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So I caught my very first overnight train into Zagreb from Milan... I can definitely understand why people chose to take overnight trains - it´s a brilliant idea really, your transport and accommodation for the night are all taken care of, and you have the entire next day to do sight seeing instead of traveling. It really is a great idea. However, I really think that tickets should be allocated on the basis of when your last shower was - ¨Been hiking in the Swiss alps the last week? Not a problem, I´ll just put you in section SS, that´d S for super stinky (and snorer). What about you? Hostel shower this morning? Well, you´ve been wearing a backpack in this heat, so I´ll just pop you in section MO, that´s MO for Mildly Offensive.¨ HONESTLY. My night was spent sharing a six person train compartment (with seats, no bed for this budget traveler) with three old hikers who smelt like they´d been bathing in each other´s sweat the last few days, and snored like lumberjacks. My overnight train experience was saved by four lovely Croatian students I met when making my final connection to Zagreb. We spent our last hours of the journey talking and sharing, them drawing me maps and making recommendations as to what I should see and do in Zagreb and Croatia, me sharing stories and lingo from Australia. Not only did they share their train compartment with me, they even shared their breakfast with me - they were just honestly very lovely people. All in all I only got about two hours sleep, but I was so excited to be in Croatia that I didn´t sleep until late the following night.
I have had the same song stuck in my head for the last few days that I´ve been in Croatia. Do you know the song ´Hello´ by The Cat Empire? You know how they pronounce the ´H´ in ´Hello´ as if they´re clearing their throat at the same time? That´s how they pronounce H´s here too! So every time I meet a Croatian, they say ´Hello Hayley´ which ends up sounding like ´Hchello Hachhhyley´ (oh Hchello Hchello!). Hence, the Cat Empire has been playing on repeat in my mind the last few days...
They manager of my hostel is a bit strange. Everything he says is very abrupt, like he´s suspicious of you. Here´s our first few conversations:
(Unlocking the door to my room after dinner, him standing on the balcony having a beer)
HIM - You
ME - G´day
HIM - What is your name?
ME - Hayley...
HIM - Ok then.
(I´m glad I answered correctly!...)
(Me leaving my room in the morning)
HIM - Haccchhyley
ME - Yes?
HIM - Your last name, where does it come from?
ME - Well, it´s actually Chinese, but only very distantly.
HIM - In Croatia, Yappa is an old term for Father.
ME - Really? Well, it´s Chinese...
HIM - OK.
Strange man. I think he makes it his personal mission to know everyone in the hostel by name, which is sweet but creepy if he sneaks up on you...
On my first day in Zagreb I met quite a few really cool kids, and we all ended up joining together to go for a trip to Juran Lakes. There were about nine of us in total, some from Australia, some from The States, some from Britain, some Irish. Never again do I want to attempt to do anything with such a large group! While it is at times lonely being a solo traveler, that afternoon made me very glad that I can go wherever I want whenever I want. We decided to meet at 1pm to catch the tram to the lakes. Most of us got there on time. Some were late, but no big dramas. Then someone forgot their waterbottle. Someone wanted to run to the bakery next door to get some food before we left. Someone else didn´t have any cash on them for the tram, so needed to find an ATM. It was about 2pm before we even got on the freakin´ tram! But the lake was very beautiful. I usually don´t like swimming in lakes, as they´re usually a bit murky, the bottom is usually muddy, and (being the chicken that I am) it usually does not make for pleasant swimming. But this lake was great! Pebbles on the bottom, so clear that you could always see you feet, lovely fresh water - my kind of lake! There was a place there where you could hire windsurfing equipment, and there were quite a number of people floating around on the lake - I say floating because they wasn´t any wind to be windsurfing, they were really just practicing their balance (I call it lack-of-wind-surfing). I ended up having a really lovely snooze on the rocky shore in the sun - my new friends were surprised how much effort it took to wake me up! Ha ha.
