Last year at this time, Nara and I went to Thailand for a four week vacation. Originally, we had planned to be married in December of 2008 and this would have been our honeymoon. But when we were renewing my visa in 2008, the process took ten full months, which took us up to November. And when they told us that I would have to renew my visa AGAIN within 8 days of getting married, we decided to delay the wedding until August of 2009 instead. The Thailand trip was already planned and paid for, though, so we went anyway and had the honeymoon before the wedding!

It was the best vacation we've ever had. Truly fantastic. Not just because it was 4 weeks long, but because we really got to relax and we did a lot of exploring of Thailand, which is a beautiful country filled with great people.

Me, outside of the hotel in Bangkok.

Nara, outside the hotel in Bangkok. Intrepid sign in the background.

When planning our trip, I had talked to a few friends who had either been to Thailand a lot or who travel a lot. We were basically told that Thailand is an easy country to get around and that you can just book everything yourself. But I wanted us to do a guided tour for part of the trip. Having never done a guided trip before, I took the advice of my friend Marie Javins who recommended Intrepid. The basic plan was to arrive in Bangkok, then head north on a tour for 8 days, then return to Bangkok and head south on our own and head first to Koh Mook then Koh Lanta, then return to Bangkok and return home from there.

Local Heinz!

Khao San Road.

The view from the hotel room.

There were a few reasons a guided tour sounded good to us. Neither of us had ever been to Asia, for one. And we'd be pretty jet lagged. I didn't really want to arrive into Bangkok then have to deal with all the travel and planning stuff to get around up in the North. And from reading Intrepid's site, it looked like they'd also take us to some places to do some things I just wouldn't have gotten around to.

Driving around Bangkok in a Tuk Tuk.

Anyway, we arrived into Bangkok. We had booked a room at Viengtai Hotel, just a block away from Khao San Road, which is a street bustling with activity and backpackers. It was fun to be in that area for a short time because there was a lot going on. It's loud at night, though, which would be a drawback for me if we stayed there for longer. As it was, though, I wore earplugs and all was well. We settled into Bangkok and spent a couple of days wandering around the city before heading north on our tour. More posts to follow with tons of pics of Thailand. Wish we were there this year too!

Khao San Road.

Well, today I went and traded in my California license for a local Croatian driver's license.

The process was fairly easy, but it still took some time. We first went to the local MUP station, which is the police station where I am registered. That's where the embassy site says to go, but as it turns out, all licenses here are issued through the MUP on Heinzelova Ulica. We'd taken the bus to the local MUP because it was so close, but this other MUP station is much further away. As it turns out, we should have driven. But we just took the tram there instead. Of course, they required one more piece of paper from me. We had a translation of my license that was basic from the American consulate, but they needed a full translation also. So we took a taxi back to the center and got the full translation, then went back and got my license. It took more time and effort than that all sounds like. But the people at that MUP station were great, very efficient, and the process was easy.

The bummer is, they kept my California license. I couldn't keep it. Well, anyway, this is one more piece of the puzzle that I've gotten. Mission accomplished today.

We also had the best Chinese food we've had yet in Croatia today at Asia Chinese food, right by Glavni Kolodvor. Not amazing, but very good.

So good day overall.

The license here looks very strange to my American eyes. I guess they don't use it as ID here, because this would be easy as hell to counterfeit. They have a separate card for ID and I don't have one of those yet. The license is like a little book. Looks like this:




More information about the process of getting a license here if you're an American is at the link below. But, be aware that the cost is 70 kuna for the stamps you have to get, called "biljezi", not 35, and then another 35 paid as a bill. And you must have a full translation of your license AND the translation from the American embassy that explains the class of license that you have.

http://zagreb.usembassy.gov/service/other/drivers_licenses.html

So, it's 2010 now. Snow covers the ground outside as the new decade starts.

2009 was one of the best years in my life so far, as detailed in a previous post. I'll miss 2009! An amazing year for me.

Last year, my resolution for the new year was to stay on top of my finances and to keep up with saving money for both retirement and for buying a house. I did a good job with that in 2009 and aim to keep that behavior up.

For this year, my resolution is to finally look into getting a higher level of medical insurance here and to do a thorough medical checkup. I'm 41 now, so it's time for me to start looking into certain sorts of tests to make sure I'm taking good care of myself. I gotta go get a local doctor to hold my balls while I cough.

;-)

I'll likely take a look at Sunce Osiguranje and Basler Osiguranje Zagreb here locally and see about getting in for a checkup. I'd like to do all of that before tax time, which for me is April 15th. So, that's the goal. Do all of that, go to the dentist for a cleanup here in Zagreb and stay on top of saving money.

Not exciting goals, but good for me to do.

There are some funny little language differences here in Croatia. Differences between the English and Croatian languages.

One that popped up last year for me was "džuboks". My friends here thought that that was how you pronounced it in English too. But, the funny part is, that is pronounced like "Jew Box". For my Croatian pals, in English, it's "jukebox". It has nothing to do with Jews. Well, if it was playing Klezmer music, I guess it could. But it's not a Jew Box.

