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In Part 1 of this series, I talked about all the problems that have come about as tourism has exponentially grown in Croatia. Now, it's time to get in to what I feel should be done to solve some of these problems. Keep in mind that I'm not expert or elected official. I'm just a guy with a blog who has traveled a great deal in Croatia and likes to write.       Croatian tourism is an economy that could easily be a good economy, as opposed to the rather malignant one that it is now. There are a number of changes that would need to come about to make this happen though. The first big one is in dealing with the infrastructure. Take the new A-1 auto cesta that I talked about in Part 1. This was built to be the Tourist Express. It is true that a good connection was needed from the interior out to the coast, but was this entire road needed? There already was a train connection, which I might was also worked on to speed up transport for passengers.       When thinking about this, one needs to keep in mind that the A1 is not finished. There is a stretch that is being worked on from Split to Dubrovnik that is coming at a great expense due to a bridge needing to be built to skirt the strip of Bosnia Herzegovina left over from the Karlowitz Treaty. Let's assume that the road from Zagreb to Rijeka and Zagreb to Split was needed. The old connection to the coast, was a small, meandering road that was difficult to traverse. The new one makes things a lot better. But, the extension that is being worked on from Split to Dubrovnik is unnecessary. The road that connects these two areas is a good road. It's small, but it's good. So, why build it? Simple, to get tourists to an already overcrowded Dubrovnik faster. This is the simple answer, but at the core, I think that there is a bigger problem.       Most people don't realize this, but there is no Ministry of Tourism in Croatia. Well, there is, but it isn't by itself. The official name is the Ministry of the Sea, Tourism, Transport and Development or MMTPR. You see, tourism has been intertwined with several other departments that I believe create a conflict of interest. Tourism projects would naturally get in line first for development over say a hospital, which is under a different ministry. The solution? Strip out the Ministry of Tourism in to it's own separate department and make it have to put out its hand for an equal share of the pie. It's an undermining practice to be putting too much money in to projects to promote tourism that take money away from other projects that could promote a better standard of life for the Croatian people is bad. The Germans and Hungarians that will eventually be zipping down to Dubrovnik will love it, but the Croats getting to endure being #43 in health care for the world won't see the benefit.       The next big step that needs to happen is to stop promoting Beach Tourism. At the very least, promote Beach Tourism in the off season as well, so that people can go enjoy the "fresh sea air" and the people in the coastal communities can have an economy based upon a regular as opposed to a seasonal source of income. But, the best course of action, is to scrap the beach bit altogether. People know it. People are coming. Enough. Start promoting the interior. Croatia has lovely, wonderful spots that, while not near the sea are great to visit. The Zagorje is a nice place full of rolling hills and fresh springs (this is where Jana water is bottled.) Medvednica and the Međimurje are also lovely places with serene villages, good white wines, and castles for those interested. Spas are popping up in these areas for those who really want to relax. You're not going to relax at the beach in high season, but up there, you can. It's peaceful.       There are also towns that could be promoted more. Dubrovnik and Split get the majority of the press as they're coastal towns. But, Zagreb is a town that I've been to four times now and really love. The buildings are all from the days of the Austrian Crown and there are a great number of parks and about 10 museums worth visiting. Varaždin, Samobor, and Karlovac are also nice towns to visit. While a one or two day stay would be plenty in them, they offer that Central European feel, but far cheaper and more relaxed.       There are even decent skiing slopes in northern Croatia, but based upon the promotional materials now, you wouldn't think that the country had any snow anywhere. There are also many parks, but with the exception of Plitvice, they get little mention, because most of them are on the beach. It's true that the park of Mljet is surrounded by water as it's on an island, but again, it's a spot that is over hyped because it sits on the Adriatic.       Then there is Istria. This little peninsula is a microcosm of everything that is wrong and everything that is right about tourism in Croatia. I covered all the things that were wrong about it in Part 1, which center around the Beach Tourists who flood there. But, in Istria's case, I think that it's more for reason of proximity than for promotion of the beaches there that the tourists have come. It's literally a 20 minute drive to Istria from Italy. It's maybe three or four hours at most from Austria. It's just really close and so, the Beach Tourists flock there with little that can be done except to try and accommodate them. But there are things happening in Istria that are very interesting. For one, there is wine, lots of wine. It's very good wine and it gives more of a reason to visit than warm waters. It also creates a sustainable economy for the area. From this, other things have risen up like Agritourism. People have found that staying in the middle of bucolic hills, surrounded by wine vines can be a pleasant way to spend a holiday. This is something I might add, that can be done year round and is thusly not a big seasonal "kaboom" and then nothing except hoping that the next season is the same.       Then there is Grožnjan. I don't know who is in charge of this little town, but they're doing good things in showing how to properly run a tourism economy. They have arts and crafts being sold in cute little stores of the old town. They have a Jazz festival that is an outgrowth of the International Cultural Centre of Young Musicians. They have truffles, wine, and good restaurants as well. All of this is in a town with maybe 100 homes, in the center of Istria, and a good half hour drive drive from the almighty sea. But the people who go there, don't go for the beach. They go for the charm of the little town and the fact that out of all of Istria, it was the one place I could actually find listed rooms to rent. There is much to be learned from this town for all of the rest of the coastal towns.       And that's what it comes down. There is much for Croatia at large to learn in how it handles its tourism. I would most likely be slapped for saying it, but they could learn a lot from their neighbors of Slovenia and Bosnia Herzegovina. The difficulties these two countries have in that they are nearly beach-less is what makes their tourism industries stronger than in Croatia. They have had to develop places and destinations for tourists and in doing so, they inevitably develop places that are going to have sustainable tourism simply because they are not flippant Beach Tourists.       Croatia will level out in the end. It has to. This will either be a smooth road, paved with long-term thinking and an overall plan for tourism development to co-exist with the people in the country, or it will be a bumpy road with localized recessions and depressions that will ultimately bring the whole country down if too many things are built on the premise that the Beach Tourist is forever. Only time will tell and it, as well as neighboring Montenegro and Albania will be interesting countries to watch over the next decade.

