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arrival in Split
Sunday, July 5 2026
location: somewhat northwest of Ireland in the North Atlantic Ocean
It's easy to look at whatever screen someone has set to the map of where the plane is and think, "Oh, we're nowhere near our destination" (in this case Amsterdam) and try to go back to sleep. But at some point the trying to get comfortable given the constraints of the airplane seats (even when we do have two extra seats to work with) delivers such diminished returns that one decides to embrace awakeness and maybe watch a movie. So that was when I started watching It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley, a documentary about the music career of Jeff Buckley, the fast-rising rock star who tragically drowned before he could release his sophomore album. Gretchen and I actually know Rebecca, his girlfriend from the early 1990s who is interviewed in the film, though neither of us could be said to be Jeff Buckley fans and, from what the picture the film painted, he sounded like something of an infuriating wingnut. But hey, Robert Plant said he was the most significant person in rock 'n' roll while he was alive, so that has to count for something.
I drifted off to sleep after watching all of that and the next time I awoke, I had no idea where we were, but we were flying over a dramatic alpine mountain that appeared to include some glaciers. It turned out that we were a lot closer to our destination on the coast of Croatia than I thought, because the body of water that soon apppeared on the ground to the east was not the north end of the Adriatic Sea as I'd initially assumed, but was instead just a minor bay amid a Croatian archipelago of large islands. And then the pilot announced that we were descending for our landing near the city of Split. The sea below us was a sublimely-saturated greenish blue, which contrasted naturally with the green-with-oatmeal-colored landscape and the uniform red terracotta roofs of the buildings.
Immigration and customs happened with the quickness we've come to expect when landing in Europe, and soon we were digorged out into the place where people await their loved ones. Right away we saw our friends Kelly and Brian from Scotland, whom we knew would be on the upcoming Mediterranean cruise with us and whom we'd expected to meet in the Split airport, but perhaps not so perfectly; they'd only just landed themselves.
Gretchen had pre-arranged for a taxi to pick all four of us up and drive us into the center of the old city of Split, where both couples had rooms reserved at the Hotel Kastel. But prior to actually getting in the cab, Gretchen had one of those moments where she flew into a rage about what she perceived to be a minor scam being worked by the cab company, which was suddenly insisting that the four of us needed a bigger cab than the one Gretchen had arranged for due to the number of people who would be in it. Somehow Gretchen worked it out and the four of us crammed with all of our stuff into what was essentially a mid-sized sedan, though three people in the back seat was a little tight. Fortunately Kelly and Brian had packed unusually lightly, though not quite as lightly as we had. As for me, I got to ride in the front passenger seat, a luxury I am often forced to accept because of my supposedly longer legs (not usually true!) even though I somewhat prefer the relative lack of scrutiny that comes with being just another person in the back seat.
After being disgorged on the edge of the gorgeous old city of Split, which looks like something from a fairy tale, it took awhile to track down the Hotel Kastel off the side of what in Italy would be called a piazza. At Hotel Kastel, we were greeted by a big guy whose job it was to carry luggage up and down stairways. He didn't speak much English, but what little he could say he tried to use to engage us, mostly to the men (me and Brian). On hearing I was from New York, the big man brought up the Knicks basketball team, but I had nothing to say about that. It soon became clear that our rooms weren't in the main part of Hotel Kastel, which on the website mentions views of the sea. Instead we were in some satellite building to the west at the top of a long stairway. Kelly & Brian's room was one floor above ours in an attic space with lots of head-bumping opportunities (good thing they're both not tall), whereas ours had tall ceilings. Neither had a view of the sea. The big guy without great English skills insisted on carrying all our luggage, which he was somehow able to do in one go. When he got to our room, he spent an unnecessarily long time explaining everything, particularly the minibar, as though we might be unfamiliar with the concept. He also took me aside to show me a switch on the wall near the bathroom that was clearly labeled saying not to turn it off, and of course Gretchen took offense that the guy was only telling me, as if a woman wasn't to worry her pretty head about it. The switch controlled power to the system that heated the water and we would eventually be lacking hot water no matter what gender turned it off if that were to happen. The big guy lingered for an uncomfortable about of time in our room asking if we were happy with everything angling for a tip, but we didn't give him one. Kelly and Brian gave him a five euro tip after he'd done a similar presentation of their attic room for them.
Since Croatia looks a lot like Italy and has been ruled from time to time from across the Adriatic, I expected it to be more culturally Italianesque. So you can imagine my surprise to discover that the coffee provided with the room (not part of the minibar!) was Nescafé, that ubiquitous brand of instant coffee familiar from such places as Guatemala and Grenada, places where the good coffee revolution had yet to arrive when we'd last been there.
