Around Town

Here are some shots from around The Palace, inside and out, as well as The Riva which shares a wall or two with it. The first shot has not been edited, it’s a palm tree and building bathed in LED disco lights for Christmas.

Further Out

The housing density picks up considerably on the way out of town. These hulking apartment blocks may look dystopian at first, but I didn’t see anything to suggest they were particularly low-rent. There’s a huge, tiered pedestrian mall out in this area as well. I can’t tell how vital it is, since this is the off season. It might have seen better days or it might see them every May. The last two shots are of houses Northwest of The Palace in one of my favorite architectural styles of all time: a type of Art Deco known as Streamline Moderne.

Seeing Spots

Villa Spiza, Academy Club Ghetto, Marvlvs Library Jazz Bar, Academy Club Ghetto, Tavern Tri Volta

One Month in Split, Croatia

The short of it: I saw Split at its worst… and it wasn’t bad. While I wasn’t wowed by the town, there also wasn’t much to complain about.

The Pros: Picturesque neighborhoods of ascending, interconnected stone homes, high availability of goods, pervasive cafe culture, reasonable pricing, purportedly low crime, seaside with immediately accessible beaches

The Cons: Major tourism destination creates chaos in the warmer months, somewhat more expensive than other towns in the region, stone home permeates cold in the otherwise tolerable winter

Distortions: We visited for 29 nights in December of 2017 and stayed in a small studio that was deeply discounted compared to high season. Our budget limited our entertainment options.

Overall: Split failed to wow me, but it was clearly having an off month. While the city enthusiastically embraces Christmas by setting up a Christmas ‘Village’ along the main promenade in order to sling hot wine and donuts at cruise ship tourists and locals alike, winter is the off season for a reason. While it provided us with excellent value, the grey skies, light crowds and prevailing chill exerted a downward influence on my impression of the town.

The city has roughly 175,000 residents and the average monthly high temperatures range from 52F (11C) in January to 86F (30C) in July. This makes it the smallest city we’ve taken up residence in on this trip and keeps with out overall plan of highs in the 50s during the coldest months of our itinerary.

Food and entertainment: While food is not particularly expensive in Split, it’s not exactly cheap either. You’ll probably be shocked by how affordable medium and higher end dining experiences are and chagrined by how much it costs to buy simple street food. Cevapi, a simple sausage sandwich and regional staple, will cost you US$4.50 for the least amount of meat. Meanwhile seafood, veal and fresh pastas abound and will land in the US$9-US$15 range. As always, bakeries have your budget conscious back. The prices are a little higher than Krakow or Budapest, but still low enough that you might not even notice. Spinach or kale play heavily, as does flaky filo-like pastry dough. We’d usually spend less than US$2/pp and leave with a filling bag full of items as cheesy and oily as they were bready. I mean that in a good way.

The prices also pushed us to cook a little more than usual. Luckily the ‘Green Market’, a  large public square filled with locals selling produce, meats, cheeses, legumes and what have you, was just 3 minutes away by foot. We ended up making a lot of gnocchi with Brussels sprouts and big chunks of local white cheese, all dressed in olive oil, garlic and salt.

Cafe culture is fully ensconced, both along the main boulevards and tucked into about every other corner of the city that you can imagine, in and outside of the palace. Espresso will run you ~US$1.12, cappuccino ~US$1.75 and 12 ounces of bottled local beer ~US$2.50. You can linger as long as you like. In fact, if 3rd wave coffee shops try to take over in Europe I think the local populace will riot. They are not ready for the ‘sip it, applaud us and get the fuck out of here’ ethos of the typical American Coffee Lab or what have you.

We particularly enjoyed Marvlvs Library Jazz Bar, run by a displaced Argentine or two. It’s a warm melding of influences and we first found it during an event they called “We Listen To: Tom Waits”, during which they simply played about 2 hours of Tom Waits at a previously agreed upon time. It gave us the change to hear Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis as we built toward the holiday and for that we’re forever grateful.

