(Otherwise entitled, "Go east, young man!") I’ve arrived in Santa Fe just in time for monsoon season. Every morning I wake up to the unadulterated blue sky outside the window of whichever friend’s house I’ve chosen to crash at the night before, and when I stumble outside in my shorts into the clear dry air, squinting and scratching the sleep off my bare chest, I can see the tops of the clouds looming over the Sangre de Cristo (“Blood of Christ”) mountains to the east.

The clouds continue piling up behind the mountains, turning grayer and more ominous as the day progresses. Finally in the mid-afternoon they spill over the mountaintops and begin spreading out and dropping succinct downpours over various widely-dispersed parts of the valley. Since I’m reliant on my bicycle for transportation, these periodic storms disrupt my plans from time to time, but New Mexico needs rain as much as a deep-sea diver needs oxygen, so I put my personal preferences on hold and wish the rain-starved hills well while I park under the nearest awning or portale to wait it out.

After riding my bike around town for a few days, I decided to rent my moving truck a day early and use it as an oversized and inconvenient rental car. My jaw dropped when I phoned around town to ask about rates. The cheapest one-way truck I could find to the east coast was U-Haul’s $718 plus taxes and insurance. I was, however, able to garner one unforeseen advantage out of the deal, as a result of the U-Haul clerk’s Santa Fe public school education. The deal included 2043 free miles, just enough to get me to my destination, but not enough to allow any detours or errands. When I asked if she could bump it up just a bit, she said she could give me an extra 50 miles, and heck, she’d throw in the extra seven and round it up to 3000. Due to basic math incompetence, I now have a buffer of 900 free miles, just in case I get lost several times for days at a time along the way. If you know me, you know that when my mind gets a-wanderin’, such things are in fact more likely than not. I plan not to take advantage of these free miles—high gas prices and all, not to mention basic honesty—but it’s nice to know I have them just in case.

So during my days here I have visited the folks who need visiting, trying my best to mend the places in the net that have frayed from inattention during the past year. I have also eaten the burritos, enchiladas, carne adovada, green chiles, and sopapillas necessary to quench my appetite and widen my gut. I have sunned myself on patios and ridden my bike dry-mouthed down the gravel roads among the hummingbirds and goats, chamisa and piñon. Today after meeting my friend Roland for huevos and posole at Tecolote, I headed to the bike shop to buy my second inner tube in three days and ended up chatting for a while with a drunk Blackfoot Indian who hit me up for spare change. He liked me because I stopped to talk to him, he said, explaining that I wasn’t like most white people who always rush from place to place. He saw my Euclid 3:16 shirt and asked me if I’d ever read Kahlil Gibran (I failed to see the connection), then mentioned that he was an American just like I am, that he’d just gotten out of the army two years ago and figured that was his admission ticket. He had a hard time pronouncing all his words, most likely related to the 40 of Bud Light in the bag at his feet, but was mostly lucid. He gave me a name in his language, which I promptly forgot, but it might have been Lapi, and he taught me how to say "This day is a good day," which I repeated once pretty accurately and then promptly forgot as well. Overall, things have been good, and I’m just about ready to throw my many boxes of crap into the truck and spend three or four days geeked out on truckstop coffee and AM country radio, cruising on slick air-smooth highways to the next destination, my home for the next three to ten years, give or take. I’ll drop you a line when I get there.

Some places are not meant to be lingering places. They are designed to be passed through quickly, to disappear from memory as soon as you have gone from point A to point B. When it happens for some reason that you linger in one, it takes on a completely different character. For instance, near Gate A2 in Chicago’s Midway airport, a placid-sounding valium-soothed woman repeats her warning every six seconds to prevent daydreaming people in the long white echoing high-ceilinged corridor from falling like felled trees when they run into the stationary ground at the end of the horizontal escalator. “Caution: The moving walkway is ending.” The people waiting at Gate A2 for their flight, which has been delayed for an hour and a half due to a thunderstorm in Denver, must nonetheless listen to this warning every six seconds until its interminably slow repetitive rhythm supplants their thoughts one by one. “Caution: The moving walkway is ending.”

