It is day 4 of 33 in Split, Croatia, and I’ve so far managed to sputter Hvala for Thank You.  Croatian is definitely ‘one of those languages’ that has various words with no vowels and/or lots of consonants jammed together.  But a farmers market here is like everywhere else – pick out which zucchini, onions, tomatoes, and cucumbers you want, hand them money, and trust that they give you back some change.  (Warning: if you are there mid afternoon, the older woman will try to send you home with all of her remaining spinach!)

I was grateful to our guide for offering an introductory language lesson yesterday.  Her name is Maja – pronounced in English like Maya, because in Croatian the ‘j’ sounds like a ‘y’.  My default foreign language is French, which has soft j’s, so I’m definitely not a natural at this, yet.

Pink is roza (cool!), white is bijela (okay…), and yellow is zuta boja (say what now?)  Wine is vino (alright, back on track!)

My roommate picked out a jar of sauce in the corner store which had great vegetables on the label. But as we ate the pasta dish we made, it didn’t have much flavour.  Then a fellow traveler introduced me to a feature of the Google Translate mobile app – it uses your device’s camera and, in real time, provides translations. I don’t know how long this has been available, and admit I may be late to this party*, but it is a game changer! 

Using the app, we determined that the jar of sauce was “slight” or “bland”.  Indeed.  

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We are now happily using “angry” sauce.

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* Given my recent craigslist sales, before I left California I needed to deposit cash for the first time in perhaps decades.  A helpful bank teller informed me that one can just put the bills directly into the ATM which will count them for you and proceed with the deposit.  Welcome to the 21^st century Ann.