🌿 Dalmatian Dawn: Notes From a Village Waking Up – Pipeaway Newsletter #211

Hi from Živogošće!

I’d love to hear you pronounce that. Diacritical marks, such as the little roofs of Croatian letters ‘ž’, ‘š’, and ‘ć’, are not the only ‘freaks’ in our dictionary. But when they gather in one word, they are surely enough for a foreigner’s tongue twist.

The Croatian alphabet has 30 letters, but for quite a few, you’ve probably never heard of them. For instance, if I were to ask you how many letters there are in my last name – Kralj – what would you say?

The correct answer is: four. And no, it’s not about you counting incorrectly. In Croatian, ‘lj’, the combo of the two letters, is indeed one letter. Well, for your first lesson in my native language, I’ll give you a translation. Not sure if you’ll need it in your everyday life, but my second name is the Croatian word for ‘king’.

I’ve arrived in the tongue-twisting Živogošće not to be a royal myself, but to upgrade the experience of tourists choosing this small Dalmatian village for their holidays.

In three weeks, they will all be expecting the greatest treatment, and my team (under construction) will need to respond.

The spring has just arrived, and for me, it feels like the start of a new year. Nature is waking up, life is entering a brand new cycle, and tourists looking for the Croatian sun will be stampeding to this region like migratory birds. In an otherwise sleepy village, visitors are the harbingers of spring.

I’m looking forward to replacing Dalmatian cats with real humans to hang out with. But hotel operations, the current springboard of my professional career, are a complex business. Even without having guests around, the work is still at full speed.

My afternoon job, sometimes a beyond-midnight job (Pipeaway website), finds me in half-slumber. After I successfully installed a replacement monitor (the laptop’s screen went to permanent ‘sleep’), my brain now needs to fight only the half-shut eyes.

Spring is the period of great cleaning, so I dug deeper into my portfolio of not-yet-published stories. Well, I wrote a lot about the Phuket Vegetarian Festival before, but this brand-new article brings you to the Lim Hu Tai Su Shrine, where entranced vegetarians use skewers to go beyond meat.

Viewers’ discretion is advised. When you visit your local hardware store next time, you’ll look at all those tools with a different set of eyes.

Have an awakening week,

Ivan Kralj    
Pipeaway.com

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Ivan Kralj

Editor

Award-winning journalist and editor from Croatia