In this way, there’s something very purgatorial about the long white waxed corridors, the thick wet receding echoes of the woman’s voice, and the smooth infinitesimal creeping of time. When our return flight from Croatia landed in Prague, the man below was engaged in his own version of the purgatory dance. He was doing this for 45 minutes, but that much video takes up a lot of bandwidth.

I was warned by the completely unapologetic ticket agent when I checked my bags at Midway that, due to the delay, I would miss my connection to Albuquerque tonight. I finally landed in Denver after eleven o’clock, and rather than drag my 130 pounds of baggage by cab to an overpriced hotel near the airport to sleep for four hours at most before dragging it back to the airport, I’ve decided to pass the nether-hours of the night with you, Gentle Reader, waiting for the Frontier ticket counter to reopen at five a.m. “Caution: The moving walkway is ending.” I’ve set up base camp with my laptop near the closed aluminum security gates of the food court, listening to the Beta Band on the headphones I stole from my Alitalia flight from Prague to Chicago. I couldn’t have known at the time that they would turn out to be so useful. The only source of food open at this hour is Burger King, so I had to give in and eat fast food for the first time in over a year. It tasted just like I remember it, that is, pretty fast and a bit like food. Thankfully, the Beta Band drowns out this particular corner’s repeating manta for travellers: “Please do not leave baggage unattended for any reason. Unattended items will be confiscated and may be destroyed.”

I promised Mike, our friend and colleague in Brno, that I’d share with him my first impressions upon returning to America after a year away, and these extra few hours I need to kill somehow seem like a wonderful opportunity to meander my way through those impressions. How does it seem different? What stands out now that I’ve been immersed in other cultural norms for long enough to become accustomed to them? In what ways do I feel like I’m returning to something absolutely familiar, and in what ways do I feel like I’m encountering something new? It’s tricky because a year isn’t really such a long time in the grand scheme. Mike has been living in the Czech Republic for 12 years, so he has probably been separated from his Americanness far more than C. or I have.

The change in scenery hasn’t surprised me. My brother picked me up at O’hare and had some errands to run in the city. I wasn’t surprised by the skyline or the traffic, both of which dwarf their respective analogues in the Czech Republic. Having been in a car five times at most during the past year, I was surprised that cruising on the Kennedy in my brother’s van into the city didn’t feel at all strange. Rather, it was completely familiar. I accompanied him on his rounds, chatting a bit with a couple of his customers. As we left the city, to satisfy my longing for a carne asada burrito and an [h]orchata, he stopped at one of the three restaurants called La Pasadita that lie on a one-block stretch of Ashland just south of Division. I’ve never understood why the same restaurant has three branches on the same block, but I have long understood that it is (they are?) my favorite burrito place(s) in Chicago. The burrito tasted just like I remembered it, that is, rich and spicy and delicious, with plenty of cilantro.

The observations worth mentioning number two so far. The first concerns the diner breakfast my sister and brother and I enjoyed yesterday morning at the Olde North Pancake House. The American diner ritual—a ritual with which I have a long and intimate acquaintance, dating back to the days in high school when I sometimes hit Denny’s with my friends twice a day, when I knew every diner within a fifteen-mile radius of my house and considered myself a connoisseur of the institution, able to recognize subtleties in the brownness of the decor, the bitterness of the coffee, or the “warm ya up, hon?” of the waitresses that escaped most casual observers—was strangely surreal because of my familiarity with it, combined with how different the Czech restaurant ritual is, both in itself and due to our limited command of the Czech language. C. and I managed to learn restaurant Czech pretty well, to the point where we could usually communicate our wishes to waiters and waitresses without confusion or miscommunication. Occasionally, we could even ask for certain basic substitutions (such as “without ham, please”). But almost all of our restaurant interactions consisted of repeating memorized phrases in various combinations; we were never able to carry on even the most basic conversation with the waitress. We sometimes take for granted being able to crack a joke or make friendly conversation with the people whose jobs bring them into contact with us on a daily basis. Being unable to stray at all from naming the desired item on the menu and replying to basic questions about our wishes caused us both some sadness.

