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Published: August 29th 2017
Geo: 45.8063, 15.9827
I'm sitting on the plane thinking it's very strange that we're spending so long in the clouds. Suddenly, I see a house and then a few more houses and it dawns on me that I'm a bit of a muppet. We haven't been flying through cloud, the ground is just covered in a blanket of snow- welcome to Croatia! I was expecting the cold, but the amount of snow was a nice surprise. Today's daytime temperature was a tropical 0 degrees and tonight it got as low as -10!
After a horribly early train from Leighton and arriving in Euston before daylight, today was a long travel day. After a bit of an issue at immigration- the people at Heathrow forgot to give me something I needed to get into the airport, I was finally in the country. Eventually I sourced what I thought was the bus going downtown however due to my non-existent Croatian or an ability to spot an English speaker, I actually had no idea. I jumped on it anyway due to a lack of other options and found myself at a bus station. The journey downtown reminded me a bit of Pyongyang- wide open roads,
a lack of traffic, and dated soviet era apartment complexes.
Now, for those of you like me who presumed that Croatia used the Euro, you're wrong! After a bit of a wild goose chase I finally found an exchange and then set about figuring out how the awesome tram network worked. Turns out you buy a ticket from a newspaper stand and then take a 50/50 guess at which direction you want to travel in- there are no guides! Suddenly the seemingly impressive network of blue soviet era trams was not looking so good! Luckily I guessed right and was soon at the hostel. I dumped my backpack, grabbed a map, chatted to some people and headed out.
Zagreb is actually a very small, compact capital city, only 800,000 people live here. The downtown area is split into two- Upper town and Lower town. Upper town is more beautiful, with lots of medieval architecture, small, narrow streets, orange and yellow colored buildings and heaps of museums. There is also a beautiful gothic cathedral which gave me a chance to thaw out and an 'old town gate' with a shrine, built under a bridge and commonly used for prayer. There's also
the shortest funicular railway in the world which terminates at a great viewing spot high on the hill above the city.
Lower town is much more cosmopolitan, I spotted Accessorize, H&M and Zara amongst many other shops. The architecture here is also very different- a real mix of Austrian/Swiss styles with soviet era and some German/Italian designs thrown in for good measure. There is also a lot of quite impressive 3D graffiti and a handful of beautiful churches nestled among offices/apartments.
Food wise- the coffee is very strong but very bitter and so far I've eaten Belgium waffles and really really good Chinese chicken noodles. Tomorrow I'll actually try some local food! Tomorrow I'm going to head south to Split. I'm not entirely sure how this is going to happen yet as there are no bus/train timetables online and no one seems to have any idea. So tomorrow's aim is to get somewhere close to the border with Bosnia.
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