Phones, WiFi, and Connecting With Nature

We often get asked by our guests about the WiFi and how come it is such a bad connection. I usually tell them, it is this side of the island and we have a challenge in getting a good signal. I restart the modem and tell them to hope for the best.

But what I would like to tell them would go something like this:

Only a few short years ago we have not even had phone lines for the landline. When finally the Croatian Telecom decided to put it in they had a challenge of setting up a transformer at a certain spot which proved to be mission impossible. The small spot of land that seemed to Croatian Telecom workers a perfect spot had so many owners that it took months to track them all down to sign an agreement to have it used for that purpose. Once they were tracked down, it proved even more challenging to have them all agree to sign the document. One was at odds with another and if he had signed this one didn't want to, and on and on and on. Months kept passing by and lo and behold, one fine day we got our landlines. This meant we could make and receive phone calls any time of the day and not have to drive 6km to the post office to make one. The phone booth in front of the post office all of a sudden seemed obsolete and unnecessary, and so did our seeing the residents of the village.

We've felt similar exuberance when we've heard they would put up a mobile tower at Selce by Bogomolje (a couple of towns away on the main road). That meant we wouldn't need to climb up the hill so we could get at least one bar on our mobile device and could actually make a phone call without the connection getting lost. It was a fine sunny day when we were told that we would have a chance to have 4G. Wow! We were moving up in the world, things were moving along.

But...

I am not so sure all those advancements were a good thing. See, when we had no reception on our mobile phones we would spend more time with our neighbors, drink bevanda (wine mixed with water, a perfect refreshment on a hot summer's day) and laugh at some silly jokes. People that would come from big towns and busy lives would exclaim that they had not had better and more wholesome rest in a long time. They wouldn't need to answer calls and put out fires at the workplace. All they did all day long was lay on the beach and occasionally jump into the water to cool off. They would read, talk, laugh and rest, rest at the full sense of the word!

Yes, granted, now we do have 4G, and we do have a landline and 3 bars on our phones for the reception, but not as much rest as we used to. Just yesterday I had overheard a phone conversation on the beach of one of the guests. He had a problem at work, was giving instructions to the person on the other end of the line, slowly getting more and more upset and nervous, while his children were swimming and splashing in the water. The seagulls, the crickets, the waves breaking on the beach lost their magic the moment that call came through and the phone rang.

Call me crazy, but I actually miss those days of chasing the phones, chasing the bars and not having phones ring all the time. Yes, we couldn't post on Instagram the same moment we've captured a moment of our kids diving in, or the fisherman going out to cast nets in the late afternoon, but we've captured moments that made happy memories in our minds and hearts.

There is an area of the beach that I most frequent with shady phone reception, that's when I get to enjoy full freedom and the seagulls and the crickets while the sea gently splashes the shore.