So it was that I recalled the details of the American restaurant ritual as our meal progressed: The ease with which I could communicate with the waitress in English, her frequent visits to refill my weak diner coffee as often as, or perhaps even more often than I wished, the strangely familiar but exotic practice of leaving the tip on the table. It all came back to me like an old friend who I hadn’t seen since childhood but with whom I immediately felt at ease, the years since our last meeting melting away into the unaffected and uninhibited conversation that only lifelong friends can enjoy; like an old friend who, nonetheless, has met the intervening years in a surprising and just slightly unflattering way. He is so familiar, and I know before even opening my mouth what his response will be to certain questions, the way his mouth will turn down slightly and tense at the corners when he tries to keep a straight face at one of my jokes. But his skin is so pale—was it always this way?—and he has put on so much weight and carries himself with such an ingratiating hunch—has he always been so hunched? or is this new?

The second observation is the ease with which my fellow travellers chatted with each other while we waited at Gate A2 at Midway or, after landing in Denver, while we waited in line at the customer service desk to reschedule our outbound flights, or while we waited in line at Burger King for a late night meal to hold us over until breakfast. I’ve mentioned the notion of the fractured society that Mike talked about in relation to Czech society in the aftermath of communism. Such casual openness with strangers is almost completely absent.

I’ve never been one to make conversation with people in line at the grocery store or while waiting to cross the street, casually while passing in a park, or in any similar circumstance, but I am aware that many people do so and even enjoy it. As a result of my own reticence, I think it was particularly easy for me to adapt to the Czech methods of social interactions, which is simply not to interact with people you don’t know. Czechs waiting for trams and buses rarely, if ever, chat to pass the time. Czechs in elevators rarely say a word during the whole ride (though, in an odd sort of retroactive politeness they frequently bid each other na shledanou [good-bye] as they disembark at their respective floors after having not acknowledged each other’s presence for the whole of the trip). These Americans around me, on the other hand, were constantly engaging one another, whether to complain about the unapologetic ticket agent, to ask for clarification about their new connections, to ask why the wireless network in the airport seems not to exist despite numerous signs indicating its usefulness. How much simpler strange situations must be when you can simply ask the people around you for a bit of help. Yet how foreign it all is: Americans will just start talking to each other with little provocation! Imagine how strange they must seem.

In a bus heading up the Croatian coast on the narrow looping highway from Dubrovnik to Split, the Croatian equivalent to California’s Highway 1, C., M., and I are settling in for our five-hour ride. I’m on the left side of the bus, so I have a beautiful view of the steep hillsides stretching down to the coast, the mountainous islands jutting up out of the water, and the deep blue Adriatic stretching out to the horizon.

We took this trip in precisely the opposite order we should have. Upon arrival at the airport, we hopped onto a waiting bus to Split, caught a ferry immediately to Jelsa, a port town on the first island we wanted to see, and then a bus to a more remote, smaller, and less visited town. Thus, within a few hours of landing, we were at our most remote location, and we slowly worked our way to more populated, more touristy, and less authentic places as the days passed. Already in Dubrovnik I found myself pining for the idyllic Mediterranean meadows and unpopulated coastlines of the islands, as though I’d been booted from paradise into the harsh glare from the unflattering light of the temporal world. There would be no wine, olive, and cheese picnics on the rocky beaches of Dubrovnik.

Europeans seem to have known about Croatia for a long time. Even under communism, the former Yugoslavian coast thrived on tourism. After all, we only came here because so many Czechs recommended it as a holiday destination. We did, in fact, overhear many Czechs in all the nooks and crannies we visited. But most Americans seem not to have heard of this place. Perhaps, as I used to before I came here, they hear the name of the country and think, “Aren’t they having a war there?” But no. The war in Croatia ended eight years ago. Even Dubrovnik, which was 70% bombed out, has been almost completely repaired. Since Croatia’s economy depends heavily on tourism, the government started repairing anything even remotely interesting to tourists before the war was even over. (They cleaned up most of the minefields too.) Countless travel memoirs have been written about southern France, Italy, and all sorts of better known Mediterranean destinations, but not much has appeared about Croatia, which is their equal is almost every way save crowds.

