Old Europe, New Europe

Train travelers in the Balkans are used to waiting at borders. Officials check your passport and ask: "Nešto za prijaviti?". Something to declare? No one ever declares anything, last of all the Croatian women who smuggle cheap textile from Italy to Zagreb.
When Slovenia joined the Schengen area I expected the endless waiting to be over. But no. Villa Opicina, at the Slovenian-Italian border is one of those notorious places where you stare out of the window and think: "Are we really in the EU?" After an hour or so the train finally starts moving to Venice.
I had to think of this as I read an article in Die Tageszeitung, published on Presseurope. Presseurope translates articles from several European newspapers into the main EU languages. Something like the International Herald Tribune, but than online and very limited in scope.
The fall of the Iron Curtain should have united two towns, but Italian Gorizia and Slovenia's Nova Gorica continue to snub one another with great distinction. While Nova enjoys an economic boom, old Gorizia tearily remembers the rare old times.
The enormous car park is almost completely deserted. It has enough space for hundreds of cars, but only a few stray vehicles are parked under the pale light of the street lamps. And save a handful of guests at the nearby pizzeria, there isn’t a soul in sight.
A cab? The waiter frowns as though he’d been asked an utterly absurd question. “After eight you can’t get a taxi anywhere in Gorizia.” Gorizia has called it a day...
We'll consider the phrase Iron Curtain a slip of the tongue.

From the Balkans to Bavaria, and back

"I realized again that I would never understand the German people. The misery of these travellers was purely amazing. It was perplexing that they should have been surprised by the lateness of the train. The journey from Berlin to Zagreb is something like thirty hours, and no sensible person would expect a minor train to be on time on such a route in winter, particularly as a great part of it runs through the mountains."
Thus wrote Rebecca West in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, a few years before the Second World War, when she traveled from Germany to Yugoslavia by train. I had to think of her as I traveled myself from Zagreb to Munich and back. A single trip takes nine hours. I doubt that's faster than in her time. The mountains are still there, some border controls disappeared, others reappeared, communism has reduced public transportation to a deplorable state, and from Villach to Zagreb even a dackshund could keep up with the speed of the train. It seems not to matter how you come to Croatia. By bus, train or car; Slovenes always manage to slow you down. Very annoying, especially when your head is being blown apart by a fever, as mine was.
The train was on time though, and unlike West's German fellow travelers, I don't get upset about some delay. If you can't deal with delays, don't go east.
When I bought the handwritten ticket (649 kuna for a round trip) from a woman with an almost visible but very common dislike of customers, I was "advised" to reserve a seat. Thank God I didn't. All reserved seats were in the old passenger cars with defective heatings. We could see our own breath. The brand new car (manufactured in Croatia, I should add), however, didn't have a single reserved seat and were comfortably warm. When I went to Sofia last year, I spent 17 hours in a passenger car without heating, so I have had my share of cold. The only source a warmth back then was the ouzo we got from a nice Macedonian lady who shared the compartment with us.
In Munich I bought many things that are unavailable or overpriced in Croatia: foodstuff, quality newspapers, good beers. I ate what you can't eat here: Vietnamese, Indian, Arabic. I visited things that don't exist here: palaces, lavishly decorated churches, beer halls, outstanding museums.
If you are wondering whether there is actually a good reason to go back to Croatia, I must say there are. Croats don't dub movies. And the girls are so much prettier here.

Smoking on the train

Croatia is gradually imposing a ban on smoking in public places. Smoking was recently outlawed in educational and health institutions and Croatian Railways announced yesterday that you are no longer allowed to lit up a cigarette in waiting rooms and trains. Smokers are even banned from dining cars, although I have never seen a dining car on a Croatian train. Even worse, there are no trolleys to serve coffee or sweets. Believe me, spending half a day in an old, painfully slow train to Budapest, Belgrade, Sarajevo, Munich or Venice is so much harder if you can't get your dose of caffeine. And now smokers are also denied their nicotine dose.
If you break the rule and smoke, you will be fined 100 kuna. A 1000 kuna fine is in preparation, which means that we won't hear about it for a long time to come. If the enforcement of the ban on using a mobile phone in cars learns us anything at all, it is: do as you like.