When we first arrive in some foreign place, my instinct is to want to sleep in the fresh new bed of our hotel room, since it's vastly superior to anything on the airplane where I'd just been trying to sleep. Usually it is Gretchen who is cracking the whip and insisting we must take advantage of this place we're in, since we'll only be there for a limited time. This time, though, both of us fell asleep and slept for some indeterminate amount of time soon after laying down "for a moment" on the bed.
Eventually, though, we both got up and stumbled out blinking into the blinding sunlight. Our first stop was a vegan restaurant nearby called Pandora Greenbox, where we sat at a table outside. It was there that I ordered an oat milk cappuccino, breaking a caffeine fast that had been going on for five or six days. Unfortunately, that cappuccino was mediocre at best, as were the several appetizers we ordered. Amusingly, we ran across Kelly and Brian at another vegan restaurant nearby but fortunately decidedly not to immediately coalesce our posses, as there would be plenty of time for that over the next two weeks.
We then walked around the old city of Split. Along the way, we passed a couple dramatic oversized bronze statues of famous male figures such as Gregory of Nin (a sort of proto-protestant from around 900 AD) that, interestingly, are postured in such a way as to conceal the face from most angles. In a tourist-filled courtyard we came upon a couple young men dressed up as Roman legionnaires in homage to the Roman emperor Diocletian, whose palace we'd just entered. It was now the site of the Split Cathedral, and we somehow wandered into its museum part through the back way without having to actually pay. The vestibule south of the cathedral proper features a domed roof around a huge oculus.
Along the way, we noted the signage in Croatian and noted that the word "apartment" is spelled "apartman" in the language. This led me to joke about a hypothetical superhero whose super power is being able to move into apartments without having to pay rent.
For dinner, we met up with Kelly and Brian and went to another vegan restaurant called Veg. I ordered the tacos, which turned out to be a bit plant and have an somewhat musky-earth flavor component that I wasn't wild about. This confirms an idea I've had in the past that it's probably a good idea to avoid tacos completely unless I am in the Americas. I also had a glass of wine, though the pour was the stingiest one I've seen since one Gretchen got at a fancy restaurant in Mexico City.
Among the topics that came up during dinner was an idea I'd had earlier today about someone in an improv performance who starts advocating rabidly Nazi or otherwise racist ideology, forcing their fellow performers to "yes, and..." such repugnant material. Another amusing topic was the new class of highly-effective weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic. This came up after Gretchen noticed Kelly wasn't eating much of her food and she asked if perhaps Kelly was on a GLP-1 receptor agonist. She was not, and it turned out that the most popular such drug in Britain is something called "Mounjaro," which in her pronunciation sounded a lot like the Italian imperative for "Eat!" [This would be a recurring joke for the next couple weeks.]
After the meal, we waded into a grocery store to get food for tomorrow's breakfast, since we didn't have any good restaurant options. There we bought some fresh fruit and bread, both of which would turn out to be amazing. There was a young woman shopping there who must've been about seven feet tall, and perhaps whatever issue had made her grow so tall was also the source of a light sprinkling of whiteheads across her back. This tall woman had us noting other people of unusually tall stature we saw on the street, making us wonder if perhaps Croatia is one of those countries, like the Netherlands, where people are unnaturally tall. The issue here, though, seemed less about the average than about the large number of outliers; the median height was only a little taller than the United States.
We continued walking to some bars spilling out onto the sidewalks along the harbor, where a group of people were excitedly watching a live game of the FIFA world soccer championship, something that slightly interested Brian and interested me not at all.
Back in our hotel room, I took advantage of the fact that our bathroom had a tub in it and took myself a bath while skimming through one of two magazines from the 1980s I'd retrieved from my Shaque last year. The one I was skimming was the November 4th, 1985 issue of Electronics, and I was struck by how in-fashion AI (as in "artificial intelligence") was in the articles. Back then, though, AI wasn't large language models (LLMs) but was instead expert systems, programs where "intelligence" is encoded using explicitly human-written code (often in the language LISP).
Fruit Square, near the main building of Hotel Kastel. The statue is of Marko Marulic. Click to enlarge.
Brian in Fruit Square soon after the cab let us off near the old city of Split. Click to enlarge.
Stone brackets in the old city of Split. Click to enlarge.
The statue of Gregory of Nin. Click to enlarge.
The main spire of the Split Cathedral (the Cathedral of Saint Domnius). Note the swifts, which comprise a good fraction of the birds one sees in Split. Click to enlarge.
A crude Madonna and Child in the Split Cathedral museum. Click to enlarge.
Gretchen with a dramatic partial arch. Click to enlarge.
The glorious Golden Gate entering Diocletian's Palace in Split. Click to enlarge.
Looking up through the huge oculus in the Split Cathedral vestibule. Click to enlarge.
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