I suppose that in the end, someone has to review movies, I just wish that it could stop being Mick LaSalle. It says a lot about a movie critic when he can't even use his real name when reviewing films for fear of death threats. On some level I know that he gets off on people thinking he's an ass and I wouldn't even be wasting the space to talk about it except that web blogs are cheap and this is taking up about 10 minutes of an otherwise lazy evening to write. Also, someday, I hope that the Chronicle will just give him the boot. They have a great many other reviewers that while I may not agree with them all the time, don't insult me as a reader. And it's this point that brings me to his latest "genius" opine:       Agnosticism has killed the horror genre in the United States. Take away the afterlife, take away a belief in the spirit world, and horror becomes about nothing but the fear of death and stories about sadism.       Those are the opening lines to his review for The Orphanage. What the hell is that? Just tell me if it's a good film. It's his bungled, misplaced attempts at an intellectual diatribe in his reviews that drive me crazy. You wouldn't see Michael Bauer (whom I also hate because I love) writing about the philosophy behind the steak that he's eating. In my book, food is just as much an art form as a movie, yet someone LaSalle keeps getting away with this.       He had been rather quiet for awhile and I had hoped the Chron had silently done away with him, but then no, up he pops like that smartass kid in school who keeps mouthing off at you while you dunk his head in the toilet. Someday, somehow, he will stop reviewing and that will be a joyous day for cinema the world over. It really is uncanny how he has the same annoying smirk that Jeff Bezos has.

