I'm in India!

Look what I found for sale on a sidewalk in India!

The window I’m looking through today is in India and not in Istria.

As you know, before moving to Istria I spent close to seven years living in India. I needed to go back... and am spending the winter there to attend a few dance festivals, work on my projects, and catch up with friends.

During this time, I’ll be updating my India blog so do follow my adventures by heading over to India Outside My Window.

But do come back to this window again in April, when I’ll be back in Istria.

I also take this opportunity to wish you, dear readers, a Happy New Year!

House renovation update

The upstairs hallway is the perfect spot for bookshelves

Finally! The house renovation update... Well, our little house is now 95% finished. The last big project was to put in the stairs linking the ground floor to the upper floor and now that’s just about done. The next step is to attach the wooden planks for the steps to the metal structure which will be done as soon as the painting and varnishing of the steps is finished. Then we’ll also have to complete the bar which separates the kitchen from the living area. But the house finally feels like a house!

Metal staircase - wooden steps to come

It’s not a big house, with two rooms and a bathroom upstairs, and a living area and kitchen downstairs, but it is a good size. We also have the outdoor courtyard to enjoy, where the brick oven sits majestically in one corner. As I had mentioned in my previous post on our renovation project, we tried to preserve as many original features of the house as possible: like the stone walls and stone doorway, the original wooden beams, and the little 'niches' built into the stone walls. Not only are we happy to have completed a living space for ourselves but also to have restored one of the village’s original stone houses.

There are still a few other projects reserved for the Spring, the most important of which is renovating the façade. Since the village has heritage protection status, we need to apply for permission to do this. We’ve already contacted the conservation committee with two possible proposals, but are still waiting to hear back from them.

The brick oven can be seen through the back door in the courtyard

One of the niches built into the stone walls.

A 'window' between the living area and kitchen

I don’t have ‘after’ photos to display here, because we’re still in the process of settling in and furnishing the house, which takes time. But the photos I’m posting here offer a peek into the restoration process.

Having gone through the experience, I would offer the following advice to anyone thinking of starting a similar project to renovate a holiday home:

Expect everything to take longer than expected. It’s difficult to estimate the time it will take for a renovation project because there are so many factors at play. In any case, renovating a property is a lot more time-consuming (and stressful!) than many people imagine. Not only do you have to rely on contractors, materials may not always be available when you need them or may have to be ordered in advance. Even the weather can delay things: like our walls which took weeks to dry because of a wet, humid winter.

Expect everything to cost more than expected. Because you’ll be glad you have some money left over!

Keep it simple. Planning and building or renovating a home or holiday retreat is a dream project. Some people get carried away and plan too big and then realize that the project is too ambitious and is eating up more time and resources than initially imagined. Less is more.

Be on-site as much as possible. There are decisions and micro-decisions which need to be taken on a daily basis. This is why you need to be around as much as possible. If you can’t, find a project manager you trust to oversee things in your absence.

Feel free to share your own experiences building or renovating a home or holiday getaway in the comments section!

The Istrian language: is it dying out?

One of the things which is unique about Istria is its language. The Istrian language is a dialect of Croatian and is quite different from standard Croatian. The language reflects Istria’s rich history with many words borrowed from Italian, and a few smatterings of German.

The Croatian language has three main dialects which are divided into many sub-dialects. The three main dialects are named after the way the word ‘what’ is pronounced in that dialect: čakavski, štokavski, and kajkavski. In Istria, the čakavski dialect is spoken, while štokavski is ‘standard’ Croatian.

There are several variations of the Istrian dialect and the accent and vocabulary can change from one village or town to the next. Like most dialects, this is not a formal written language, though some local writers and poets do write in the Istrian language for stylistic (and cultural) reasons.

While growing up in Canada, we would speak the Istrian dialect at home and this is the language I spoke with my grandparents and other family members when I would come to Istria for visits. This is why I struggle with standard Croatian and tend to understand old people best!

While older people tend to speak Istrian, I’ve noticed that today young Istrians are more likely to speak standard Croatian in everyday situations, though some make a point of speaking the dialect. There are several reasons for this; one may be increased literacy. My grandparents were not educated in Croatian but Italian, since Istria was part of Italy in their school-going days. The Istrian language was what was spoken at home. In my grandparents’ time, and even in my parents’ time, not everyone was able to go to school or complete their schooling. For this reason, they may have been less exposed to ‘Serbo-Croatian’, as the language was called during Yugoslavia. Fast forward two generations and today everyone is educated at least to the secondary level, with most students moving on to higher studies. Since all schooling is in standard Croatian, young people have a high proficiency in the language.