That night Jeremy (USA), Steve (AUS), Kate (?) and I headed to a soccer game - Zagreb versus some tiny little Croatian town with a name we could never pronounce. While the game was very entertaining, the soccer itself was VERY VERY BAD. Very bad. What the players lacked in skill they made up with their acting abilities. As they didn´t have the skills to command the ball and score goals, they made it their tactic to get as many penalties as possible. Any physical contact a player received, they would fall dramatically to the ground, and roll around until someone noticed them and their girlish cries. They would then be escorted off the pitch clutching their knee/shoulder/head/etc, only to return back to the game five minutes later. It was all very dramatic. We got talking to some Zagreb supporters behind us, and learnt how to say ¨You idiot!¨ and ¨Get up!¨ in Croatia (all very useful phrases when watching European football!). My absolute favourite part of the evening was watching the mad supporters get up to mischief. They were insane. Seriously nuts. Halfway through the game (perhaps they didn´t think it was exciting enough) they started throwing flares onto the pitch, which landed about two meters from some of the players (I wondered how they got them into the stadium in the first place, as I had my water bottle confiscated upon entering). They did not stop singing war cries the entire game, complete with choreographed clapping, swaying and stamping. They did this one war cry which would have choreographed clapping in the chorus, and in each verse they would push and shove each other and tumble down the grandstands into the lower levels! Then when the chorus came back they would help each other back up and continue clapping along with the rest of the group. Nuts. The score ended up being 2-1 in favour of Zagreb.
I had a biiiiig sleep in on Monday morning. And a very lazy day followed. After a walk around the town, I found a nice patch of grass in one of the lovely squares next to a fountain and chilled out reading my book. All very lovely and relaxing - a glass of rosé would have completed the picture! That´s something that I´m loving about Europe - their alcohol laws! You can drink anywhere, anytime basically. They don´t have the same rules as Australia in that you can´t have an open alcoholic beverage in public. And it´s interesting, because I honestly haven´t seen very many drunk people wandering the streets, unlike in Australia where if you´re in the city after about 10pm on a Friday or Saturday, you´re more than likely to ´bump´ into someone who has lost control of their legs.
I´m still having a bit of a hard time eating over here. While the food is much cheaper in Croatia than in Western Europe, it is still almost always laced with meat. They don´t really understand the concept of being vegetarian no matter how you put it (I´m vegetarian, no meat, only vegetables. This looks like it has meat in it? Yes, I know it´s not a steak, but those are still chunks of bacon floating in my soup...). I´ve taken to constructing my own meals when I go to restaurants now. The side dishes are usually vegetarian, so I´ll order a plate of cooked vegies, some soup, a side salad and some bread and I´m usually right to go! I tried to order a salad burger from this burger joint the other day - you know, tomato, lettuce, cucumber, etc on a bun with a bit of sauce? I ended up with a deep fried cheese patty with lettuce - oh yum.
One of the reasons I had come to Zagreb was that there was an international puppet festival going on that week. I know what you´re thinking - puppets? Throw me a sock and you can see that in Australia! Which may have been true for some of the performances, but the ones I was really interested in was the old school Eastern European puppet shows - that´s something I´d never have the opportunity to see again. In the morning I warmed up my puppet pallet with a kids show from England called ´Punch and Judy´ - I wouldn´t be surprised if you´ve heard of it before, it´s quite famous from what I gather. It´s based on slapstick humour - literally, there are a lot of puppets getting slapped with sticks! Lots of audience participation - Where´s the crocodile? IT´S BEHIND YOU, JUDY! Very fun with a mostly child audience.
