Croatia in a few words
I haven’t been so great at writing blog posts lately, not for any really great reason, I just haven’t been spending the time. Part of the issue, I think, is that we’ve been in the mindset that when we move from one country to the next we’ll write a blog post, but I I think I end up trying to type too much or we don’t type nearly enough.
Anyway, hopefully I’ll starting writing more frequent blog posts. This one is not really one of those though, because it’s another “catch up.”
Croatia was a pretty great country. I’d recommend you visit it if you get a chance. Zagreb, the capital, where we started, felt like a small-ish city compared to a Paris or a Munich, but nice. It sort of reminded me of what I remember Prague to be like I guess. We did a few noteworthy things there:
- We went to the “museum of broken relationships” – basically a bunch of items from various failed relationships (most of them romantic, but not all). The stories behind the actual items were the most interesting part of the museum. I was/am very happy to have found that the museum felt “authentic” to me, not like people had edited a bunch of stories to make them incredible when they weren’t. There were just a bunch of real feeling, often sad, thought provoking little stories to accompany the items.
- The mushroom museum. This was difficult to find. We took two days to find it actually (not searching the entire time of course!). The first day we asked the tourist information area where the museum was and they drew the location on a map and said “Next to the Hypo Bank.” We found the bank easy enough (it was visibile from the tourist office), but found not a single sign that indicated that there was a museum there. We ended up walking around the building, but found nothing. The next day we went back, did the same search again, but this time we went into a random door that looked like it led to a closed down building. You walk in the door and it was dark, sort of like a large apartment building that was condemmed or something. But we walked up the staircase (the museum was supposed to be on the second floor), at this point having no idea if this was the correct place or not (having seen no sign). On the second floor, sure enough there was a sign that said something about the something-something society, not exactly “MUSHROOM MUSEUM IS HERE” or anything, but it sounded like something that might be related to a museum so we knocked and it ended up being the right place. The museum itself was small-ish (two rooms or so), but really really impressive. Hundreds of different types of mushrooms, all well preserved. Plus it was free.
Otherwise, in Zagreb, we spent a lot of time walking around the city, eating different foods (things were very cheap having flown from Netherlands), and walking more. I did some work on my website project, Lindsay and I watched a few episodes of Deadwood (a great show by the way).
We also went to see Interstellar in a movie theater. This was for us both I think a great experience because
- It was the first American movie we’ve been to on this trip (we saw two movies in Hindi in India, but those were Bollywood films)
- I had wanted to see the movie for a long time, in theathers, and had assumed I’d miss the opportunity but for whatever reason the movie was still playing in Zagreb
- The movie was awesome I thought, and Lindsay thought
- It was pretty cheap – I think we paid around 7 USD for two tickets
- I very much enjoy going to the movies in general, and going to the movies in a different country is always an interesting experience I think. Sort of like eating at McDonalds in a different country, it’s similar but the differences make it so interesting
We ended up heading to Zadar next after Zagreb. Zadar is a small coastal town, and the photos if you were to google look amazing. Zadar was very beautiful, but for me at least more then most cities we’ve visited recently it wasn’t really well suited for tourism during the winter. There are a bunch of places we’ve visited that are sort of “dead” during the winter, and often time that’s OK (even nice sometimes as you feel like less of an annoyng tourist and more of a crazy tourist). But Zadar was really really dead.
Honestly I can’t exactly think what we did in Zadar at this point, except that Lindsay liked the city because she ran every day and there were a bunch of nice routes. I did a fair amount of programming I believe, and I drank some coffee and ate musli.
We also saw the Sea Organ, which is basically a cement structure created so that air is forced up over the holes in the concrete structure when waves come in. So it’s like an organ or some other wind instrument. The cool thing about it is that it’s quite large, and it’s actually built into the sidewalk that goes along the water.
Anyway, our time in Zadar we stayed at the “Sea Gallery” apartment, which was a small apartment with a bunch of water colors the owner painted hung up on the walls. It was a pretty nice little apartment. As I mentioned, I’m unsure of what exactly we did in Zadar, but whatever it was we did it for a few days and then moved onto Split.
Split was probably the easiest town to love, and probably the most popular tourist destination I’d guess, but that didn’t stop me from loving it. It’s on the water, there is a park right near the city area, the entire city feels like the sea/water is part of the everyday life, and in general it was just a cool town.
We did a lot of walking in Split, which isn’t abnormal, but we had a few days of beautiful, warm sunshine and it felt like heaven. I went swimming one day, which was great. Well, it was good, maybe not great. It felt great to get in the water, but honestly the water was the coldest I’ve been in in a while. The type of water that is difficult to stay in for long because you get a headache the second your face goes under. Still, even in the shallow water (2-3 feet max?) I brought my mask and saw a bunch of beautiful sea anemones (which is a nearly impossible word to spell by the way).
Lindsay and I ate out one nice meal in Split. The photos you’ve seen already, but we had the black squid ink risotto. I actually thought it was really really good. I also talked to the bartender/waiter for a while about it and asked him if it was just a tourist gimmick, and he said no, and that he didn’t eat it all the time but normally once a month or so.
I also really liked Split because it felt a bit like a gateway to other awesome water areas of Croatia. For instance, the island of Vis. We didn’t go, but I talked to a guy in a freediving/spearfishing shop about places to spearfish and apparently Vis is one of the top spearfishing and scuba diving places in Croatia. This I found exciting.
Another thing I really enjoyed about Split was sitting outside with all of the locals (mainly men) along the water drinking a beer at 1 in the afternoon. Seriously, there were guys that would sit outside all day long on these benches with their friends and their dogs and drink beer. I remember on day Lindsay and I sat outside and drank a beer in the morning, then we walked around all day and did whatever we did, and then on the way home that night, after dark, the same group of guys were sitting exactly where they had been before, still drinking beer and chatting.
There was also a fishing area (best way I can put it), where there were a bunch of small fishing boats and nets and things laying out drying, and there would always be a group of guys sitting around. One particularly memorable day there was a group of guys who I think had been fishing, and they were sitting around on a picnick bench in their fisherman gear, and somebody was grilling up some fish, and then they all started singing. It was awesome. It was like, a fisherman song, I like to think. Maybe they were singing about the sea, and how beautiful it is, and how they love fishing and the sea air. I have an audio recording of it actually, maybe I’ll try to post it.
In closing, let me say that I’d recommend anybody go to Croatia. I would likely recommend visiting in the summer (though I think Split in particular is crazy with tourists at this point, a bit different from the chill atmosphere we had!). I think I’d like to go back to Croatia one day, and when I do I think I’ll probably stick to the South and to the islands.
Next up, a ferry to Ancona, Italy.