Our place: Our place was a 1 room efficiency that lives up to the moniker. We had two twin beds, a small table with two chairs, a night stand, a dresser (or something) and a standing bar for hanging clothing. The kitchen sink was about 4 feet from my bed, but it all worked surprisingly well. The location was excellent, the rent was US$553.17 (about 1/3 of what it would have been during the high season) and overall it worked.

Infrastructure: We never experienced outages of water or power. Our internet situation was too tenuous to draw conclusions. There was a near bizarre saturation of grocery stores; I think I counted 9 within 10 minutes walk, many sizes were in evidence, from beefed up cornershops to a large Lidl further away and an equally large Spar. Streets and sidewalks were well maintained

The Numbers: We brought the month in at US$1,450.38 for two, covering everything except a few medical costs for The Girlfriend. The full breakdown is available here. As mentioned above, rent was US$553.17 including Airbnb fees, utilities and a weekly cleaning. We spent US$290.23 on meals out, loosely averaging US$6.60/person/meal. Our budget felt tighter here than in most places we visit, mostly because there were no dirt-cheap sources for simple, prepared meals. We happily cook the overwhelming majority of our meals when we’re living in The US, so this isn’t a hindrance in theory, but during a single month stay when your unfamiliar with the local cuisine and may not have the best equipped kitchen, the effect is amplified. I”m generally a ‘cook everything one day a week, pull from the freezer the rest of the time’ kind of guy, but the impracticality of this approach while traveling amplifies the utility of having sub US$2 meals at your ready disposal.

Around the neighborhood

Here are a few shots from around our rental. It’s mostly pedestrian passageways, though you see the occasional moped and rare car come through. I’m kind of obsessed with the property in the second photo. I think it’s abandoned because the roof has fallen in completely in one section. A lot of the property around here is in this state, which is kind of shocking since our place rents out for thousands of dollars a month during high season and structurally its nothing special. I’m sure there are economic considerations I’m unaware of. Right next to our rental, so close we share a wall, is a two store structure made of cut stone (like everything in this neighborhood) that has literally nothing else. It’s actually kind of visible on the left in the first picture; the structure with the bricked up window holes. It’s a ruin that would be a wonderful house with the addition of a minimum of improvements; a roof, a couple floors, some windows, plumbing and power… what I mean is the building style here is incredibly simple, there’s no insulation and little ‘finishing’, just big stone walls inside and out. I keep staring at this place and wondering how it can be ignored in such a valuable location and why there are so many like it. And then today a bunch of workers showed up and they’re pounding and power-something-ing away at it all morning. There’s probably some money to be made here, but I’m not staying on this continent long enough to find out.

Home Cooking

Prices in Split are a little higher than we’re accustomed to while traveling, so we’ve been cooking at home a fair amount. Dishes often include Brussel Sprouts, local cheese, pasta or gnocchi and olive oil. I’ve included some groceries from a local store and the receipt (multiply by .16 to find the US$ equivalent), as well as a shot of The Green Market, which operates daily and is a 3 minute walk from our place.

Menus

A cafe (Bellevue) and a shot of the room, a fast food menu in two parts, a 5 piece sausafe sandwich, in its entirety, from that menu, a menu from an ‘affordable’ local buffet that was closed for the season and the menu from a fast food stand near the Joker Mall.

We figure the US$ price buy taking the KN price and multiplying it by .16.

Discards

At least two items are getting left behind in Split. Up top is my Belkin 3 Prong surge protector with 2 USB ports. I don’t remember where I got this thing, but the first time I traveled with it I liked it so much I ordered one as a gift. But that was 10 years ago (or something) and modern USB chargers are cheap to buy locally (needing no conversion) and charge much more quickly. Adios, mi amigo.

The second item pictured is a door security device that I bought for this trip. It’s small(ish), but heavy and here in our third rental we haven’t been able to use it once. The doors here are likely to open outward or have a kind of lip on the interior, either of which make this device useless. This rental also has a step down when you enter, which makes the device useless. All in all, I’m not willing to keep hauling it around on the off chance it might occasionally perform sort of well, at best.