I have enjoyed the last fours years of travel, visiting Croatia. I love the country and while my meager claim to being Croatian is small, I feel a good deal of kinship to it. It is after all a beautiful country with snowy, wooded mountains at one end and crystal clear waters of the Adriatic Sea at the other end. It's hard to not want to travel there and until recently it was rather undiscovered by a great many tourists, including Americans. This however, has changed.       With these changes a blight has emerged in Croatia as it seems that a vast chunk of the country and nearly the entire swath of the coast is centered on one single economy: tourism. To this I might add that they are focused on Beach Tourism. Yes, the rude, soak up the sun, get drunk at night, spend as little as possible, clog the highways kind of people are flocking to Croatia. But, why are they flocking to Croatia? The simple answer to this is that it's cheap. Actually the simple answer to this is that it was cheap.       This is where the problems start to rise for Croatia. When I first went looking for a guidebook in 2003, there was one by Rough Guides and one just about to come out from Lonely Planet. They touted the affordable life that travelers could have if they hopped off to this strange place most people thought a war was still being fought (it officially ended in 1995 with the Dayton Accords by the way.) Fast forward four years and there are something like six solid guides for the country and several ones about specific regions or cities like Dubrovnik. Instead of hearing from friends and family, "Croatia? Why the hell do you want to go there?", I'm getting, "Hey, where is the cheapest place to stay in __________?" Undiscovered, Croatia is no more.       Despite all of this, Croatia found itself in a tough spot at the start of the 21st century. Unemployment was extremely high and still is, at a bit over 9% (the US is just below 5% and people are currently worried about a recession here to give you gauge for this.) So, instead of letting tourism develop in a natural manner, the government took the rash approach of pumping the hell out their coastline to attract Beach Tourists. It wasn't necessarily the worst plan and their official tourism slogan of, "The Mediterranean as it Once Was", was catchy if not a bit pedantic. They already had a good deal of the infrastructure in place to handle Beach Tourists, since the coast had been developed from the 1950's onward by the then Yugoslavian government. They also had a long history of Beach Tourism, which you can seen in places like Opatija in the northern part of the coast where holiday mansions and retreats were built in the 19th century. So, in theory, people + beach + Croatia, should = kuna.       The problem with this approach was that they didn't know when to let up on it. As far as I know, ads are still playing on BBC TV promoting this aspect of Croatia. The net effect has been incredible successful in getting people to the coast of Croatia in the summer, but it has ultimately proved to be massively detrimental. I can sum it all up in one conversation I had with two Irish girls that were staying at the pension we were at in Jelsa, Hvar. They realized that we had traveled the area a bit and then had the gall to ask, "So, you wouldn't happen to know where the sandy beaches are, would you?" Needless to say, I didn't know as I like the pebble beaches and without this information as well as their inability to know that the Prošek (a delicious sweet wine) the couple served was incredible good, they moved on the next day. They were cheap girls who couldn't even spend money on a guidebook and just wanted to drink. They were the epitome of the people who come to the Croatian coast.       Ultimately, the government should have realized there is no need to attract the Beach Tourist. They come of their own accord, migrating according to the winds of cheapness. These are people who only want to sit in the sun and they don't give a damn how nice the water is, as long as their can go back north with a cruel chocolate-strawberry hue to their abused skin. I've witnessed firsthand how these people have been treating Croatia. In Dubrovnik, that town is full. Don't go. Stay away. You literally will not get in. In Hvar City, people party to all odd hours of the night, vomit and piss on the streets, go lay in the sun and then repeat this all the next night. In Istria, every single spot it crowded, from the most pristine rocks to the lowliest mud hole on the Adriatic (sun is sun to the beach tourist.) Korčula City sees throngs of idiots roaming that small town drunk and trying to pick up the local girls. The roads are clogged, including the brand new auto cesta that runs out to the coast and was built basically to pump tourists out there. The congestion isn't because of the roads being small, but because there are just too many cars going to the coast during the summer and the result is the same as if you tried to push a pig through a garden hose.       But, beyond all these problems which could be seen as merely annoyances, there is the issue that tourism is smashing the local economies of the coastal towns in to being solely sustained by tourist money. This creates the first main problem of a group of people who work for three or four months and then have no income for the rest of the year. But, even more so, things like bars, nightclubs, strip joints, and whatever else start popping up just to cater to the tourists, thusly obliterating any sense of local culture from the people in the area. And once all this gets built up, you end up having an economy for the area that has its market driven by a single service. We all know that's bad and that the main thing any investor will tell you is that you need to diversify. The Croats who have focused on tourism for their main source of revenue are feeling the pinch of this already. Inflation is out of control on the coast and goods are very expensive for the locals to buy now. But the other fact is that the price of hotels, apartments, and rooms has gone up massively as well. In 2004, I paid 35 Euros a night for an entire apartment flat in Dubrovnik. The same flat is now about 100 Euros a night four years later.       This is all very bad for attracting the Beach Tourist. They want cheap and this is not cheap anymore. In fact, it's nearing or is the same price as places like Spain and Italy. So, there is now a glut of housing in the area and people are having a hard time filling all their rooms. By no means does this mean that Croatia will become a bargain again, but more the fact that hard times are ahead for a great chunk of the country that has heavily invested in the Beach Tourist.       This is all very negative of course and it's easy to complain about all the problems of an area. This is why there is a 'Part 1' in the title. In Part 2, I cover what I feel needs to be done to avert these problems. While these are personal observations of mine, they are from someone who knows the country well and has seen it from one end to the other. Okay, I admit that I haven't been to Slavonia yet, but I had to save something for a future trip!

