Zagreb & Zadar

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About a day before I leave wherever I am, I’ve started booking my hostel for the next place. At the start of this trip I was looking for clean rooms, social areas, close to the town, etc etc, but my booking criteria has changed completely. It is now this: Air Conditioning! It doesn’t really matter what else is at the hostel after that. Hostelworld reviews say - “There were rats in the kitchen!!”……. My thoughts… “Did someone say free breakfast?!”



So I booked by hostel (with air conditioned room) at my next destination, which is Zagreb, the capital of Croatia. I took the 7 ½ hour train journey from Budapest, which had little air conditioning and no drinking water – even to buy - and arrived at my hostel a sweaty yet dehydrated mess. Incidentally, this is the first train I have been on where I have had my passport checked. The 7 other countries I’ve visited mustn’t care too much about border control!



After taking a shower and having a beer in the bar, I headed to bed. Let me just tell you, up until this point I have been pleasantly surprised about hostels and the people who stay in them. They have all been clean and tidy, and fairly quiet in the dorms while people are sleeping. So I wasn’t accustomed to being woken up at 2am by two people shagging, seemingly as loudly as possible, on the top bunk of a squeaky bed in a 10 person dorm!



I mean, For. F*ck’s. Sake!! At least try to be quiet about it! Or, better still, just piss off somewhere else!



So after I tested the soundproofing of my pillow (which left a lot to be desired!) I got back to sleep, and was then woken up by the group of people who had returned from their pub crawl of the city. The noisy bastards stayed up talking for ages and scoffing bloody Pringles like scabby dogs! Welllllll, that’s okay! – because I just *happened* to be getting up early in the morning to go sightseeing, and I *happened* to need to completely empty and re-fill TP; take a shower; squeak my wet flip flops; slam every door in sight; cough; sneeze; tap drum rhythms on the bed; whistle; hum jingle bells to myself; and generally, be the most annoying shit of a human on the planet to their shrivelled hungover brains…..Oops.



After I left the hostel and returned to civil society, I went on (yet another!) walking tour of the city. I learned that the animal on the flag of Croatia is called a ‘Kuna’ or what we apparently call a ‘Marten’. Croatian people used to trade at markets in Kuna fur, which is why their currency today is the Croatian Kuna. Zagreb also has a canon that is set off from a central tower at midday every day, which was historically to tell all the churches to ring their bells to inform their people of the time. Now it’s done just for tourists, and it scares the living crap out of you when you’re right below it!



Our guide told us that Croatia has very strong alcohol, and if you visit a person’s house, it is customary to have a shot of this alcohol upon your arrival. The Croatian language sounds a little bit like Russian I think, so imagine our Croatian guide saying this: “If you don’t drink de shot when you get to friend’s house, dey will likely think you impolite and no friendly, or joost, dat you are pussy!” ….. Well we wouldn’t want that.



There is a museum called the ‘Museum of Broken Relationships’ in Zagreb. This is a place where, after any relationship has broken down, people can send in all the physical possessions which they don’t want anymore and which that remind them of that relationship, and an explanation for people to read about. I was told it is actually quite heart-warming, but I didn’t go in. I mean – what’s wrong with a good old garden bonfire for all that shite anyway? Instead, I stayed out roaming the city and ate a seafood salad, with octopus tentacles and everything! – Tasty!



Later that evening, I stayed out to watch a guitar player and singer performing outside at a bar, and they were very good! It chilled me out enough to face returning to ‘The Bunk Bangers and the Bungle-Brained Baboons’, as I had dubbed my room mates.



When I arrived back at the hostel, there was a ‘pub quiz’ social event going on, so I joined in the end of it. Some of the people I had met were going out for drinks afterwards, so I joined them, and ended up staying out having a dance to 90s music until 3am. I hadn’t really considered my 7am start. When I came back to the hostel, some of the bungle-brains were still out partying. They arrived back maybe 40 minutes after me….and would you believe it……. The female counterpart of the bunk-bangers had brought home another man! Last night’s man was still sleeping across from her in the dorm, but that didn’t seem to matter! I was just about to drag my pillow and sheet out into the hall for the night when one of the Australian girls in the room shouted out – (Imagine a good Australian accent) – “If youz start bonkin’ agin I’m gonna go fcking nats!” I couldn’t help laughing out loud. Good old Ozzys. I don’t think they started up again, or if they did, I was far too drunk to hear anything.



The next morning was not a good one. I snoozed my alarm, and by snoozed I mean I accidentally turned it off, so was late getting up. I didn’t have time for a shower, and felt as through my pounding head might detach itself and crawl off into hiding rather than face the world. But I persevered and packed up TP, and left the hostel to take the tram to the bus station for my trip to Zadar, which is on the coast. I was heading for my tram when I stumbled slightly over a curb on the street, causing the in-between-your-toes bit of my right sandal to snap completely. BOLLOCKS!! The shoe was held on purely by the ankle strap at the back, so the shoe slapped down on the pavement like a wet fish at every step. My walking sounded like this – Step, thwap, step thwap, step thwap etc etc. So the only pair of shoes I had brought with me, and which I had spent the last three weeks getting them to stop rubbing all of the skin off my feet, were no more.