In the middle of the day Chris (ENG), Claire (AUS) and I headed to Juran lakes again to chill before we dived into the world of creepy Eastern European puppetry. I don´t think Europe receives the same standard of swim education as Australia does. Chris calls freestyle ´front crawl´, and thought that they call it freestyle in the Olympics because in freestyle races the swimmers can pick whatever stroke they want, and they all just happen to pick ´front crawl´. WOW. He also had never heard of side/safety stroke. Claire and I were great advocates of the side/safety stroke, pointing out it´s efficiency and advantages as opposed to breaststroke (or ´front crawl´, for that matter!). After a quick verbal survey when we got back to the hostel, Claire and I came to the conclusion that side/safety stroke is something that Australians have invented. But we don´t mind. We just continued to point out how much better our swimmers are than England´s! HA! We also had great fun watching the Croatians swim laps up and down the lake. There was one woman whose butterfly technique was reminiscent of what you see when whale watching - her arms would rise slowly from the water and make a grand slapping sound as they hit the surface of the water before returning to the depths of the sea (sounded quite painful, really). Another woman was attempting breaststroke, and had some sort of funky kick happening where her left leg would remain under water doing the standard breastroke kick, and her right leg would do a freestyle (front crawl?) kick and pop out of the water every now and then.
If I had of been a child, and went to the performance of Pinocchio that we saw on Tuesday night, I would have left the theatre in tears. There was no cheerful Jimini Cricket singing ´When you wish upon a star´, no beautiful fairly who turns Pinocchio into ´a real boy´, none of this love and magic. It was grim. It was creepy. And I think that the Slovenian interpretation has Pinocchio tripped out on drugs for the majority of the story. WOW. It was nothing like the Disney version, in fact, after the first half hour we began questioning if we had walked into the correct theatre. I tried to get photos, but it was a little difficult to capture the eerie nature of this play. But I´m definitely glad I went.
I was catching another overnight train on Wednesday night, so that morning I packed up all of my gear, left it at the hostel, headed out to do all of the tourist things I hadn´t yet accomplished in Zagreb. First on the list was the History of Zagreb museum. It all looked very interesting, however I can´t say I came away with much of an understanding of Zagreb´s history - all of the explanations were in Croatian! Surely the History of Zagreb museum would be more of a tourist attraction than a Croatian hang out joint. Oh well. Here´s what I learnt- - Zagreb went through a period were clock making was an absolute boom industry, and while there is now two spires on the Zagreb Cathedral, there was originally only one. I wish I could have understood more. Oh well.
Next on the list was the Zagreb tower and walls, which had a brilliant view from the top, although I almost didn´t make it all the way up. I´ve found that in my old age I seem to be getting a bit of vertigo, which has been inhibiting my ability to climb to the top of numerous town towers and enjoy the view (big fat bummer!). This has been frustrating me quite a bit so I was determined to make it to the top this time. And I did! Once I reached the top, however, I was rewarded with three big fat chimes from the bells, which honest to God felt like it shook the entire tower. When I´m climbing these towers, I just keep thinking how old they are, and how many pairs of feet (and bell chimes) it would take before it started to crumble...
The pigeons of Zagreb Square and I have a standoff on a daily basis. Damn pigeons. Move.
After eating half of my previously mentioned deep fried cheese burger for lunch (seriously gross) I headed back to the hostel to chill before catching my overnight train. I met a really lovely girl from Sydney called Bree, who also had plans to head to Zadar in a couple of days. We shared some homecooked pasta and pesto for dinner that night, and made plans to meet up in either Zadar or Split, and then perhaps travel to Dubrovnik together. I´m beginning to realise just how great traveling alone is. You can go wherever you want, whenever you want, and if you want to hang out with someone, pick up some friends at the hostel, then find new ones in the next city! Someone made a comment the other day that travel relationships are so much more intense than ordinary relationships - you know you´re only going to spend a few hours, or maybe even a few days together, so you put everything out on the table in the beginning. No time for icebreakers, no time for polite conversation. Just throw everything out there! You usually end up knowing more about a traveler you´ve known for four hours than some acquaintances that you may have known for four months.
I was lucky enough to score an entire cabin to myself on the train that night, which meant I could lift up the armrests and spread out across three seats. Add a silk sleepsheet and a rolled up jumper as a pillow and I effectively had myself a nice little bed! I had a very pleasant nine hour sleep all the way to Zadar.
So that was Zagreb! I really enjoyed my time there. After big, dirty Spain it was really refreshing to be in a city that reminded me of my beloved Switzerland. Who knows, perhaps Croatia will become my new number one?
Talk to you soon!
Love Hayley xxx
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