A friend of mine is out of town for a week and during this time, I've managed to get her car so that I can practice every single move from Bullitt within the boundaries of what a Ford Focus will allow. You know what I'm talking about, right? I believe that a good deal of this is Focus-able. You only do these things with friends cars when they're away so that they can only read about on your blog and then shake their heads in disbelief and be thankful they have a low insurance deductible. Ha, ha...       Anyways, I don't really plan on doing all that much driving, other than seeing how fast I can go down the Filbert Steps or up Lombard Street backwards. So, during the time I'm not being a menace, I have to deal with parking. This is crappy thing to deal with in San Francisco and just in time to make me worry was an article from about a woman's parking woes. It really makes you shake your head, but it also teaches an important lesson in that vigilante justice is the only justice that properly works. That and the justice of Chuck Norris.       Have a happy Christmas!       

These are a bit old news, but they're incredibly silly, so I'm posting them. Basically some English speaker went and put what he thought they were saying in the videos as subtitles. Racially insensitive? You betcha. Funny nonetheless:              I'd say you could stop watching about halfway through. There are some funny bits after that point, but it gets a bit repetitive. Still, if you're reading this blog, then most likely you've got some time to kill. And in that case, I'd recommend checking out this one. The subtitles aren't as funny, but the video is really, really silly. Again, it gets a bit repetitive as well, so use your own judgment in when to stop.

There comes a time for each and every one of us where we need to sit back, look around at where we are and realize that, goddamit, some Americans got something right for once. This is the experience that I have every time I walk in to Naia, your friendly, properly-done gelato spot in the Bay Area. There aren't a ton of them and if that's what keeps them getting so many of their flavors dead on awesome, then so be it. It does after all give me reason to wander up to North Beach. I admittedly have yet to visit the one in the Castro, although I have hit up the Berkeley one.       The flavors are really to die for. If you've had gelato in the US, then you know how crappy it can generally be. The folks who started up this chain thought to themselves, "Crap, gelato is freakin' awesome in Europe. Why does it suck so bad in the US? Let's see if we can change this." And change it they did. In typical California fashion they just ran with the idea above and beyond anything that I've ever had in Europe. I mean, have you ever seen persimmon, green tea, or Guinness gelato there? No and you should. Oh yeah, that's right, I said Guinness gelato. They do it around St. Patrick's day.       Sometimes the occasional flavor is a bit of a miss or a bit chalky or just not there, but they try things and I like that. Oh and if it seems like I've written about them before, I have, right here. The reason I'm writing about them again is a) I have that nifty photo down there that I took using the bomb ass wide and b) we went to a tasting of their winter flavors. These are overall quite good. Some are even excellent. But it's all a good reason to sign up for their mailing list as they did this free for all on the list. Yeah, that's right. Awesome gelato for free. While the staff can sometimes have the appearance of having been skateboarding by the shop and thinking, "Huh? Help wanted? Well, I'm skateboarding here, but okay, I can scoop some gelato for awhile." they are generally pretty mellow with no attitude and happy to dish out the the cold stuff that makes us all go "nyum nyum nyum".

Yesterday was one of those marathon sessions of 15 hours that I thought I had left behind in my 20's, but apparently not. The net seems to not be a workplace for old men...       But, after getting out this monstrosity, which was delayed several times by people having to do the QA after a launch and then a retraction and then a launch again, I found some solace in the following video:              Yeah, I know. I'm posting a lot of videos lately from things that amuse me. Has the web really come to this? Well, yeah. It's either this or more bitching about crippies and art students. Who needs that?

