Potty Training Your Newborn

“Tasty beef-ham” is the star ingredient in a sandwich offered by GermanWings. “Longdrinks” are also available for a few euros — a cocktail to we English-speaking layfolk. I earned this knowledge because my good friend Laurel, from university days, bought me a seat on said airline to assist her in a week of single-parenthood.

Her newborn daughter Finya is absolutely stunning. Beautiful, adorable, cute little lips and eyes and ears and nose and toes… and she is somewhat toilet-trained. Dead serious. For the first four days I was there, she still hadn’t even figured out how to suck her thumb. But wait for the toilet instead of soiling her diaper? Oh, absolutely. How is this miracle accomplished? I’ll leave   the explanation to the experts.

I adored being a baby/mommy assistant for a week. The duo treated me to fantastic hikes, visits to castles and beer gardens and parks, tons of cute baby time, best-friend heart-to-hearts, and even a shopping trip to the Rittersport (aka Amazing German Chocolate) Factory!

My “wow-Germany” moments included luxury changing tables in most bathrooms, disappointment in the lack of architectural variety/beauty in new buildings, the first aggressive border interrogation I’ve had in the past year of travel, and the impossibly tidy rows of veggies at the farms near the airport. German symmetry. Wow.

But all that was five weeks ago. The plan was to return to the apartment Pat and I were renting in Croatia, unwind, and take off together on one last hurrah — a European tour. That didn’t work out. Instead, I vacationed at the Croatian coast and two national parks, then Pat left on his own trip around Europe, and I stayed in Zagreb studying programming and living life on the green hill above the capital city.

My Zagreb neighborhood is home to one of the (third? fourth?) oldest churches in Europe — a beautiful sanctuary and monastery nestled into a little valley containing the former monks’ vineyard and orchards. It’s a Catholic church, of course, so one Sunday I finally made it to mass. I grew up Catholic, so although I don’t speak Croatian, it was interesting to see the difference in the rituals.

The service begins exactly as the clock in the bell-tower strikes the hour. The priest and altar-folk (all men and male teens, no youngsters) march out from the wings and take their positions. The church was packed, even with four Sunday Masses offered, and I noted those already in the pews didn’t close the gaps to make room for other parishioners. Although I arrived ten minutes early, I was among the many left standing for the entire service. The church has an organ, which is played live, while singing voices are piped in over Bose ® surround-sound speakers. The service included almost double the music as my childhood church, albeit having no songbooks. The readings and collecting of offerings were done by the altar contingent instead of congregation folk, and there were no eucharistic ministers — only the priests gave communion, and only half the congregation received it. I hung around after church until they turned off the lights. I realized mass would have had a very different ambiance back when the church was built — with just sunlight coming through the windows and candles through the dark winters.

Winter, however, was the last thing on my mind during my trip to the Croatian coast and national parks. On the way to the seaside town of Å ibenik the bus passed miles and miles of Kansas/Nebraska territory — flat and full of corn. Croatians love their corn. We also passed a shocking number of truckers driving with a foot propped up on the dash — a move I pulled in less responsible times. Maybe I’ve discovered a new calling?!

As we neared the inland side of the coastal range, carpets of ferns dotted with karst rubble piles backed up straight into dark blue mountains. Once we dropped down on the coast side, the landscape of stunted vegetation anchored in pale rock and the balconies with rounded facades made me feel as though I’d teleported to the middle east. My introduction to turbo folk   – the nationally popular fusion of traditional and electronic music — came flooding back to me.  Check it out and you’ll hear the middle-eastern influence.

My most memorable intense bus moment was being buzzed by a fire plane, which came so close I could see paint chips in the numbers on the side. Second was the raging wildfire 100 yards from the road! Shortly thereafter, the gorgeous Å ibenik panorama filled the bus windows: the blue water of the sea inlet was dotted with buoys of shellfish farms, motor boat wakes and a scattering of sailboats cutting smooth lines through the water. The town itself is quaint, walkable, and historic with lots of medieval features. A strange employee at the tourist office told me I “must reduce [my] questions” and provided me with a tourism publication which advises tourists to follow local customs except in the case of tipping. While Croatians don’t tip, “leaving 10-15% for the staff’s efforts seems like a classy thing for a visitor to do, doesn’t it?”

Weird.

Anyway, Å ibenik was quaint, Zadar was beautiful, and the national parks — Krka and Plitvice — were both lovely. Both preserve the same remarkable river feature –  travertine formations (organic deposits) which become waterfalls. I loved Krka’s swimming hole and ethnic displays. For the first time in my life, I learned about ‘the old ways’ and felt connected: these are my people! The hundreds of ripe figs just out of reach on the park trees turned me into a fruit-crazed mad woman for half the morning. I didn’t even blink at the Wild Boar Crossing signs on the trail! No such signs at the wildly popular Plitivice, known for the stunning hue of its waters — like a blue raspberry jolly-rancher. The chalk-grey canyon walls really make the color pop!   Thankfully, I managed to find some tougher trails that meant escaping the tourist hordes while enjoying paradise.

Arriving at Krka wasn’t near as easy as Plitvice. Granted, the Plitvice bus just sort of dumped me off on the side of the road and vaguely gestured west. I only had to ask three farmers for help before I finally arrived at the campground. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. At Krka, however, reduce-your-questions-tourist-office-lady and a handful of others claimed the entrance was walking distance from the camp. A half-truth. Let me preface by saying I’m not a lightweight. I can knock out two or three miles on a forest trail without even thinking about it. But when sunrise revealed the terrain I was to tackle, I thought, “Um… oh. This is  weird.”

Apparently I’d stepped off the nighttime bus into a flat, decrepit desert. I half-wondered if I’d teleported to southern California — not a puddle of shade in sight, wind turbines on the ridgeline, and already the heat at 6 a.m. had turned the surrounding hills into shimmering mirages. I lugged my backpack, following the deserted black ribbon of asphalt past eerie, silent, rundown farms. The broken remains of stone pasture fences, built centuries before the age of barbed wire and chain link, reminded me that I was “not in Kansas anymore.”

Following vague directions from the campground manager and a pair of Italian tourists, I took a left at the bus stop shelter filled with windswept garbage. I was pretty sure I was retracing the bus route — didn’t I remember the bus driver honking somewhere down this road when we passed a staffed building that must have been the park’s entrance gates the night before? My confidence faltered as I trudged past abandoned concrete industrial buildings with broken windows and cluttered, dirty courtyards. Sweat poured, and I thought, “Here I am in the middle of nowhere, miles from the nearest town, no river or national-park-worthy territory in sight, walking by myself, an obvious backpack-toting-stranger, in a place where the locals haven’t been terribly friendly, the farms are a rag-tag bunch of crumbling buildings and collapsing barbed wire fences, and I only speak enough of the language to get me in trouble. Great.”

Luckily, just as things started to get really weird, I came around a bend, sensed that I was near the edge of a canyon, and saw a gaggle of people milling in the distance. Phew! Minutes later I was listening to a ranger who can give his park introduction in 9 languages and was therefore back in “Kansas,” but in a different way.

Speaking of which, I’m scribbling this out on the plane ride back to the U.S. Thanks to a serendipitous connection between Croatia’s capital city, Zagreb, where I’d been living and the German city of Stuttgart, where my close friend Laurel lives, I got one last dose of baby and friend time, including a girl’s night at a traditional, three-week-long boutique winery party. Now: bring on the culture shock! ♣

Experience death-by-baby-cuteness and see Zadar’s rad, interactive art installations in this facebook album.