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Showing posts from August, 2018

Let's not give up on travel: Why travel matters and how to do it a little better

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The Adriatic Sea: The Closest I've Come to Croatia At the risk of sounding like an insufferable hipster, I've liked Croatia before it was cool. Heck, I liked Croatia when it was still Yugoslavia. Maybe it was that hottie Goran Visnjic as Dr. Kovac in ER or adolescent fascination with war-torn countries, but I fantasized about the turn-of-the-century glamour of pre-WWI resorts on the Croatian coast, and the fringes of both the Ottoman and Roman empires, and the melting pot of Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim culture. I got a Croatian dictionary for Christmas once and tried my best to leverage my junior-high Russian into self-learning the Croatian language. I didn't grow out of loving Yugoslavia. I watched depressing subtitled films. My undergraduate thesis was on a late-20th century Slovenian war poet. In graduate school, I had to appeal to both my own department and the Slavic department to take a credit/non-credit spot in an undergraduate class where I finally got to stu