for "luggage": prtljaga.  or "patient": "strpljiv."  I know exactly what those words mean when I hear, read, or write them, but speaking them is another matter altogether!  Plus the case endings are hard to get straight at a normal conversation speed.  On a test, I could write out the proper case ending for a noun after the number "four," but saying it...I'm still a bit too slow!  :)

Sometimes  I understand exactly what someone is saying.  Yesterday our new landlady was telling Kristian about how our little house had belonged to her parents, but then her father died in 2000.  The real estate agent had estimated the value of the house at 350,000 euros.  (No, it's no mansion. it's more like maybe the size of a tool shed behind a mansion.  But it has a huge yard in a desirable location, so the land itself is valuable).

I understood all that, but I also heard her talking about dogs, and I figured she was saying something about pets in the house, but I didn't understand any of the words.  Turns out she was telling Kristian that she and her husband own a metal factory that went through a huge boom for a while because they were making ID tags for dogs.  Then the government started requiring dogs to have microchips, so no one was buying ID tags, and their business really suffered.  My vocabulary is pretty minimal as it is, and "microchip implantation" has not really ever come up before, so I was lost.

My language abilities, then, are pretty hit-or-miss...but I am getting there!  I can't even imagine what it will be like to be fluent, but I look forward to that day!

What did people do without the internet: cooking edition.

I bet every single person reading this has wondered how things were DONE before the internet or has thought back wonderingly to the days when people did still use typewriters, card catalogs, and so forth.

Living in another country only intensifies that feeling.  I've written about my cooking woes on here, but thanks to some practice I've adjusted: I finally found the darned cornstarch, my thoughtful mother is mailing me measuring implements, and I've found quite a few recipes on allrecipes.com that I can manage.  What would I have done if there weren't such a thing as allrecipes.com? Wedged a few heavy cookbooks in my already overweight two suitcases? Troubled my mom or others to mail me recipes? Bought a Croatian-language cookbook and muddled through? (I am looking forward to being able to buy a Croatian cookbook and use it, but it is going to be SLOW going.)

But even allrecipes isn't perfect: maybe I just can't sort effectively, but it seems like most of what's on that site requires too many expensive ingredients.  It seemed like I was spending 70-100 kuna ($14-$20) every time I made dinner.  Fortunately, a quick Google search took me to the very-economical-looking website, Frugal Recipes.  It ain't pretty, but I'm trying an inexpensive green bean recipe from there tonight.  

Through some other mysterious channels of the internet (I followed a chain of links about keeping your maiden name), I came upon the Unintended Housewife, a blog with a title I can relate to.  She posted a recipe for stuffed peppers, which Kristian and I love but which I have only made unsuccessfully, stuffed with leftover barbecue   from a recipe posted by the author of the blog Thrift at Home.  

I'm making that barbecue tonight and planning stuffed peppers (punjene paprike in Croatian) for tomorrow.  Now I'm all set with frugal-cooking resources.  My only remaining cooking woe is that it's around 90 degrees and there is no air-conditioning in the kitchen or even much airflow.  Let me tell you, cooking over a gas stovetop in July is no swell time. That woe will soon be over too, though, because on Saturday we get the keys to our new place!