I knew that there were shoe shops on the street I was on, and I had no idea Zadar was going to have many shops or not, and even so – I couldn’t get to the bus station like this! So I called into a shoe shop and literally asked them to give me any shoes they had in my size. I was already running late and this was just going from bad to worse. She had a pair of sandals in my size, I tried on one foot and said ‘I’ll take them!’. I don’t even know how much they were. The shop owner kindly disposed of my old shoes without me even asking her to – she must’ve thought they needed some sort of hazardous waste treatment! I put both shoes on, left the shop, and walked 100 yards before realising that these may be the most uncomfortable shoes in the entire world. They were already rubbing my skin off.



I arrived at the tram station, and read that the tram I needed was going to be another 10 minutes. I took a chance, and got on another tram which was facing the direction I was going in, and it took me about another 10 minutes in the opposite direction I wanted to go ☹ shit shit shit! I got off the tram, and walked to the next tram stop to see if the one I wanted might be arriving – it wasn’t. I was already supposed to be at the bus station now, and google maps said it would take me 20 minutes to walk. My bus was leaving in 15. RIGHT! That’s it! I swapped my new shit shoes for my shower flip flops, hitched TP as tightly as possible, and began power walking in whatever direction google maps was suggesting. It was already 34 degrees with the sun blazing down, TP was about the heaviest I can remember, and I was sweating more than I have ever sweat in my life! It felt like some serious desert army endurance training. I arrived near the bus station, ran the last 500 meters and skidded in front of my already moving bus to tell them to stop. They bloody did too! – my first lucky break of the day! It was 4 minutes past 10, and my bus was due to leave at 10. I had literally caught it by the skin of my teeth. I felt pretty sorry for the other passengers on the bus when I got on it though. My top was soaked with sweat, I was red faced, panting, hair stuck to my forehead, and there were only a couple of single seats left next to people who looked completely fresh and composed. I felt, and no doubt looked, like I should be sheep-dipped before being allowed in public. I was a broken human, and there may be a serious chance I was carrying foot and mouth disease. I sat right on the back of the bus with two teenage boys (they always smell so they wouldn’t notice so much right?!) and tried not to puke for the three hour journey as the hangover and that morning’s exertion really hit home.



When I arrived in Zadar, I again relied on google maps to find my next hostel. This time it was only a 10 minute walk, but it was 39 degrees. It felt like I was walking for 10 hours. Google maps also directed me down the wrong street which took me another ten minutes to correct. By the time I arrived at my hostel, I could’ve sat and cried! I immediately got in a cold shower, drank a load of water, and lay on the bed in my air-conditioned room (on full blast) until I felt COLD. It took me a fair few hours.



I managed to get myself out that evening to sit on the beach which was right next to the hostel, and I had a walk into the old town which is very pretty. There was a festival on – something about celebrating the full moon, but not in a werewolf type of way! Apparently the festival brings together the people of Zadar and the nearby islands to celebrate their trading together. They have loads of food stalls on the promenade selling tuna steaks, mussels, slightly burnt corn on the cob etc, and a stage for their traditional music. I stayed for a little while before heading for a decent night’s sleep.



The next day I got up early so that I could get to the beach before it got too hot. The sea in Croatia is lovely. It is cooler than the air but warm enough that you can jump straight in! It’s also really salty, which means that you can float in the water without needing to swim at all. Bliss! Having that time in the sea really helps with the heat. I spent most of the day going between the beach and sea, until it was cool enough for me to walk around. I also took my little hand scissors and my new shoes to the beach, and spent a good hour mutilating my new sandals to cut away every possible part of the shoe that rubbed my feet. Why can’t they make shoes to fit FEET?! I figured the less shoe there is, the less it can rub!



One of the main reasons I wanted to visit Zadar is because it has the ‘sea organ’ on the promenade. This is an area of the promenade which has had pipes put underneath it, so that when the sea hits the chambers it creates noises, like an organ. I had briefly seen it the night before, but it was too noisy with the festival on to hear it properly. I had spoken to a man called Sasha who was staying in my hostel, who said that for it to be free of people, you really needed to see it at about 2am. So after my beach trip, I bought dinner and went to bed about 9pm so that I could get up later and walk into the town. I got up about 11pm and walked into the town. Unfortunately, when I got there the festival was still in full swing and there were loads of people around sitting on the steps of the sea organ. I decided to wait in the hope that people would start leaving, but the bands were still performing on stage (some truly god-awful music), and in between that, there were party boats leaving from the port with pop music blaring with lyrics about how ‘last night a DJ saved my life.’



I waited there until past 2am, but the promenade never fully cleared, and even when the music on stage stopped, the bars nearby started their own music. The boats also carried on departing from the port for a night’s worth of partying. Trust me to pick a visit to Zadar when there’s a festival on and I only wanted to hear the sea! I sat there for quite a while chunnering to myself about how I didn’t give a monkey’s f*ck if a DJ shagged your wife, or whatever the lyrics are….I just wanted to hear the sea sing!! The only good thing about the boats was that they stirred up the water enough that the waves hit the pipes more, so you could hear the organ much better after they had gone past. To be fair, I did hear the organ pretty well, it’s just that I wanted it to be really quiet so I could listen to all the noises. At about 2:30 I gave up, and walked back to the hostel for the night. I had a fairly early start to get to Split the next day and didn’t want a repeat performance of that in Zagreb!

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