Monday, March 14, 2011. The Croatian language has its roots in the Latin language – same roots as the English language. So, my question is: “Why is it so difficult to learn Croatian?” I’ve learned several phrases, which is nice – but not very helpful! I can’t understand anything anyone says to me. Even with learning the numbers, I still don’t understand how much anything is when it’s all verbal. If there’s a sign, then I’m okay and can hand over the correct amount of bills and coins. Again, nice, but there is so much more to learn…
I am rediscovering that traveling in a non-English speaking country is a very humbling experience. And doesn’t get easier as you get older! Although since my last trip to Europe, I’m a little more relaxed about some things. Somehow, everything will work out for us.
But when we’re on the highways – that’s another story. It’s hard to be relaxed on these roads while trying to read road signs and the maps too. The GPS that came with our rental car doesn’t have Croatia on it and that was a big surprise to us. We haven’t been able to download a road map of Croatia for our GPS from here. For some reason the transaction won’t go through. We sure wished we’d done this at home before we got here! We just assumed the GPS that came with the rental car would have Croatia on it, which is why we didn’t update our GPS at home.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011. Yesterday we tried to drive up the coast road to another town that has beautiful views of the sea and a wonderful old cathedral. The road map shows the coastal road going all the way to this town – honest, it does! But about half-way there, the road ended. So we had to turn around and go almost all the way back to where we started. We were pretty disgusted by all this and just came back the apt. It was a cloudy day so the views wouldn’t have been that good anyway. But I am good at rationalizing my decisions!
We love Skype! We called the credit card company, they put us on a conference call with TomTom GPS. The TomTom website would not let the transaction go through for some reason for our purchase of an Eastern Europe map. Well, we’re not impressed with TomTom Technical Support. They were unable to figure out how to make this transaction go through. We are impressed with the credit card company. They stayed on the line and spent over half an hour trying to help us. We changed our address to the one here in Pula but that didn’t help. Then changed it back to the US address. Still didn’t work. Frustration was oozing out of us! We’d tried several different credit cards and on 3 different days. So – this frustration has been building for a few weeks now. We said good-bye to our credit card helper and thanked him for his efforts.
After walking off some of our frustration we returned to the internet to try again. This time we accidentally picked a TomTom website in the UK. Well, what did we have to lose? We tried ordering from this site and it worked!!! Oh, happy day!!! Of course, our TomTom didn’t have enough room for this map and we had to delete our US maps. There’s always a catch…but we’re just so glad we were finally able to get this map of Eastern Europe. Now, we finally get to plan some trips. Some will be day trips to places nearby, others will be to other countries. Let the fun begin!
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