Another one that is really strange to me is when Croats pronounce a V like a W. This makes absolutely no sense to me. They don't even have a W in their alphabet. They also pronounce a W like V, which to me makes total sense. Seeing as how they don't have a W, change it to a V. Makes sense. But to pronounce a V, which IS in their alphabet, like a W, which is NOT, makes no sense to me. My friend Esad says womit instead of vomit, for instance. Always reminds me of Chekhov in Star Trek 4 saying "nuclear wessels". Esad also says "awailable".

I've asked him and others about this a lot and have never gotten a good answer. They say basically that they see no difference between those letters. But that still doesn't make sense to me.

Inspired by the blog here:

http://rosemarybaileybrown.blogspot.com/

Where have I been? What have I been up to for the last 9 odd months?

Well, I've been all over. And I've been doing a lot of things. So, here's a bit of a catchup blog post.

I've been meaning to get back to this for a while, but once you stop for a while, there's some sort of inertia that keeps you locked on (or in this case off) course.

2009 has been a good year for me personally. We spent a good chunk of this year traveling. We've taken almost 10 weeks off from work and spent the bulk of that time traveling. That's more than 2 months off this year, which is huge for me. We spent 4 weeks in January and February in Thailand, 10 days or so in Southern California, and 3 weeks in Tribunj, Croatia and traveling around that area (1 week was working, so I don't count that week). In early August I headed to London solo to attend the Great British Beer Festival, which was four days of drinking with thousands of merry strangers. Lovely. In September we headed to Tunisia for a week, which was not so lovely. Then, just a couple of weeks ago we headed to Vienna. It's a beautiful city and we had a great time.

I'll post more about these trips later, but in brief, Thailand was the best and Tunisia was the worst. All of the trips were fantastic except Tunisia. All told, 5 countries other than Croatia were visited on 4 continents. Well, 6 countries if you count our 2 little day trips to Slovenija.

Nara and I also were married in August. And she's the best wife a man could ask for! We're very happy together. We lived together for a while before that, and life's pretty much the same as it was before we were married. We're a great couple and really like living together and enjoy our shared life. So win win!

I also set up my homebrew brewery here in our basement. I homebrewed for five years while living in Portland, but had last brewed in 2002. So there was a 7 year hiatus there. But with quite a lot of effort, the brewery is all set up here and functioning well. Brewing beer, of course!

Still working a lot for Marvel Comics, but also working for DC Comics again for the first time in some years.

We're also saving for a house and for retirement. So working hard when we're not traveling and trying to invest and save as much of that money as we can.

This is all just a quick catchup on what's been up in my world. I'll touch on these topics in more depth later and post pictures and all that good, fun stuff.

But that doesn't quite touch on why I stopped blogging. I stopped primarily because I started to get really annoyed with the volume of people e-mailing me about their desire to move to Croatia. Well, that in and of itself is not annoying. The annoying part was when they'd ask me for a lot of in depth advice about the process or when they were just up late in America and dreaming about moving overseas, had never been to Croatia and thought they'd just up and move here. Okay, it's fine to dream. But I'm not here as a service to people who want to move overseas. I mean no offense by this, but I will no longer answer this stuff. And in fact, I have removed my e-mail contact. If you want to have some contact, leave a comment on this blog. Don't e-mail me about advice for moving here, please. Anything I have to say on the subject is already in this blog, so read the blog if you want information on living here.

I also didn't quite get back to blogging because some of the stuff that I notice that I might want to blog about is sometime a negative impression of Croatia, the people here and living here in general. And I don't want to offend a lot of my friends. So how do I go about writing about the negative aspects of living here? I don't have the answer for that yet, but we'll see. Either I'll try to find a way to write about this stuff and hope to not offend my friends and others or I'll just skip that part. More likely I will write about it, but try to be as tactful as I can. That said, I still like living here and enjoy a lot of the culture and the people here. But as with anything, it's not all rosy. Yin yang and all that. The overly positive first impression has, logically, been replaced by a more balanced view of life here after having lived here for 3 years now. When you first arrive somewhere, it retains that "vacation" edge to it for a while. Once that's worn off, you can settle in and get a more realistic impression of the place. That's where I'm at now.

Oh, and I have my third visa. This year it was easy. It just required us to stand (yes, stand the entire time) in line at MUP, the police station, for 6 hours. We then got in for our meeting and had to return 30 days later and it went smoothly. The woman who processed me this year was great and all went smoothly.

So that's that for now. I'm hoping to get back on here more regularly but can make no promises at this point. Time will tell, as always.

I looked out the window a few minutes ago and saw this image. Seems some local gypsies got inventive and knocked over the paper recycling container to bust into it from the bottom and take the paper. Presumably, they'll hit as many of these as needed to fill that van then take it in to some recycling center and get some money for it.