Yay lighter pack!

Current Location: Bed, Rental Studio Apartment, Split, Croatia, Adriatic Coast

Price of beer in a bar: US$2.24 for .33L (~11 ounces) of bottled domestic mediocrity

Son currently stuck in my head: Santa’s Super Sleigh (Peter Brewis)

It’s Dec 17th, regardless of what the date on this post says, and The Girlfriend and I are casting youtube videos of Christmas Music to the TV in our small studio most days now. We’re almost 3 weeks into our stay here in Split and I haven’t really settled into a feel for the town. The Palace (Diocletian’s) is gorgeous, but beyond that the town feels like a repetition of the same few motifs, mostly ‘cafe’ which feels oppressively generic as of late. Perhaps it’s me. Perhaps the weather, the dominant grey expanse that occasionally spits drizzle for hours at a time, is taking a toll. Perhaps at day 97 of European travel the novelty is wearing off and I’m hitting a wall. Because beyond all else, The Girlfriend and I are bored. She’s more in love with Split than I am; this town is close enough, visually, to Greece to evoke some positive associations that she, alone, carries. But we both liken this month to life in a nursing home where leisure time abounds and little happens.

We receive no direct sunlight in our rental, which is probably the norm for ground level accommodations in this neighborhood, owing to the narrow passages that don’t allow a direct line of sight to the sky. We have two reasonably sized windows looking out on the ‘street’, but the next building is 7 feet away (or something) and 4 stories tall. We get plenty of reflected light (it’s nice and bright in here right now, about as pictured above), but I doubt this interior has ever hosted an actual ray of sunshine.

Cost plays a role, as always. Things here are more expensive than anywhere we’ve been or are likely to be on this trip, but that’s hitting me more in the head than the wallet. I’m averse to spending US$2 on a small bottle of beer or a cappuccino, even though my budget can absorb it. Mostly it’s the cost of meals out that is prohibitive here; the absolute cheapest we’re seeing takeout for is ~US$5 (barring a US$2 slice of pizza), which is a serious markup over budget meals in most of the other towns you’ll see floating around the word cloud to my right.

Because of all of the above, we’ve sought financial refuge in the grocery stores. I count 9 of them within an 11 minute walk of our apartment and there’s no way that’s a comprehensive accounting. We keep finding larger and larger supermarkets, ascending the tiers of cornershop, market, maximarket and beyond. 500ml of cider runs about US$1 and local beer can be less. Medium to large sized eggs go for about 21 cents each. Gnocchi or pasta, tossed with brussel sprouts and or zuccini, sausage, garlic, olive oil and local cheese is getting piled high in this apartment, thanks in large part to the “Green Market’ that’s 3 minutes away where vendors move fresh vegetables, meats and dairy daily. Hearty pasties with flaky crusts surrounding sweet or savory cheeses, fruits or vegetables like chard or spinach can be had for about US$2/each in filling portions at a million local bakeries… we have this well in hand, but we’re hoping for something more stimulating to happen soon.

Split is mostly known as a seaside destination; a popular port of call for the yacht crowd. I have no trouble imagining it being a fantastic week or weekend when approached from one of the marinas; the town is oriented to slide its best foot up your sundress when you’re approaching from the water and the eclectic mix of wide open outdoor cafe seating and tiny, 3 table bistros tucked into palace corners must be a sight for sore eyes when you’ve been living between decks out at sea. So far, for me, it’s been good, not great. But again, it could be more me than here.

Meow

There are a lot of cats in Split and, therefore, a lot of pictures of cats in Split on my roll. I managed to narrow them down to this collection. The cats are all well behaved and seem to be in robust health. People definitely feed them; you see little dishes and even cat doors all around town. I assume they help keep the local rodent population in check.

The two catching sun are in the same general basement area that the scenes in Game Of Thrones where dragons are chained up were filmed.