A poet from the village who writes in the Istrian language told me that another reason why the dialect is being spoken less today is because people do not marry within the same region anymore. While transportation links were poor in the past, making travel a challenge, today people can move around more easily. They go away to study in other parts of Croatia and often marry non-Istrians.

Since being fluent in standard Croatian indicated a certain level of education (at one time), Istrian is seen by some as a ‘peasant’ language, or a language spoken only by old people, hence a certain ‘inferiority’ complex on the part of Istrian speakers and a ‘superiority’ complex on the part of standard Croatian speakers (especially from outside Istria). As high literacy and education levels have now created a level playing field, I think (hope) that young people today speak Istrian because they want to speak their language, and by speaking it, they preserve it and a part of their identity and heritage.

I was curious to know what they think so I asked a few young people (in their 20s and 30s) from different regions of Istria a few questions and am including their answers below. Their answers are often contradictory and reflect the region of Istria they come from.

The brick oven – part 2

I know there are two outstanding updates on this blog, namely updates on the house renovation and the brick oven construction in our courtyard. Well, the house is practically finished, with just a few details left, the most important of which is the internal staircase which will connect the ground and upper floors. The metal staircase structure which will support the steps is being assembled and I’m hoping it will be installed this week. In the meantime we’ll be busy varnishing the wooden planks which will be used as steps this week. A more detailed update on the house is coming soon!

As for the brick oven, it’s now complete and fully functional and has produced many yummy breads and pizza. As you may have read in a previous post, the brick oven has been the Belgian husband’s pet project for the past few months. I’ve been itching to write an update about it for some time now but I was asked by the brick oven maestro to wait until he completes the informational website he has created detailing the entire construction process. That was almost two months ago… and after a few reminders and a final decision that I was writing the update brick-oven-website-ready-or-not, the website was magically completed and I can finally write this post and share the website link with you (see below).

The brick oven project was started at the beginning of May and completed towards the end of October, with many breaks in the construction process due to (rainy) weather, a bit of travel, and injury (nothing too serious, just a few sore arm muscles and back strain).

Our brick oven is a subject of curiosity in the village. Many people stopped by to have a look during the building process and offer their advice (solicited and unsolicited – mostly unsolicited – everyone had a say!). We also heard a lot of stories about the olden days when the village had three or four functioning brick ovens – some of these were public where villagers could come to bake their bread. At Easter time women would walk here from neighbouring farms and villages with loaves of sweet bread to bake in the communal oven. My aunt told me she would accompany my grandmother, balancing on her head a large wooden kneading board covered with loaves ready to be baked.

One of these old ovens is still left but is not in use – it is actually very close to ours, in the next property just over the back wall. Nowadays everyone has an electric oven of course, but there are some people who build a brick oven specially for baking pizza and bread. Nothing compares to a pizza baked in a wood-fired oven!

As for the experience, the Belgian husband says it was definitely worthwhile and greatly rewarding (culinarily rewarding too!). He shares his research, 3D models, mathematical formulas, photos and experiences on almost every detail of the brick oven building process at The Brick Oven.

And here is an updated slide show of the steps of the oven being built:

Thoughts about stuff

Left: the box containing our stuff being loaded in Bangalore. Right: our stuff arriving in Gracisce.

Having experienced three international moves in the space of seven years, I have a few thoughts about stuff. You know, the stuff you tend to drag around from one home to the next. The stuff you keep in boxes in the basement or an attic, which simply takes up space. The stuff you either have to face by sorting through it and deciding what is indispensable and what isn’t, or the stuff whose real or imagined utility you don’t question at all and instead just move it to another basement or attic where it sits until the next move.

I’ve learned that you don’t need most of this stuff but you end up paying to pack it, move it, store it, and sometimes even to dispose of it.

I’ve learned that life is simpler without stuff.

I’ve learned that it’s very liberating to get rid of stuff. When I wrote about my experience packing up my previous life in India I mentioned the feeling of liberation and how after purging years of accumulated stuff, I felt lighter.

The reason why I’ve been thinking about stuff is because over the past few months I’ve been sorting through all our possessions, unpacking the boxes we shipped from India, and those we had left in storage for the past 8 years.

