I have a good friend who beckons from Dubrovnik, Croatia. He says his country is every bit as luxuriously quaint as the postcard-esque seaside oasis we saw in the next-to-last episode of The Amazing Race. He also confirmed the anal-retentive nature of the Dubrovnik taxi drivers. You see, their cabs are their temples — badges of honor and pride. They are meticulously maintained. A body dripping liquids — like those of Nathan and Jennifer's — would most definitely be banned, in most cases, from taking a seat within.

By David W. Taylor (Email The Author)
Reality Reel Media
12.28.07

And after the relative discord and stench of Africa — with their unscrupulous taxi drivers — we land softly in lands of cleanliness, orderliness and relative calm. Lithuania and Croatia almost appear sleepy. Things are livened up by having local masked characters jig and carry on whilst the weary cast try their luck in counting fence posts or tackling clog-stilts.

This was amusing. Ronald pulled together his splayed hernia and fought his advancing years and plodded his way to glory. Good job, crusty ole dude. A huge effort. Simply mysterious was the utterly confused Nicolas, who earlier in the hour arrived at the Old Quarter in first place, with Donald, only to fall menacingly behind while trying to locate a hair salon.

I never got a sense of why the baffled Nicolas couldn't find the blasted place while almost all the other teams sailed past him. In its place we got slow-motion shots of Nicolas with his mouth hanging open, dumbfounded and perplexed. That's been the new Race paradigm.

Instead of showing us what actually took place on the maze-like streets of Lithuania, we get a few seconds of Nicolas looking askance in a grainy slow-motion capture. I'll take a wild guess: he's lost? It's used abundantly, sad to say, on The Amazing Race to convey assorted frustrations and confusions. It's a half-assed technique. We lose the lyricism of a Reality adventure story; a Race. The technique is overwrought and cheap.

Kynt & Vyxsin may look odd but their behavior is anything but. They may think they're "off the beaten path" like, they say, TK & Rachel but their actions are nicely normal.

In this last leg we saw the "fallen" and goth Kynt tell a perplexed and agitated Vyxsin during a low point in their struggle through Italy that "I'm praying again, Vyxsin. I'm praying again..." Could these two disciples of darkness be praying to God? It seems to prove that old adage about everyone finding God in the war-torn foxhole. When one exhausts all human effort it seems quite normal to begin praying, no matter if moments earlier you were applying gobs of make-up on an Italy-bound ferry...

At the beginning of their fast decline Kynt & Vyxsin were all aflutter with confidence — "The pink and black attack is doing pretty awesome..." said Vyxsin. Kynt issued another bold prediction — as he did prior to being unleashed on uber-tolerant Amsterdam — that "I'm just so excited about Italy. This is a place that's known for fashion, style, grace...I think we're going to fit in quite well there, Vyxsin, what do you think?..."