So I hear that the Dutch have the tallest population in Europe. This I was surprised to hear… at first…

Admittedly the Dutch have a very tall population, but it reminds me of the time I was absolutely dwarfed (and I’m by no means diminutive) in Split, Croatia. It was shortly after Goran Ivanisevic famously mooned the waiting revellers following his 2001 Wimbledon win. 

Maybe my visit just happened to coincide with a national or international basketball competition? Or perhaps I was just stuck amongst several groups of Dutch tourists… who knows…?

I’m going to Milan today. France is having two weeks of school holidays, and I’m preparing myself for double shifts next week by fleeing the country for this week.

This will be my first trip to Milan, despite some well intentioned blunders in previous years. I’m also going back to Venice because I’ve recently read Joseph Brodsky’s meditative portrayal with winter-time Venice in Watermark. Venice as an Italian Petersburg – this I need to see afresh.

But this has got me thinking about famous Milanese and Venetians, which somehow progressed into an administrative panic… what would Marco Polo do in modern-day France?

For, you seen, the French are somewhat obsessed with lieu de naissance or place of birth. You need to include this on any formal document you fill out, and quite often on seemingly informal documents too. Why I worry for this long-deceased 13th-century Venetian trader and explorer is the controversy over his birthplace. Established historiography considers him a ‘citizen of the City of Venice’, but the Croatian Tourist Board maintains that he was born on the Adriatic island of Curzola, then part of the Venetian Republic, but nowadays the Croatian island of Korčula. It’s all a bit of an impasse really, with two such authoritative heavyweights battling it out…

I had first heard of this multiple birthplace theory when I was in Korčula. So, like the football team one barracks for as a child, I’m gunning for this stunning island’s claim to authenticity. Venice has too many attractions and too many tourists anyway, why not let Korčula have this one?

Now it so happens that in the aforementioned trip to Croatia with my two friends and the side-splittingly funny Irish girls, we rented a car and drove to Montenegro for the day. It was lucky that we had met the Irish girls, because at 18 and 19, my friends and I weren’t actually old enough to rent a car.

We set of across the border, expectations of all things unexpected, but shortly after we were stopped by two policemen. Seems, on reflection, that we had been going to fast a few kilometres previously, and the traffic cops had radioed ahead to their colleagues down the road, who then pulled us over.

Upon seeing a car-load of young blond and red-headed girls, the older of the two stepped aside as the younger one swaggered forwards, and, I guess, began to give us the hard word on our transgression.

We gawked and flailed our arms, indicating incomprehension. Did he speak English?

No. Did we speak Serbian?

No. What about German? (From us to him).

No. Italian? (We all shook our heads).

Spanish? – French? – Russian? (The options volleyed back and forth).

We then determined that we shared no mutually comprehensible language, other than that of theatrics, so the now blushing policeman acted out that we had been speeding, and that if we continued in that way, it would be “katastroph”.

Oh yes, officer, we understand.

“Katastroph” – it was repeated for emphasis, and then we were let off to continue on our merry way. Phew…

The rest of the day continued without a hitch, well… there was one other airheads-in-car moment. We had entered a particularly long tunnel, and only realised that it wasn’t ventilated halfway through when we where feeling a little high and dizzy from the fumes. We hastily wound our windows up, and started to panic about the associated health risks, when the driver (one of the Irish girls) started to fret that she couldn’t see anything anymore. The anxiety level increased several notches… and then we realised she was still wearing her sunglasses.

It was all without a hitch after that…

Ok, firstly, I need you to take a deep breath… clear your mind… and project yourself into a sun-drenched scenario, looking out upon a timeless terracotta vista of earthy-red roof tiles. Throw in, for good measure, an ancient city wall, and then the rich deep blue hues of the Adriatic.

Now, I have a story for you about Dubrovnik.

Somewhere amongst those stones is a little sign with an arrow. It promises you the ‘cafe with the moust beautiful view’. I was travelling with two friends, one of whom was celebrating a birthday. We had also met two laugh-a-minute Irish girls, which brought our party to five. With a few beers and the sunset, it seemed like a simple way to celebrate the event.

