Deep Thoughts

Last Friday morning Michelle and I were on our way to the women’s conference that had really started Thursday night. We were planning to catch the 8:00 am bus, so I stayed up until around 2:00 doing some cleaning, packing, etc. and set my alarm for 6:20. I woke up around 8:05 to Michelle on the phone with Marni. Somehow we both slept through alarms and phone calls… I was pretty frustrated and stressed out, but we pulled ourselves together in time to catch the 9:30 bus. But that bus actually didn’t exist, so we ended up with about 45 minutes of time to kill while waiting for a 10:00 bus. We decided to find some breakfast and get coffee, and Michelle remembered a little bakery about a block away so we headed there first. About 2 weeks ago I discovered my first muffin in Croatia, and here at this bakery they had muffins, too! Delighted to find them again, I proceeded to order in Croatian, confidently repeating the pronunciation of the pastry’s name used by the bakery lady of several weeks past- “moo-fin.” Somehow, it wasn’t working as well this time. I repeated “Chokolada moofin, molim vas” several times and a firm look of consternation was my only reward. Finally, I resorted to a meek combination of pointing and grunting and Bakery Lady exclaimed “Oh, chocolate muffin!” (note the normal, American pronunciation) and placed one in a bag for me.

About 10 minutes later, Michelle and I were sitting in a café with our beverages and muffins when we noticed the music. It was a Croatian rap song, odd enough in itself, but it was even weirder due to the fact that the music in the background was a bizarre concoction of Arab sounding polka-ish music, heavy on the accordion. We discussed this briefly, and after a few more minutes got up to leave. On our way out the door, one of the waitresses called out “kishobran!” and ran over to the table where I had left my umbrella. It was such a tiny thing, but in that moment it was unbelievably gratifying to realize that I had known exactly what she meant and hadn’t needed to consciously translate the word for umbrella. And Michelle and I were going to get on a bus, and we had tickets, and plenty of the local currency (and none of anything else, actually), and this is our city, darn it, and we know our way around, even if I can’t always get a muffin on the first try.