Of course emotions are invariably linked to stuff too. I felt a burst of nostalgia when I opened up the boxes packed with my Indian clothes, the smell of India still there. Unpacking the moving boxes I had packed up in London eight years ago (which we had stored in Brussels and transported to Istria recently) felt very strange… like I was handling artifacts from another time. And I was delighted to be reunited with my books and enjoyed the ritual of lining them up on new bookshelves.

I’m happy to finally have the unpacking, sorting and purging behind me and am glad to now have all our stuff in its place, in one place.

Now that the unpacking is done and the house renovations are over, I finally feel like I have a home again.

It’s marenda time

When I have errands to run, I’ve learned not to expect to get anything done between 10:00 and 10:30am.

10 o’clock is ‘marenda’ time you see, a sacrosanct time of the day when workers across Istria are taking their morning break. Since most offices and workplaces start their workday at 7am, 10am is usually break time.

So now I know not to bother going to any administrative office, the electricity board, or even to the shoemaker between 10 and 10:30am because I’ll just be wasting my time waiting for them to come back from their Marenda break. Sometimes Marenda can even stretch to 11am, so 10-11am is a ‘no-go’ time!

Marenda comes from the Italian word merenda and this habit or custom must be a legacy of Italian times. While in Istria marenda is a snack or light meal eaten between breakfast and lunch, in Italy merenda is usually an afternoon snack.

Many local restaurants in Istria have a special marenda menu at a set price meant for workers who’d like to have a cheap and filling meal. In restaurants in the nearby town of Pazin (there are only two!), marenda is super cheap at 28 Kuna (3.65 Euro). For this price a hot meal of a main dish is served with two side dishes and often a small salad. The special marenda menu usually has three or four main dishes to choose from.

Since marenda is a light meal eaten between breakfast and lunch, this means there are four mealtimes in Istria. Breakfast is a very light meal (or some skip it entirely) followed by marenda, while lunch is the main meal of the day, and dinner is again usually something light.

Four mealtimes – why not? Any excuse to eat is a good one in Istria!

5 foods from my childhood I’m rediscovering

Blitva (Swiss Chard) growing in my neighbour's garden

Since I’ve been living in Istria, I’ve been rediscovering some of the foods I knew as a child. Here are a few:

1. Blitva (Swiss chard). This leafy green vegetable is a staple in Croatian cuisine. Everyone grows it in their vegetable gardens and you can find it on all restaurant menus as a side dish. It’s served just plain, drizzled with a bit of olive oil, or mashed together with potatoes. This was a dish my mother would make very often and it’s a comfort food for me. I hadn’t eaten blitva for years but now I get huge bunches of fresh blitva from my neighbours. Nothing like yummy, home-grown, naturally organic blitva. Blitva I missed you!

2. Gris (Cream of Wheat). A bowl of hot cream of wheat cereal brings back memories of cold winter mornings in Canada when I would have this for breakfast. At home we would use the Croatian word for it, gris (pronounced like ‘grease’), so that’s what we called it. This is another winter morning comfort food I hadn’t eaten in years before moving to Istria. My Indian friends will know this as rava.

3. Vegeta. Vegeta is Croatia’s ‘garam masala’. Every Croatian recipe calls for a dash of Vegeta, a powdered mix of dried spices and vegetables. At home in Toronto we had a steady supply which my mother would pick up at a European-style deli. Here, Vegeta takes up much aisle space at the supermarket because it now comes in many different flavours. There’s even a non-MSG version. But in the olden days there was just one type of Vegeta.

4. Napolitanke. Produced by the Croatian confectionary company Kraš, this is a type of wafer biscuit made with chocolate and hazelnuts. The European deli in Toronto also sold Napolitanke and when I was living in London I would find them at a local Turkish shop. We would always get the hazelnut ones, but today they’re available in other flavours: chocolate, nougat, lemon, chocolate-covered, mocha, rum. Oh and guess what? They’re vegan!

5. Ki-Ki. Ki-Ki is a type of soft candy I knew from the summers I spent here as a child. When I see packages of Ki-Ki at stores here it brings back memories of my grandfather who would always bring his grandchildren a bag of Ki-Ki when he would go ‘to town’. Today Ki-Ki comes in a whole bunch of different flavours but I remember that back then there was only one generic flavour and kids loved them.

That’s my round-up of childhood foods I’m rediscovering here in Istria. You’ll be forgiven for thinking so, but no, this is not a sponsored post!