Dubrovnik is distinctive because of the completely intact city wall that surrounds it. All the other walled cities of Europe seem to have demolished their walls at some point. Perhaps they’re too expensive to maintain. Perhaps, as Dubrovnik illustrates, walls have been obsolete as a protective measure since the invention of the airplane. Many towns will make a big deal about the small piece of the town wall still standing here or there near a river or built into the side of a building. Tour guides will drag groups of tourists with sun-reddened necks and sunglasses past the non-descript patchwork structures, pointing out the ten stones at the bottom that date from the thirteenth century. But in Dubrovnik, the entire wall—with all its gates, towers, and ramparts—is still standing. It lends a very medieval feel to the whole place.

The hostel industry has had trouble finding its niche here because of all the grandmothers and their sobes—private rooms—which they rent to tourists for a fair sum. They line up at the ferry landings and bus stations holding up signs that read, in five or six languages, “rooms for rent.” It’s actually a funny sight. While some are younger women and others are men, the majority are gray-haired grandmothers loudly hawking their spare rooms for $15 a night, forceful women who haggle loudly and refuse to listen when you say “no.”

Our sobe was on the side of the cliff that overlooks Dubrovnik; 371 steps up the side of the hill, to be specific. I know because I counted them. The cliff has a couple of roads that cut switchbacks up the cliff face, but most of the houses are only accessible by stairs—rough-hewn and uneven sets of stairs set at random angles. The stairs are given street names, and the houses that adjoin the stairs have addresses that ascend as the stairs ascend. The word for one of these staircase roads, put, is the same as is used for “journey,” and the daily march up the narrow stairs to our sobe was precisely that.

In Korčula, the church bells chime the quarter hours all through the night. This is not helpful when one is unable to sleep. But tonight, other things are conspiring to keep me awake as well. The heat is one. Although I am writing this by candlelight on a small balcony at the back of the building in the cool night air (relative to the daytime temperatures, tonight’s breezeless seventy-two degrees is blissfully cool), in the bedroom I was sweating even with the sheet thrown off. Another is the painful itching from the sunburn I acquired on our first day in Stari Grad. Right now, I’m shirtless and covered in more baby powder than an unclever kid trying to be a Halloween ghoul. It seems to help the itching. The sky is beginning to lighten at the horizon, so I think I’ll have to give up on getting more than the two hours of sleep that I’ve already had tonight.

We’re staying in a third-floor bedroom in a house across the street from the bay and about 150 meters from the old town. Korčula claims to be the birthplace of Marco Polo, though of course no one knows for sure. It’s the main town on an island that has alternatively been inhabited by Illyrians, Greeks, Romans, Venetians, and Croats throughout its long history. Everything is made of limestone—the streets, the buildings, everything—and is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.

Here, in Croatia, it seems most appropriate to clarify one lingering Czech question. When we were in Prague a few days ago, both my brother and Marcel had to endure C. and I bitching incessantly about the glut of stupid tourists being stupid and buying stupid things, posing stupidly in front of the stupidest, most uninteresting statues merely because they’re older than America, for example. I know we must have across as entirely more-expat-than-thou, but that wasn’t really the intent. It’s taken me a couple of days to put my finger on why I hate Prague, and I think I’m closer to being able to spell it out. Being a stupid tourist in Croatia has given me the necessary contrast.

Don’t get me wrong—architecturally, artistically, historically, Prague is an unparalleled place. It’s pretty much the only city in Europe that wasn’t destroyed during the Second World War. As a result, visiting the city center is a trip to another era, a living monument to a part of history that, if it exists elsewhere, has most likely been reconstructed from blueprints. But now, 15 years after the revolution in 1989, Prague is a whore, seductively displaying her wares to people who travel from all corners of the Earth to engage in this lurid fantasy. They tell Prague what they want her to be and she becomes it.

