We were at a restaurant last week celebrating a friends birthday. There were 20 or so of us on a couple of tables on one side of the room and another long table for another birthday on the other side of the room.
The food was lousy by the way and I am never going back, but that is another story. It was Italian, and the meal consisted of about 23 courses - except that we only discovered this when courses 8, 9 and 10 came out and we found that there were still plenty more to come. By that point, we were all loosening out belts.
At around course 12, a young girl detached herself from the other table and came over to ask us some questions. It turned out that she was 17, and had been dared by her friends to go and talk to the "old people" at the table next door. We invited her to sit down and we yarned away for a good half an hour. In fact talking to her was the best part of the night. She was joined a bit later by her twin brother, who couldn't believe that she had taken up the dare.
One of her first questions was to J, and it was "Are you Croatian?", the answer being yes. She then fired off a pile of Croat at J, who just looked at her blankly and tried to work out what she was jabbering on about. After a few minutes of grinding the cogs, J managed to start to string together enough rusty phrases to chat away.
Here's the rub - this girl was 17, was born here, and her parents were actually Italian! But because she goes to a school that is 70% Croat, and they are all still madly Croatian, she knows more Croat than J.
The kids at her school all totally support some Croat soccer club, they all go to Croatian school on the weekend and I guess the parents all read the Croat Daily News in Croat. They are all still totally immersed in being Croatians.
What got me is that these kids were probably 2nd generation Australians, yet as far as they were concerned, they were Croatians who happened to be living in Australia.
What's the point? If you want to be a Croat so much, just jump on a plane and go back. Surely it can't be that hard?
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