I Pee Postards and it Hurts

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After a Google search, I found a Croatian, Slovenian and Polish church in San Francisco offering language classes. They were more informal than I had expected but folks there loved my enthusiasm and loaded me up with cassette tapes and phrase books. I listened to the tapes in the car, studied on the weekends and hung out regularly with other novices who warned me about the impossible grammar rules.

Grammar for this trip was not my objective. I just wanted to be able to talk to friends of my grandparents and tell them I lived in California, I was a reporter and my family sends their regards.

In less than eight weeks, I confidently could recite: “Bog. Kako ste? Ja sam Jennifer” which means, “Hello. How are you? I am Jennifer.” This duly impressed my father, who I asked to come with me on this trip. Part of the purpose of this adventure was to see his hometown through his eyes. What’s probably more accurate, though, is deep down, I’m a coward and I knew he would get me out of a bind if I floundered.

And, boy, did I blunder along the way. At one point, assured that I was getting the hang of it, I announced that I was peeing postcards to a group of older women. In fact, what I was actually doing was writing postcards. Not nearly the same thing, huh?

It was weeks, maybe even months, after my trip that I finally figured out that I unknowingly swapped the verbs to urinate and to write. That would explain the polite giggles from my audience on that fateful day. Amazing what a difference a single letter can make in the meaning of a sentence. The village elders thought I was cute, and didn’t have the heart to correct me out of fear of squashing my willingness to try again.

Two weeks in this beautiful country, ravaged by civil war twelve years ago, but on its way to democracy, only whetted my appetite for more. Becoming conversational would mean a higher level of dedication, more intense study and practice, practice, practice.

I organized my friends and forced them to schedule time to get together to watch movies spoken in Croatian, go over dialogs and describe everyday things in Croatian words. Essentially, though, we’re a group of self-taught speakers with the capacity of four- to 10-year-olds. We had to step it up a notch. We found a woman in the East Bay who would teach a handful of us every Thursday in her home. This was all helpful but I still felt this need to go back and be near the Adriatic Sea to truly make progress.

As luck, fate or destiny would have it, a number of factors collided in the spring of 2003 and created the opportunity for me to travel around Europe for six months.

While it was primarily a break-from-my-life type of experience that would take from Greece to Italy to Spain, I made certain to block out two months for Croatia. A month of that, I decided, would be in the country’s capital, Zagreb, taking an intense summer language and culture course affiliated with the University of Zagreb that came highly recommended from one of my buddies.

I slapped down my 720 euros for the class, another 250 euros for the culture program and about $15 a night for a bed in the dorm at the school, which included a traditional European breakfast of bread, nutella-like spread, cheese and a strange-looking slice of ham that under other circumstances I may have passed on because it didn’t really resemble ham.

For the month of July, I was consumed by the student routine. I woke up to church bells at 6:45 a.m.—a constant reminder of how quickly the night had passed and how little I had accomplished; spent five hours a day in a basement classroom digesting new words and grammar exceptions; I played games designed for first-graders as a way of drilling in the day’s lessons; I studied in cafes in the blistering mid-afternoon heat and poured over pages and pages of fill-in-the-blank homework assignments; I flirted with waiters and insisted that they correct me so I wouldn’t screw up something big like writing and peeing ever again.

I also hiked in the nearby hills, stayed up way too late in the dorms, alternately quizzing other students or lapping up pizza in the courtyard and even, went to the opera, although I have no idea what it was about because I couldn’t read the translations.

While I always felt that I was an eternal student at heart, there were days I wanted to shoot myself. Just when I thought I got something, the instructors would give me the list of exceptions that logically didn’t follow anything you learned the day before and you felt like you were right back at square one.

At the same time, it was hard to ignore the significant progress I made. Menus got easier to read. Walking into a store to buy fruit became less terrifying. And, even if I couldn’t answer folks immediately—I often found that I instinctively wanted to answer in the French that I had buried long ago and had to quickly re-translate my French answer back into English and then again into Croatian, it was something. Hey, at least I was thinking in a foreign tongue, I rationalized. Yeah, it wasn’t the right one, but at least I was in the ball park.

It was hard, especially in the smaller villages where regional dialects were much different than the version we learned in the big city and sometimes, we had to make up stuff in our heads to fill the gap between what we knew and what we couldn’t follow. But, nonetheless, it was wonderful.

However, as important as those little steps were, nothing was more dear to me than the conversation I had with my grandmother shortly after she received a letter from me, written in her language.

I could hear in her voice how important this card was and could almost see her welling up, touched by the fact that I had gone to such lengths to understand where she came from. She said, using simple Croatian words I could follow, “Srce moja, ja sam jako sretna,” which means, “My heart, (a colloquialism that is much stronger than "my dear") I am very happy.”

I know there were other words that followed, but those are the ones that stay with me and inspire to keep studying.

Jennifer Baljko is a San Francisco-based freelancer writer, working on everything from business trend stories to travel pieces to personal essays. Although she is trying to convert her wanna-be-princess mentality into a backpacker-on-a-budget lifestyle, she's busy thinking up an excuse to justify taking cute, but totally impractical, red sandals with her on her next far-flung adventure.

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