“Life’s a party. Crash it.”
— Tagline from the film, Wedding Crashers
Over the past year of attending various travel writing and blogging events, one of the people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting is a freelance writer and photographer named Lola Akinmade.
Based in Stockholm, Lola is an official blogger for the Swedish tourism board and yesterday, she blogged about “crashing” a wedding in Storkyrkan with a dozen other people who couldn’t help but get their cameras out.
As I looked at her photos, I laughed at how many times I myself “crashed” events in Croatia all week–although no weddings were involved, there was a children’s chess tournament in Zadar’s main square, a parade of musicians from the national orchestra, and, as I wandered along the island of Pag one day, a group of men gathered for what seemed to be their Friday night ritual of bocce ball.
It was nearly time to catch my bus back to Zadar, but I noticed nearly twenty men standing in the shade of a leafy park. At first I’d thought they were merely huddling together for a bit of gossip and time away from their wives, when I realized something else was going on. They were stood on the sides of what looked like a concrete bowling alley and waited as one by one, each man had his turn at “bowling” from the other end. Obviously, I had to know more.
I walked over and pretended I wasn’t the only female around–not to mention at least twenty years younger than the average guy there! There was no use trying to be discrete with my camera either–they spotted it immediately and started bantering with each other. I could understand exactly four words: “kamera,” “fotografia,” “Americana,” and–get this–“playboy.”
“Hey! He’s a playboy,” one man in track pants and black leather shoes called out about one of his friends. He then proceded to say this about the next four men who stepped up to bowl, so I didn’t exactly take him too seriously.
I hung around for as long as I dared–skipping back and forth across the lane to get a better angle. I couldn’t tell if I was actually welcome until I caught one man looking at me to make sure I had my camera ready before he had his turn. There was certainly no camera-shyness on Pag. They called the game bulete, which one man said means “little red ball”–the same ball that each man tried to throw his ball the closest to. “The nearest ball wins,” another man explained.
As much as I wanted to stay and have a go myself, I soon had to slip out of the park, taking my camera with me and the memory of twenty men talking Croatian smack over a friendly game of bocce ball…
One Comment
Comments are closed.