Welcome to Chez Cliff!

Well guess what true believer: this blog turned four the other day.  Happy Blogoversary!

For those of you who are still with me, thanks for hanging in there.  Sean recently said that real estate investing is actually pretty boring.  And it’s true.  When things are flowing smoothly, its hard to generate stories and tell adventures which everyone hasn’t heard before.

Ever since my return from vacation, this overwhelming need for change has gripped me.  I get these ways sometimes.  Maybe it’s that 7-year itch; I’m not too sure.  All I do know is that now is the time for me to make those changes.

What I’ve decided to do is take a two months off.  My efforts need to be focused on continuing to build my business and taking care of a few annoying loose ends in my life (like this Wordpress model).

The reason for doing this is simple: there’s only so many hours in the day.  With this blog, I’ve always felt it’s better to produce 1 or 2 articles worth reading than 20 that are nothing but drivel.  Those articles do take time to produce.  With the limited amount of time in the day, I’ve decided to put my blog on hold for a short period of time.

So please keep me in your RSS reader list.  Don’t remove me from your book marks.  This is a temporary hiatus.  I’ll be back.  And without a doubt, I’ll have a lot to share.

See you October 1st.

Wordpress is really starting to irritate me.

I posted photos of the vacation on my dot mac site.  It’s scary easy how nicely iPhoto plays with MobileMe.

Follow the link below to see them all.  As usual, I organize the photos by location.

These are the same albums my friends got to see so there will be tons of extra pics.  Just skip those you may not be interested in.

Enjoy!

By the by: the photo show may not work in Internet Explorer 6.

All seven of us sat in complete silence, not exactly sure what to say.

Matko, our boat captain, had pulled up in some small hidden bay.  His best-friends mom, who is arguably the toughest woman I ever met, hauled the boat into the dock and helped us out.

Not understanding a single slavic word, she grabbed my arm in hers and thus began our march to her home.  She quickly arranged a few tables for us to sit at and then opened her home.  A few apertifs were served, along with samples of her own home-made olive oil.  A berry, called Forrest Berry, was used to produce this other type of beverage very similar to a port.

She showed us her olive orchard, located on the opposite side of the bay on a mountain.  “No one is left to pick the olives,” she said.  “Young people only want to live in the city.”  When the harvest needs to be done, she grabs her burlap backpack and heads up into the mountain to pick her own olives.  Then, as her mother, her grand-mother and countless generations did – she makes her own olive oil.  What she can bottle and sell goes to help pay the bills.  She shows no sign of slowing down.

It was an all too familar scene, something us Americans just weren’t use to.  Time and time again a short conversation in Croatia would lead to a dinner invitation or their equivalent of “let’s get a beer”.  Always warm, always open and friendly these people were always willing to share whatever they had even if it wasn’t a lot.

Into day four of our trip, we were emotionally spent.  The seven of us who prefer to go as local as possible had a chance to meet many locals on this trip.  The locals, in returned, shared with us their homes, their lives and their stories which could easily fill the New York times best-seller listing.

As we stood up to leave this lady’s house, I could feel something inside of me had changed.  This vacation had touched me on a deep leve, resonanted with something perhaps I was lacking.  It wasn’t so much the place or the things we had done but rather the constant string of people we had met in this beautiful and captivating country called Croatia.

Yes, I’ll definitely be going back.

About day four of our Croatian adventure, our ship captain Matko said “You know, I’d like to take you guys to a place where I spent my childhood.  Sort of a second home.”

When you’re in close quarters, you really do learn a lot about people.  Fortunately none of us had killed each other but we also had a Croatian for ballast.  With Matko, he had a special set of people skills a ship captain would need to have.  Matko had ceased being a ship captain and became our friend.  And it wasn’t hard: he was quite charming and disarming but also honest.

Matko started to share with us his viewpoint of the war.  Being a kid himself, he was playing with friends one day when the Serbians roll up outside of Dubrovnik with their large cannons and tanks.  He thought it was just a military exercise until planes started bombing the city that night.  When the planes stopped the cannons started.  The shelling continued for nearly a day before the city finally surrendered.

From there, madness that could only be brought by war ensued.  The Serbians saw fit, for some reason, to poison the city’s water supply as well.  Before the word got out, Matko’s father had drank some of this water requiring 3 feet of his intestine to be removed.

Being American, we’re lucky to have never experienced war being brought to our shores.  Geographically, that would be hard to do.  But when your immediate neighbor has more military might, and no wisdom, it’s not hard to imagine jealousy would follow and the age-old battle for territory would ensue.

At this point in the story, Matko took a long hit off his cigarette and stared off into the mountains.  His family fled Dubrovnik.  The only way to evade the snipers hiding in the mountains was to drive fast, with no headlights, down the roads that were completely engulfed in the blackness of night.  Once they had made it safely away from the city, their lives returned to a semi-normal state until the Serbians were forced out.  Then came the rebuilding.

The entrepreneurial spirit and strong work-ethic turns this tiny country into a cash machine.  Since the only tax is a 22% VAT tax, the entire country pretty much runs on a cash-system.  Pay cash, no receipts, no tax.  This makes Croatia’s neighbors slightly jealous.  And after each invasion, the people find themselves once again rebuilding their country and their lives.

Matko’s story is just one of thousands, told by the survivors of the war.  People who can remember and were affected often have a sad look in their eyes, even though the war ended nearly a decade ago.  But life must go on and each recognizes they can wallow in sadness or improve their situation.  Fortunately most have elected to improve their situation such as our boat captain.

I’m amazed at the blank stares I receive when the words “Croatia” and “vacation” appear in the same sentence.  It’s true: when my friends first mentioned going to Croatia all I could think about was war-torn country, bullet-holes in the churches, and ethnic cleansing.  After all, the Bosnia-Serbian conflict was just 10 years ago.

What I was not prepare for was the resilience of the people of Croatia.  This region has been a region of conflict for centuries.  Unfortunately I fear that this may be once again another region of conflict sometime soon.  But because my understanding of this country, these people was so limited (and laughable) it made this the perfect place to take a vacation.

My friends took the liberty of renting a 45 foot yacht for us to sail around the islands that do make up Croatia.  Over 1,100 islands.  Obviously in our four days on board we couldn’t see every island.  But the best way to get around Croatia is by boat.

First, let’s start with the water.  The sea was so clear, it made Hawaii look dirty.  Pristine, untouched and simply gorgeous.  When our yacht would drop anchor, you could see the anchor on the bottle of the sea.  Very clear.  The next trait about the water: the salinity was so high it was impossible to sink.  That is an odd sensation, considering Michigan’s fresh water swimming permitted one to sink indefinitely.  No, hold your breath and try to go under and it won’t happen.  The furthest I could get was just above my eye brows.

Next on the list was the seafood.  The first place we held up for the night had four seafood restaurants.  When we got off the boat, a fisherman was cleaning the largest grouper-fish I had ever seen.  I believe this was the same fish that swallowed Jonah from the bible.  Not sure.  One of my companions made a comment about how delicious the grouper looked and I agreed.  That night, the restaurant, convienently located right next to our yacht, told us the specials.  The lady finished with “Oh, and we have fresh grouper.  The fish is so large you could probably all share it.”  Having the fish go from the ocean to your plate within the span of two hours definitely means it’s fresh.

If it’s true that you can tell more about a culture by its cuisine then what we tasted spoken volumes.  During our stay aboard our version of the S.S. Minnow, our captain was about to show us what true local Croatians were all about through their cooking.  And it was an interesting story.