We perched nearby on the rocks with our drinks and chocolate cake, interested only in the ‘moust beautiful view’, rather than the cafe. That was, until nature called, and I sheepishly went to ask the cafe owners if we could use their facilities. I thought it might be more permissible if I was to explain why we were there, “my friend, she’s having a birthday”, and with an understanding nod I was shown through the empty chairs and tables, to the grass shack/hole in the rocks toilet.

Soon after I rejoined the group, the cafe owners came down to us with a tray of extra-potent rakija singing ‘happy birthday’. It was such a lovely and unexpected thing for them to do. They invited us to the cafe with our drinks, because it was a dead evening in low season, so why not celebrate together? Revelry ensued, and the evening culminated in the toilet being abandoned by some in favour of holding onto a rock, squatting and going into the liquid black of the crashing waves. By the light of day (the next morning), this dark abyss was actually revealed to be a steep vertical cliff face, with a long drop into the ocean. Eeeek! That definitely wasn’t the type of moonshine to enhance one’s night vision!

I’m pretty sure that everyone has had one of those strange-but-true meetings whilst travelling. I’m not talking future partners, but more of the random blast-from-the-past encounters.

Mine was in Zagreb, Croatia, and it involved actually getting to know someone from my hometown better than just from a glance.

I was staying in an ex-psychiatric hospital-cum-refugee barracks-cum-youth hostel (if you’ve been to this otherwise wonderful city, I’m sure you know the one I mean… the one with the black leather-clad Mafiosi in the foyer, hogging all the payphones). The place where you pay for the next night by 10am… or else…

So it happened, wandering in sometime around midday, that I was summoned to the front desk with a militant point of a finger from the most formidable of the ‘receptionists’, a welcoming figure of approximately six feet tall and six feet wide.

“You… Here…” he commanded.

My knees started to buckle beneath me; I gulped and approached the front desk.

What could it be? Had I paid? Had I accidentally set fire to my bed? What could possibly be wrong?

“You… You born here?” He traced the same massive finger through the hostel record book to where he had meticulously copied out my place and country of birth.

I nodded, still apprehensive.

“Last night… Man stayed here… Born in same place.”

Phew… I felt my tensions drain and I breathed a sign of relief. But fat chance of me knowing the guy, I was born in city of a million, with the hospital serving a much larger area. What were the chances?

The finger continued to trace down the page, until he found the name. I looked, double-took, and blurted out (all in the one breath),

“Oh my goodness! I know that guy! His mum was my teacher in first grade, and led the choir, and I used to catch the train with him everyday, but because we went to different high schools, in different classes we used to pretend not to acknowledge each other’s presence… ahh… ahem…” I noticed our moment of mutual sharing was over, his good deed done for the day, and he didn’t care for a further word… “…ahh… yes… does he stay here tonight?”

“Room 412”

And that was that. We met, had a drink, and created conversation a world away when our mothers also had a chance supermarket aisle encounter the following week.

An obvious side-effect of a Eurocentric education is an inkling to set forth across the continent, mapping out places where events from history books took place in Technicolor and not just in fine-print packed into paragraphs and henceforth crammed into young heads. This curiosity more often than not develops into the more serious condition of wanderlust, and then, as I’m lead to believe, into dromomania, a passion or uncontrollable impulse to wander or travel, a malady (or blessing) by which I’m seriously afflicted.

The first time I went alone to Europe was when I was 18. Having finished high school and saved my pocket money, I was determined to somehow stretch this meagre amount to last for a whole year without working. Thanks to numerous relatives, generous students willing to share their dormitories, Eurolines and Eastern Europe, this was possible. I was also lucky enough to have well-travelled parents, with well-travelled friends, who had sent their teenage sons and daughters to stay at my parents’ house, and thus the doors of Europe where open for me.

My favourite places in Europe – what I think of as the majestic golden triangle of Vienna, Budapest and Prague; countries of the former Yugoslavia, the Baltic states and Scandinavia, anywhere in Southern Europe blessed by an ocean, and most definitely anywhere with either a picturesque mountain range or a comprehensive recycling system or bicycles as a recognised and supported form of public transport. Have I covered it all yet?