29-30 June 2019

We are starting to shift from destinations with more tourists to ones with more locals. A welcome relief. It is still very hot but the AC in the studio apartment sent the temperature low at night. Bonnie needed a fleece jacket and blanket. Robert did not.

Zagreb is not large. Population close to that of San Francisco. Most everyone speaks some English.

As with other cities in Croatia, Zagreb has embraced the street for walking, drinking, eating, and seeing each other. Wide and extensive expanses of pedestrian-only zones. Everyone is in a rush here to serve the customers. Always on the move serving food and drinks and picking up empty plates and glasses.

Misters are everywhere creating fog at the edges of the canopies on regular intervals. Quite effective in reducing the temperature (or at least how hot you think it is).

We are finding the posts helpful recently because we are staying only two nights in some places. Cities in the Balkans are starting to blur. But with the posts and Apple photos sorted by location and date, we are keeping on track. At least for now!

Wanderings

Outdoor and Indoor Market

The daily market is quite large. The outdoor portion occupies a big plaza while the indoor portion is at one side of the plaza. It seems that some outdoor vendors sell produce they purchased from others. Some were definitely selling home-grown or wild produce. Robert saw one woman probably in her late 80s, selling a bag of mushrooms she must have picked from a field or forest nearby.

More Wanderings

Upper Town

Took a 55-second ride on a funicular to the upper town—one of the best preserved historic Croatian towns.

This museum is a must. Full of short narratives and objects about broken relationships—some with people, some with objects. Some very sad. Some very joyful. All good.

Cat Woman

Zagreb Cathedral

Retail

Bonnie spots shopping bags from H&M and Zara in EVERY large city. Even when she can’t figure out where the store would be. (Of course Google maps knows all.) And in every city in Italy and the Balkans she has seen big blue IKEA bags used for laundry, hotel linens, or whatever. The globalization of inexpensive retail brands is great, but it has cut down on the number of local boutiques with unusual goods. We miss them.

Tee shirts on men and boys in tourist mobs of Europeans and Asians: 60 percent of tee shirts mention California with some illogical text, 20 percent mention New York (some both: “Brooklyn, California”), 10 percent Tommy Hilfiger, 10 other.

Lodging

Running beneath the sightseeing, eating, drinking, and driving is a low rumble of anxiety about where we will sleep next. Bonnie assembles calendar, iPad, phone, maps, and a notebook for the hunt.

The search starts with TripAdvisor and search words like “Hotel with Parking.” Usually a week or two in advance. Sometimes she gets bumped by TripAdvisor to Booking.com or Hotels.com. She may move to AirBnB for more choices. Although once she identifies a spot on a site not managed by AirBnB, she tries to call them directly. They appreciate this as they then will receive 100 percent of their fee.

Every city is different in mix of housing, prices, and locations. Hotels on the Dalmatian coast are outrageously expensive but there is an abundance of private apartments and rooms at low prices. We had a lovely modern two-bedroom in Dubrovnik with washer and full kitchen for about $50. We rarely stay at hotels, although there have been two or three tiny ones that were brilliant. Europeans use the term B&B differently than we do. A room or hotel room with breakfast can be an B&B. No antiques, stuffed dolls, or hovering owner.

Generally there seems to be an oversupply of private rooms and apartments, which makes sense because of Italy’s negative population growth and families’ tendency to hang on to empty apartments as investments and for possible future use by their children.

Looking for the perfect intersection of reasonable parking, location near the historic center, air conditioning, attractive price, quiet, and maybe a kitchen requires at least 90 minutes. Doing it in 15-minute chunks doesn’t work.

And driving to a new place always brings a slight wave of apprehension. Can we even find it using our navigation app? Several times not. Will the host really be there to give us keys? What’s the neighborhood like? Depressing furnishings? Tiny? Is Bonnie’s hunt for a bargain going to catch up with us? Our only real fail was in the middle of the heat wave in Ljubljana where the apartment promised AC and there was only a fan. But we were able to book quickly elsewhere and got a refund easily.

Hrana i Piće

Next stop: Ljubljana!