Seize the world

Several years ago, the Croatian tourist board adopted the advertising slogan "Croatia: the Mediterranean as it once was." I've seen these ads a lot on CNN International, actually I've been seeing them for a couple years, which is part of why I wanted to go to Croatia so badly. They would show spectacular white sand beaches beside sparkling cerulean ocean, exotic luxury yachts and ancient Roman palaces and cathedrals overlooking the Adriatic. I couldn't wait.

This slogan may be completely accurate, but it would have been more clear if they had said "Croatia: Dirty, Industrial and Boring."

I'm probably not being very fair, since I was there before tourist season, and it might be a lot more fun after the cruise ships start arriving. But I doubt it.

It was such a disappointment to me because Croatia was the place I was probably most looking forward to seeing on this trip. Seriously, I'd wake up in the middle of the night last summer and fall and think about the fact that I was going to Croatia in eight months, and get so excited I wouldn't be able to get back to sleep. It was the combination of so many great things for me: my love of ancient history and culture, my academic interest in the former Yugoslavia, my obsession with geography and the fascinating geopolitical position of Croatia, historically, between Italy and Greece, and my increasing desire to spend a few days lying lazily on the beach drinking Mai Tais. But it fell far short of my expectations.

I started off in Dubrovnik, known for centuries as the "pearl of the Adriatic." And ohmygoditwassoboring. SO boring. First of all, there were no beaches. NO BEACHES. Whatever beaches they had were so far away you had to take a long bus ride to get there, and it was really too cold for the beach anyway. Second, because the cruise ships don't start docking for another two weeks, it felt like a ghost town. It had some nice parts, like the Old Town, which was paved with marble and chock full of mildly interesting, sort-of-historical, not-quite-beautiful buildings. But it was completely deserted, except for a smattering of old Japanese tourists. (Side note: I've started noticing an interesting trend with Japanese tourists. The young ones, the ones on their honeymoon or traveling with friends, go only to really cliché places, like Paris and Florence and Rome, to take pictures of themselves making peace signs in front of the Winged Victory of Thrace, or giggling and pointing stupidly at The David. Old Japanese tourists, retirees who often walk with a cane, choose to visit more out of the way locations, like Croatia or Budapest, going off the beaten path where they will also take altogether too many photographs, not of themselves but just of buildings and statues, that they will never look at again, or remember the significance of. Is this true of all cultures, this destination switch? I know it's not true of Americans, who spend their entire adult lives obsessing over their careers and money, and never take time out to travel and enjoy life until they are retired. At which point they go on a regimented, plasticky cruise and try to see as many cliché places as they can from the inside of an air conditioned tour bus, because they're too old to actually go out and enjoy them naturally. Most Americans die before they get a chance to go off the beaten track.)

Anyway, Dubrovnik was kind of depressing. Every time I asked someone what I should do while I was there, they would tell me excitedly to take a (several hour long) boat trip to one of the islands. "What should I do there?" I would ask. "Oh you know... just see it!"

I find this extremely irritating. First, you know how much I hate going somewhere just to "see" it. Seriously, what's the point? But I'm also starting to really hate being in places where when you go to the tourist office to get activity suggestions, they highly recommend that you take a trip somewhere else. For Pete's sake! I came here to be here, not to go someplace else! Tell me what's fun to do here! Especially if the place I'm at is really out of the way and was hard to get to (ahem, Dubrovnik) it's really effing frustrating to basically be told, "Oh no, keep going, the fun is further down!" But the truth was, there isn't anything fun to do in Dubrovnik. I was in a souvenir shop town with C-list sights during the off season. It was like Honolulu, without Waikiki or tourists. Lame.

My first day there it rained. Not like hard, emphatic, purposeful, run-for-cover rain, but light schizophrenic rain that would drop from misty clouds for ten minutes before disappearing, only to return a half hour later. But what made the rain a real hardship was that it made the marble pedestrian streets incredibly slippery. In my tractionless flip flops, I twice slipped and fell flat on my back, getting soaking wet and earning stares and impolite pointing from the Japanese tourists. So rather than add a broken tailbone to my list of injuries on this trip, finally I decided to just take off my shoes and walk barefoot through the wet streets of the Old Town. More stares, more pointing, but I didn't care. It was so lame.

My second day I took the advice I kept hearing and made the boat trip to Lokrum island, which was supposed to have beautiful beaches and a botanical garden. When I got there I discovered that by "beaches" they meant large, flat rocks near the water where a person could lie uncomfortably and sun themselves like a giant sea turtle. And by "botanical garden" they meant "trees." I tried to keep myself occupied for a couple hours on the island, but ohmygoditwassoboring.

Croatian people are not really anything to write home about either. They're nice enough, typically trilingual, not unpleasant, but just kind of... bland. Boring. Nothing special. I just couldn't find a way to have fun there.

I left Dubrovnik to make my way to Split, Croatia's second largest city and the retirement home of the Roman emperor Diocletian, who abdicated the throne in the third century to come here and build an enormous palace and live out his days on the Dalmatian coast. Honestly, the early morning bus ride up the coast was my favorite part of being in Croatia. Besides there being no white sand beaches (grr, I feel so cheated) the Dalmatian coast really is dazzling, so I just spent my four hours staring out the window, zoning out listening to Taylor Swift's Fearless album. (Dear iPhone, I love you. XO, Moira.)