It’s not a real city anymore. The center is filled almost exclusively with shops that cater to tourists. A thousand storefronts offer you KGB tee-shirts, shot glasses, bumper stickers, shoddy mass-market folk art knockoffs, nondescript and non-specific stuff that looks vaguely Slavic. The restaurants offer you pizza or non-specific Italian or French food, and even when you are able to find something that purports to be authentic Czech food, it never includes dumplings. They don’t even appear on the menu, presumably because foreigners don’t like them. Having spent a full year in Brno, a town where few tourists have reason to go, I feel like I’ve had a decent introduction to the country and the people. I have a rough idea, albeit from my perspective as an outsider and a note-taker, of what it’s like to be Czech. Well, Moravian, more specifically, since they still differentiate; since Prague is in Bohemia, I have to make some allowances for my naivety.

One small example: For reasons I’ve been unable to determine, Czech waking hours are out of phase with the rest of the world. Many businesses there open at seven in the morning and, as a result, many people are finished with their day’s work by two or three o’clock in the afternoon. Because they are able to shop on the way home, most shops close by five or six in the evening at the latest. A special subspecies of convenience store exists for people who need to buy goods until eight in the evening. After eight, only the pubs are open, and even they close at ten or eleven o’clock, because people need to get home in time to wake up at five-thirty or six to start it all over again. The whole country are disciples of Ben Franklin’s early-to-bed-early-to-rise dictum, though I hear that it actually originated with the Austrian Emperor Rudolph II.

Prague, on the other hand, keeps party hours. Walking through the desolate and unpopulated old town at eight-thirty in the morning to meet my friend Marcel for the first time in eight years, I couldn’t figure out where all the people were. In Brno, the morning bustle would have been long over, the shops would have been open, and people would have been well into their day. In Prague, all the storefront security gates were drawn shut, exposing the work of night graffitists. Scattered early-morning dog walkers were the only other people on the streets beside me and the crews of orange-vested men and women sweeping up the debris and mopping up the puke of the foreign revelers who had been up late into the night, who had been, in fact, the only people out. The only Czechs to be found at the late-night dives amid the Black Sabbath, Joe Cocker, and Everclear blaring from the loud bars the previous night were the waitresses and bartenders.

The city has been stolen from the people who live there and has been turned into a generic, blandly international and culturally non-descript place. It is no longer Czech. I’m not even talking about the 40,000 Americans who live there, running the branch offices of international companies or wishing they could have been in Paris in the twenties. Many of the latter are unfortunate enough to have beenduped into thinking that one actually has to go to Bohemia to live that well-hyped bohemian lifestyle they’ve heard so much about. But the tourists don’t deserve all the blame. Every step of the way, Prague is right there, selling them what they want to buy, pretending to be something it’s not (or didn’t use to be). Hence the whore analogy. The tacit don’t-ask-don’t-tell deception barely conceals the real nature of the transaction. More than anything else, though, among all the wonderful experiences I had in the Czech Republic, I’m simply disappointed that the nasty summer tourist glut in Prague is one of my last memories of the place.

Well, the horseflies and mosquitoes are now taking advantage of the early morning light to annoy as many people as possible, including me, before the day’s heat oppresses them into a standstill. The swallows are flying circles overhead. It’s time to walk down and check the ferry times to Mljet island, today’s destination, half of which has been designated national forest, with a pair of lakes up in the mountains surrounded by meadows. The half moon is still visible. A seagull swoons and dives overhead. I kill a mosquito on my calf. I apply more baby powder.

We’re on the island of Hvar, in the Adriatic Sea off the coast of Croatia. Up the hill from the town of Stari Grad, where we’re staying in a small bungalow at a campground five minutes by foot from the waterfront, we hiked for an hour in the late-morning ninety-degree heat to a tiny village called Rudine. We passed olive groves and small vineyards bordered by piles of small limestone blocks that passed for walls. Fennel, rosemary, and laurel trees grew wild. The wind blowing across the dry scrubby hillsides smelled like God’s spice cupboard. Fig, orange, and pomegranate trees sprouted up everywhere. Enormous spiders lurked at the centers of webs whose support fibers stretched literally fifteen feet at times. We surprised praying mantises a couple of times. The sound of cicadas, near and far, filled the hot wind.

