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Minefields
Looks like the kind of place Bambi and Thumper would play in right? Well...the odd skull and crossbones signs along the outside beg to differ. What? I'm here again? Rubbish, I'm never this productive. Oh wait, technically my brain is calling this procrastinating. After all, I don't really have to worry about my open suitcase, lack of a ticket, or a million other oddities if I'm doing that updating thing right? Much less any of the emotional side of these things. That's what the beer's for. Well if I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it right, let's move onto Croatia.
Croatia: Notice how much time I spent back in that last entry focusing mostly on the everyday goingson in Serbia? Well I hope that adds as a little bit of balance for what starts here. After all, who I met were mostly college age students, maybe a few years older than me, but never by enough to have much on their hands. We caught a bus north to Croatia at this point, and this was where the scars of Yugoslavia’s violent collapse were made apparent. How so? Well, driving to Vukovar meant passing through a few kinds of agriculture. Fields all around us, sown with lovely CAP subsidized crops, and forests sown with a different kind, and reaping a whole other harvest.
Water Tower
It's a little bleak, but still shines in some ways. In case that literary atrocity of a sentence didn’t key you in, anytime a patch of forest popped up, the signs around us quickly pointed out that this was a landmine zone. Both sides had sprinkled them liberally around the countryside like demented Easter bunnies, and the Croats still pay the consequences for that today. It's always an unpleasant surprise to see the signs by the road, if you could forget the language and culture the terrain almost looked like Iowa (this is much nicer, even with the landmines).
Welcome to Vukovar, hope you like war crimes! Vukovar itself was the site of a three month prolonged siege in the first Serb-Croat war in 1992, basically a time when the JNA decided that they were better off pounding the city into rubble before storming it. Of course, what they hadn't really counted on was the Macgyver like tendencies of the defenders, who pretty much ground the Serb assault to a screeching halt. Special mentions go to the three or so Croats who knocked out a dozen tanks on one stretch of road. Still, overwhelming force and a tendency to employ morally ambiguous fanatics does give a bit of an
Downtown Zagreb
Ah right, not everywhere I go has to have a touch of seedy around it. The main drag of bars in Zagreb is downright gorgeous. edge, and Vukovar did fall. Today it’s mostly limped back to normalcy, the population’s at half of what it was, and while many buildings still have shell fragments only the water tower in the middle of the city still looks like it did in the war, sort of like a grim pockmarked Washington Monument. The Croats still hold this up as a sign of national pride, as they had a habit of putting their national flag up each night of the siege (each day the Serbs used it for target practice).
Vukovar also marked one of the earliest instances of war crimes, many of the surviving defenders following the end of the siege were dragged out to farmhouse and shot. Again, like Auschwitz I don’t really want to dwell on this, the site is now a memorial, and a very pretty one at that; but there’s just something about the sheer barbarism of a town mayor torturing his own citizens for being Croatian (he was Serbian) that almost defies understanding.
Zagreb Ugh, after that it was pretty clear just about everyone needed a drink. Fortunately, from here on we went to Zagreb, which I’d recommend for a day.
Tolkien Bar
....right. Er, no one will mind if I just set up a sleeping bag in the corner will they? It’s rather pretty, and if you need any proof that the nation is on the cusp of joining the EU (they do so next year) you need only look at prices that the Serbs would call a walking obscenity, and what people in Brussels would call Tuesday. Still, they served fried dough, so can’t stay mad at them. The speakers here included the warmest of the bunch, a bubbly Croat who had helped prepare Croatia’s accession. Speaking with him it was hard not to feel just a touch more optimistic about the region. At least as far as he was concerned, Croatia had gone the extra mile to ensure that their laws made sense; and that they weren’t going to be using their new status as a bully pulpit against Serbia or other potential EU states (Slovenia did this to them over a maritime border). Regardless of what you might hear about the EU and the Eurozone, it’s hard not to see its merit if nations like Croatia join. Maybe Yugoslavia couldn’t survive, but I wonder if the member nations might try a common currency and border again under Europe someday.
As a final note, I didn't really go
Gandalf the Grey
Thank goodness for wonderful little tourist traps. out here, the weather that night was crap, but the positive side to it all was finding a Tolkien themed bar. Nothing perks a chap up like "Gandalf the Grey", which I swear was more than just a Pina Colada. Also, they did have shots, so there was that. Still, call it a part of one of those days where the world was just quietly at peace with itself. I hung out with two friends from the program and did very little, relaxing lazily in the sun. Nothing can make war crimes and the nightmares of history feel more distant than a day like that.
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