But Split was equally disappointing. We drove into the city, past large concrete apartment buildings of stupefying ugliness, looking like giant, unfinished 3D puzzles against the sky, or incomplete games of Jenga. When we got into the city, I walked along the main promenade, which felt just like any cheap beach town boardwalk on the Jersey shore: drab, uncreative stores selling cheap crap under plastic awnings, gray-brown beaches covered in seaweed and candy bar wrappers, and long rows of ugly, unimaginative bars selling €6 Coronas. Even the "palace" was lame. There just wasn't really much to see.

My directions to the hostel, though, proved to be a bright spot on my arrival. They read like some sort of treasure hunt: "Walk along the main promenade, keeping the ocean to your left. When you see six red motorcycles outside an ice cream shop, turn right. Walk 40 paces, turn left. After 100 paces you will see a statue of a teacup and a funnel. Stop beside it; turn 270 degrees and you will see a stone building with a silver door. The door is unlocked. Go inside. On the ground floor you will see several large piles of stones; ignore them, walk up to the first floor, and ring the bell."

The directions were perfect, and I arrived to the hostel without incident, and without even having to use Google maps, which is a first.

I tried to find things to do during the day in Split, but it was just too boring, too depressing, so I returned to the hostel at about 4 o'clock. Sitting in the common room I met four guys, all, as fate would have it, solo travelers, who were basically having the same experience I was in Split, so we all spent the rest of the afternoon in the common room watching episodes of "Mantracker" on YouTube (which, if you haven't seen it, is a true classic of reality television.) One of these guys was Stephen, and, after we all went out to get some dinner together, I found out that he was six months into a two-year, around-the-world bike trip to raise awareness for his fledgling non-profit in Colorado promoting epilepsy research. It was a pretty amazing story. His organization is called "Seize the World" and he is the executive director, also an epileptic, and founded the program just under a year ago. He started off on his bike from Telluride, rode west through the US to North Carolina, flew to Portugal, then rode up Iberia, around the French Riviera, down through Italy and across to Croatia. His tour will take him all the way around the northern hemisphere, from Telluride to Turkey to Tokyo. He said he normally rides about 40 or 50 kilometers a day, and at night just pitches his tent in farms or fields along the way. Occasionally he stays in hostels and rests up for a couple days before continuing on his trek.

I found this guy incredibly inspirational. First of all that he was 24, and felt so passionately about this issue, and so empowered to make change in the world, that instead of becoming a corporate whore like the rest of us he actually started his own non-profit. I love to see that there are still men in America who live lives of passion, and don't just care about how to make more and more money without pursuing anything at all resembling a personal interest. And because he was doing something so huge, so brave, so incredible to get the word out. I don't necessarily know how successful this stunt will be for him (he says they're hoping any day now to get picked up in a national news story) but I know how challenging it has been for me, traveling on my own, staying in comfortable beds and taking trains and planes to my next destination. I just couldn't imagine what it would be like to go for two years, all by yourself, with just your bike and your tent.

If you get a chance, you should check out his website, www.seizetheworld.com. It's got some pretty cool stories from his trip. (And if you know anyone in the national news media, maybe you could do my friend Stephen a favor and spread the word.) I love meeting people like this, on my travels, people who really change your perspective and inspire you, people who you never forget.

After dinner we all went back to the hostel, and found that some new guests had arrived: the entire Croatian national rugby team. They were staying in Split overnight on their way back to Zagreb from a victorious game in Montenegro, and they were looking to have a good time. Everyone seemed to be up for going out partying in Split, except me, because I had a 7am flight and would have to be up at 4 in the morning. Lucas, one of the Aussies I had just had dinner with, didn't buy this excuse at all, and just said "Moira - when else will you ever have this opportunity?" I sighed, because he was right, and with assurances that they would all make sure I made my flight in the morning, we went out to take on Split's nightlife. Six hours later, exhausted, buzzed and groggy, having just literally stayed out all night going toe to toe with the Croatian rugby team, I was helped to the bus stop by Jan and Gregja, and embarked on a long, horrible day of travel to Greece...

I started thinking a lot about the name of Stephen's non-profit organization, Seize the World. It was an apt name, I thought, for an organization dealing with people who have seizures, and also to describe his publicity stunt, taking on the world from his bike. I started to think about my own trip: wasn't that exactly what I was trying to do on my own adventure? Seize the world? Sometimes I have imagined myself grabbing onto the planet with both hands, and shaking it vigorously trying to find answers to all my persistent big life questions, like some sort of giant Magic 8 ball ("Try Again Later"), or hoping answers will just fall from this shaking planet like manna. I wanted to go to as many places as I could, because I thought once I went I would, in a sense, "own" them. And that's sort of true. Looking back after two and a half months, I do feel like I somehow "own" the places I have been to. I own the memories I made there, and I seized a little bit of their essence which I will carry with me forever.

Seizing the world is also about seizing the opportunities of the world. I came on this trip because I wanted to see and do things that would challenge and change me, and because I didn't want to be a fat, career-obsessed American who never saw Rome until I was retired, arthritic and wearing a fanny pack. I wanted to seize the world, to capture it for myself, to make it my own, before it was too late to appreciate it, to go off the beaten path.

I like this motto a lot. Seize the world. It's like seize the day, except a much broader mandate. Carpe mondus. Do everything, and go everywhere, you possibly can in this world. Then, take it all home with you, and live life with the knowledge that the world is so much bigger, so much more complicated, so much more beautiful, than you ever imagined it would be.