Thirsty from not having saved any of the water we’d packed when we set off, we followed hand-painted signs directing us to the Mini Market Žukova. We arrived to discover some umbrellas and a small white collapsable hut erected in a driveway. When we rang the bell, a woman came running from playing with some toddlers in the back yard. She offered us fresh produce, ice cream, and drinks from a cooler in the hut. When we asked for water without gas, she apologized, but offered to run into her house and fill a bottle with tap water for us, free of charge. We accepted.

Her English was barely passable. She knew enough at least to run her fruit and ice cream stand. When she heard us speaking in English to each other, she asked us where we were from. We answered. She asked, “Why here?” I answered, “Because it’s beautiful.” She made a gesture as if to dismiss the flattery. I tried to clarify. “We lived for a year in the Czech Republic, and everyone there told us that Croatia is paradise. We decided to come and see it for ourselves.” She blushed a bit before replying, “I am so pride.” We knew what she meant.

After the three of us downed the liter of water in a gulp, we found a trail heading back down the hillside to the sea, and after a few minutes we appeared at the mouth of a small cove lined with rocky outcroppings. Three or four sailboats rocked gently in the waves. Five or six families were all we could see in scattered encampments around the cove.

After a heavy application of Nubian brand sun block (SPF 6, our first mistake), we dove into the spectacularly clear blue water. A few minutes later, after one of my freshly-purchased water shoes had slipped off, I watched it floating in gentle circles downward. It was still clearly visible 40 or 50 feet down. I cannot describe the perfectly clean and clear phosphorescent turquoise water adequately. You’ll have to look at photos when I post them. Suffice it to say, this was the most beautiful start I could imagine to our twelve-day Croatian adventure.

We alternated for two or three hours between lazily wading in the cove and sunning ourselves on the rocks until we’d roasted ourselves to a light pink color. Not wanting to endanger our future beach plans, we decided it was high time to remove ourselves from the sun. We hiked back up the hillside, and our increasingly-insistent hunger suggested we look for someplace to buy lunch. We were unable to find anything resembling a downtown among the clusters of low and far-flung stone houses in the village. Eventually, we gave up and returned to the Mini Market Žukova. We asked the woman if the village had a restaurant. She shook her head. Then her face lit up and she rushed out from behind her cart, gesturing and excitedly bubbling in broken English.

“I’m asking. There is woman. I come with you.”

“Pardon?” we asked.

She tried to clarify. “There is woman in village. She is our superwoman. I’m asking. I come with you.”

“We don’t understand.”

“I’m asking. Woman. She cook sometimes.”

We began to understand that a woman in the village sometimes cooked for guests, for some sort of fee, we supposed, and that our guide was going to lead us to her house. Intrigued, we followed the fruit stand woman (whose name we never got) around the corner to a house where two young men were repairing the plaster under a large picture window. Two-foot-high figurines of the seven dwarves, hand-painted with house paint, were evenly spaced along the flat roof and half-height walls that surrounded a tiny courtyard in front of the house. A middle-aged blonde woman in a red and white sundress was overseeing the men. The woman who brought us fired off a couple of questions. The blonde woman shot back some answers. One of the young men looked up from his plasterwork to translate. “We have sausage, and some kind of fish. Grilled. Maybe some potato salad or something. Beer or juice. You want?”

Hungry, tired, and thirsty, our skin continuing to grow pinker, we accepted her offer to sit at a picnic table in the shade under a vine-covered trellis. She brought us beer, two kinds of sausage, round loaves of home-made bread, and two plates of grilled vegetables. We downed the beers at once and asked for seconds. She agreed, but then we saw her walk straight away from the table, down the driveway, and down in the street in the direction of the Mini Market Žukova. She returned a few minutes later with three cold bottles in hand. She kept bringing plates of bread and grilled food until we asked her, please, to stop. The Žukova woman returned a while later and asked if we needed a ride back to Stari Grad. She’d be taking her cousin to the ferry port in an hour, she said, and we were welcome to ride along. We accepted.