Most people I know have probably not been to Nevada City and really, why would they? It's really far from San Francisco and there isn't any skiing or wine at it. But, it is a cute Gold Rush Era mining town that has been well restored instead of being left to decay like so many others. If you're curious, check out the Nevada City gallery I just uploaded for a look-see. As you will hopefully notice, the town does indeed have charm. It also has other things. For instead a grave amount of dirtbags with dreadlocks and a severe lack of showers seem to love to circulate on Commerical Street which is one of two main streets, the other being Broad Street. They do indeed kill a good deal of the charm. But, what really does the place in for me, are the crippies.       As you can read in a previous article, this is a rather annoying group. While on the surface, they at first seem like passive do-gooders, underneath lies a seething person that would condemn you Hell (if they believed in it, since they don't being Buddhists and all) because you don't see things in their conformist, peace-loving ways. Thankfully, they all have a place they can congregate and share tips from the latest issue of Tricycle and this place is Nevada City.       The lovely, old, rustic buildings of the downtown carry a never ending horizon of all the prayer flags, incense, Buddhist quotes on everything, bells, Chinese character encrusted stuff, handmade funky clothes, and whatever else is needed to have all the trappings to appear to be a Buddhist, New Ager, or general Spiritualist. I think the worst one for me is Mountain Song. It pretty much sums up the general aura of this mecca for the anti-corporate people to go and spend, spend, spend.       I gleefully rip in to the general spirit of Nevada City because I've been there many times and I find everything that it's about to be so ridiculously contradictory and faux-lifestyle oriented that the irony is more than a little painful.       But, there are things that I like there however. Besides the cute town, there is the food. Good restaurants have opened up over the years because crippies do love to eat, just like me. There is a Mexican spot on Commercial Street that is really mighty good. Yes, some Mexicans managed to find their way up in to the hills to make Free Trade Burritos. No, they don't call them that, but they'd sell them like crazy if they did. I'm giving that idea free of charge by the way.       I would have to say that my favorite restaurant in the place is the New Moon Cafe. It's generally quite tasty, although quite popular and requires booking for popular weekends. Although, again, the name is just typical of a place where shops can't exist without at least 15% of their merchandise devoted to something dealing with astrology. Had it been the "New Manteca Cafe" it probably would have died off sometime ago and we would have all been the losers in that.

The clip below came out in 2005 or thereabouts, but I just recently found the thing, which makes me a tad degree lame, but not as lame as someone who wants to share something that he found in 2007 that was aired in 2005 with everyone else.              Anyways, it's most enjoyable and solid humor by the "brilliant" Rick Gervais. While my last trip through London in September reconfirmed the premise that English food when outside of London is quite bad, this clip reconfirms that the Brits are damned funny as a people. They also are damned musical as a people. I believe this all comes down to the fact that the weather generally sucks and what else are you going to do, but be funny and rock and roll. I can only imagine what would have happened if the English had had good wine. The Romans wouldn't have left the place so quickly and the world would be far less funny place. That's what would have happened, I am sure.

It's a fact that the vast majority of the information on the internet is written in English. Even a site that pulls together all this information like Global Voices still uses English as its main language. This is a shame. It's not a shame because it's using a single language, but that English has become so dominant on the web. It was somewhat inevitable as the vast majority of the components that drive it are in English. I mean, if you look at the code driving any page, you'll see all these English words in there. So, it's a given that to be able to set up sites, you'll need to be able to understand some degree of English.       I think it's this last point that really was excluding a great many people for a good long time. But now that there are so many packages you can use where you don't need to be a native English speaker to have a blog. Tossing up an installation of Wordpress or using a pre-fab system like Blogger or even Livejournal is possible by a great many more these days.       Unfortunately we still come back to the point that English has become so dominant in the world and if you're a native English speaker, you're bound to not know very many if any other languages. So, what do you do if you want to be informed about the rest of the world? Simple. You revert to the method of our ancestors and use pictures. Yes, it's primitive, but still quite effective. It's on this point that I'd like to point out a few blogs that are either wholly or partially photo-based and something that most native English speakers can follow. If not, fire up a little BabelFish and get a funky translation that might see you though.       Фотографоманство ('fotografomanstvo' in the Latin alphabet, which I think just means, 'photomanie') is a very compelling photographic journey by a girl living in Minsk, Belarus. The media is extremely controlled and the people there live under what amounts to an autocracy, so being able to see someone's daily life from the area is really interesting. The girl also has a very good eye and she was the winner of the Best of the Blogs.       A Best of Blogs winner for French, Cédric Kalonji is the life of Cédric in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Again, this is a nation without a free media, so his view from inside the country is quite interesting. Unfortunately for English speakers, we need to either dust off our crappy French skills or hit the Fish as most of it is in French.       Lastly, a friend named Timothée Rolin documents his life in Paris, France. Tim's site is almost completely photos and quite thorough about his life, so anyone can appreciate it and the partying that he seems to do non-stop when he isn't eating at La Fée Verte. If you're any kind of fan of The Real World or other crap reality TV shows, you'll probably get hooked.       Of course, there are a great many more blogs out there that people can follow. These are just some that I got turned on to which you may or may not know about and will hopefully enjoy.