Zagreb

Saturday we arrived in Zagreb, the capitol of Croatia. We went to dinner with our new friend Fi and had delicious Goulash. We wish we would have listened to Amanda's Mom when she told us to bring an umbrella as it has been raining the entire time we have been here. The rain comes down a bit harder than in Seattle so we paid $4 for umbrellas. People were mobbing the umbrella stand which leads us to believe that rain is either a rare occurence here or people lose their umbrellas at an alarming rate. I happened to purchase a ghetto umbrella that slowly starts to collapse so that after 5 minutes the handle is about 6 inches long. It becomes more of a hat than an umbrella at this point. It keeps me dry though so I am happy.

Once we secured a way to stay dry we stopped at a cafe playing Beatles music. We turned out to be the only girls among a crowd of older men drinking and smoking and a lovely fellow enjoying a beer and a nap at 10am. We were very impressed with the Crotians' taste in music until we snuck a peak at the play list and saw that it was Rod Stewart. Either the song was mislabled or we need to give Mr. Stewart a second chance. We have ducked into a few cafes in Zagreb to warm up and have noticed they don't serve food in places here. This is how everyone stays thin. They just drink coffee and beer... and smoke. It's the Croatian Liquid Diet. The beer here is almost as good as German beer so it must be a pretty easy diet to stick to.


We ventured back into the rain and went on self-guided walking tour which involved a lot of "stepping into the map" action. We saw the Zagreb Cathedral, St. Mark's Church, lots of open air markets and the Stone Gate. Initially we were not impressed with Zagreb but once we started walking around and exploring we couldn't help but notice the old Eastern European charm. Like Slovenia, the people here are very friendly and helpful. We get by with English, a little Polish and sign language just fine.





Yesterday, as we were examining a city map, a girl approached us and asked if we were American. Her name is Steph and she just moved to Croatia for med school. We chatted for a bit and then we all decided to go to the cemetary. We stopped by her apartment on the way- it was cool to see what the apartments look like here. The most distinguished feature was the hobbit-sized double door. I could just pass through without having to hunch. Amanda had no problem :)


P.S. Rod Stewart is playing again.


The cemetary was gorgeous which seems like an odd word to use. It is described as the most beautiful cemetary in the world and I wouldn't disagree. It was MASSIVE. It felt a litle weird to be taking so many pictures of a cemetary (like 100, no joke) but the uniqueness of each tombstone made it impossible not to take a picture every few steps. Unlike the states where the tombstones are usually small tiles that are flush with the ground, here they are above ground and each has a unique statue or elborate engraving. Steph used her Croatian language skills to find the grave of Drazen Petrovic, a famous basketball player (never heard of him but figured the boys would know who he was).


In addition to being a useful tour guide, Steph also happens to be a salsa dancer and told us about a good club so we went salsa dancing last night! Croatian men are great dancers. Some shake their hips a little too much (this part should really be left for the women) but it was very entertaining. I wish I had brought my dancing shoes but we had to make do with sneakers- such is the life of a backpacker.

Today we are off to Split....much love to everyone :)

P.S. Adding pictures to blogs somehow makes it necessary to edit with html and clearly I am not a computer whiz so please forgive us if the formatting looks off.