“Why would you come to this paltry little village on an island off the coast of nowhere special, you silly Americans?” is what she’d wanted to ask as she’d handed us the bottle of tap water, but all she’d been able to formulate in English was “Why here?” I couldn’t really tell her that the beauty of the hillsides and ocean, the Mediterranean climate and terrain so commonplace and uninteresting to her, was an endlessly exotic fairy tale to me, and that being offered a meal at her friend’s one-table ad hoc bed and breakfast was the perfect end to the perfect day. An hour later, we thanked our hostess and paid the reasonable price she wrote on a napkin. The Žukova woman pulled up with her Bosnian cousin in the front seat. The conversation proceeded between her and C. in German, since her German was far better than her English. We asked her how she enjoyed living in Croatia. The Bosnian woman spoke no English or German and remained silent, but the Žukova woman replied that everything was fine. The war had been over for eight years already, and was history. She asked us if we knew that there were many American soldiers (thousands in fact) still stationed there. We hadn’t known. She said that there was no more fighting anymore, that the Americans were only there to keep the peace, but that their job was done and they probably should have gone home two or three years ago. We could easily imagine that to be true.

When we finally got back to our bungalow and changed our clothes, we discovered that we’d long overstayed our window of safety in the sun. M. and I are redder than raw salmon, and we have crisp white outlines where our swimming suit tags had escaped to the exterior of our suits. C., due to more diligent sunscreen application, escaped mostly unscathed. We’ve all been applying lotion to each other for most of the evening, but I fear the worst: We may have to avoid the sun for the next few days. There are old renaissance chateaux to visit, from when the Venetians ruled the area in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and other sights to see from the Habsburg days. We could even track down some old Roman ruins or some fortresses that staved off invading Turks a time or two. But that’s not the point. I’m not particularly interested, at this point in my life, in ancient Croatian history and, honestly, I’m sort of castled-out after the castle bonanza at the end of our Czech adventure. I came for two weeks of beach, swimming, and sun, and my heart will drop if I have to hide in my bungalow in the ninety-degree heat all week. I suppose it serves me right for my solar overconfidence.

I’m posting this from the gleaming stone lobby of Andel’s Hotel in Prague, a hyper-modern ultra-hip launch pad for the international business jet set. How, you might ask, did I—a sweaty, unwashed backpacker with a stinky pair of sandals and a horrible watch-tan—manage to secure accomodations here among the elite? Well, my brother helped. He left this morning in a taxi for the airport, and C., her sister, and I are left in the hotel until noon trying to see how many free services we can take advantage of before we leave. I’ve already enjoyed the luscious breakfast spread, but have yet to visit the solarium, sauna, or steam room. My complimentary copy of FT (The Financial Times, if you have to ask) is waiting for me on top of the DVD player in my room, as are unlimited cappuccinos in the fifth floor lounge.

Yesterday, I was reunited with my old friend Marcel, who is working on his PhD in English. He’s in Prague teaching at a summer institute. We lived together in Champaign, Illinois in 1993 when we were both students at the University of Illinois. It’s been at least eight years since I’ve seen him, though e-mail contact has occasionally happened. It was a beautiful reunion, and we plan to wander the parks and winding streets this afternoon, though we might instead choose to sit in a cafe and down espressos. C. and I are touristed out. Too many sights, too many castle tours, too many “KGB: Still Watching You” and “Praha Drinking Team” tee shirts.

Posting has been intermittent, or perhaps sporadic, and will only become more so. We leave for the Croatian coast tomorrow morning, and I suspect that internet cafes will not be quite as common there. Nor will want to take time out of our heavy beach schedule. I’ve got to even out this farmer’s tan I’ve acquired this week. The back of my neck is ten shades darker than the band under my watch. I’m not even going to talk about my sandal tan.