Return to Osijek

Mother's Day was a very nice day.  I helped Liz make clam chowder from frozen clams we found at the grocery store.  We first made clam chowder back when we lived in Washington, where the kids had a ball digging up the clams that are easiest to find - cockles and horse clams.  Those are also the least desirable variety of clam, but the chowder is mostly the creamy soup and the vegetables, with the clams adding a bit of flavor and the excuse to eat the rest.  But the frozen clams were very good, including the bonus that they were not at all rubbery like the clams we've used in the past.  I chopped them finely, like always, but they were so tender it wouldn't have made any difference if I'd left them whole, which is what we might do next time.
    The best part of it, though was that we got to see and virtually be with our family.  Liz and the girls had a girl's Zoom "brunch" and chat fest.  Later, we had our Sunday service together, as usual.  We have songs, prayers, and two or three short talks.  Then we all just visit with one another.  It is such a treat.
   We have been here in Zagreb, under quarantine, for 8 weeks now.  That is almost twice as long as we were in Osijek.  We have felt  very much at home in the Mission Home, but it is not OURS, and that is beginning to feel not so good.  We'd like to get settled in somewhere. 
    Then, yesterday we got news that Croatia has lifted all restrictions on travel within the country.  Liz and I debated most of the day, and decided to go to Osijek to retrieve the rest of our belongings.  We took the Mission Van, which is a Ford Transporter, 8  passenger van with a large luggage area.  It has a diesel engine, and adaptive cruise control, lane assist, collision avoidance, etc.  We both like driving it a lot.  It isn't very comfortable to sit in for a long time, though.  Only the driver's seat moves forward and back, none of them are adjustable for the angle of repose, and there isn't much room to put your feet.  Still, we made the trip in good spirits, arriving just before 9:00 pm.  We squeezed the van as far into our parking spot as possible so it only stuck out into the passageway a foot or so, and then we went up to OUR apartment.   We had a bite to eat.  Liz asked me if I wanted to start loading our stuff into our suitcases, and I said, no I wanted to watch a movie.  Surprise!  Actually, we had watched half of Spanglish the night before, so we brought it up on the big TV there and watched the rest of it.
  This morning, we loaded up Liz's desk (actually a table with three drawers across the front), a little matching cabinet, and all the other little odds and ends we'd left behind.  It wasn't really all that much.  We also met with the landlord and told him we won't be staying there anymore, but that somebody else will come, eventually.  I paid him 400 kuna for internet service.  It is 100 kuna per month, and we actually only lived there for one month, but it was being held for us.  We told him we didn't know when someone would move in, but that we definitely wanted to continue to have access to it and that the church would continue to pay him for rent and utilities.  He was happy with that.
  As we drove home, we talked about how the countryside has changed.  It is so green and verdant, and productive!  The fields are worked in small strips, I assume to control soil erosion, or perhaps to control pests.  I love seeing the deer and pheasants and hawks here, things I've loved watching all my life.  But here, there are also storks and big grey crows (see below) and swans, and many others.

Most of the crops I recognize, but not all, and some things are different here.  For example, we passed a big orchard where all the trees were pruned so they are only 2 or 3 feet wide, and the rows are only about 6 feet apart.  We couldn't tell what kind of fruit tree they were, while driving past - they looked like stone fruit, though.
  We got back to the Mission Home by early afternoon.  It seems that most people haven't gotten the news that they can travel again, because we mostly had the highways to ourselves until we got back to Zagreb.
    When we arrived, there was a big van parked in front of the home that we didn't recognize.  It turns out that this morning a meter reader came by and he came to the front door, quite alarmed.  They showed me the water meter, and the needle was spinning quite rapidly.  It should never spin like that!  So the big van belongs to a guy who specializes in finding water leaks.    He had all kinds of amazing equipment for looking inside pipes, sonar scanning for pipes, injecting detectable gas into pipes, etc.  By this evening, he had the leak spotted and marked with spray paint.
  Tomorrow, all the missionaries in Croatia are taking a recreational day to go hike around Plitvitsa, a series of about a dozen lakes with hundreds of waterfalls going from each lake to the next one down the mountain.  It is an amazing place and it's on my bucket list, but I won't be going.  My knee is giving me trouble and I am not up for hiking up and down a mountain.  I am very disappointed, but I will get there another time.