Croatia part 3: Zagreb
March 21, Zagreb
We didn't have all that much time in Zagreb, unfortunately - two nights but really only day, since the others were spent getting there before and on to Austria afterward. I had the niggling feeling throughout Croatia that we'd done things a bit backwards. In Slovenia, we'd started out with several days in the capital - getting our bearings, learning about history and culture, even getting to hang out with actual Slovenians, thanks to Hospitality Club - before continuing on to other places where we were less personally connected and more just tourists.
In Croatia, we started with the coast and worked our way through a couple of national parks before ending up in the capital at the very end. Everything we saw was wonderful, and we did put plenty of time into reading up on history etc, in the never-ending quest to understand even a fraction of the complexities of the Balkan wars. But I felt a bit of a lack in the people department. Making actual connections with local people is hard when you're just a tourist - and yet for me, a main reason to travel (okay, aside from getting to hear awesome, weird, wonderful languages...) is meeting people, seeing how they live, learning about the culture. A paradox I haven't fully resolved.
We did get a bit of people-contact in the end, at least, with another person from Hospitality Club - Vladimir, a middle-aged German teacher in a high school. It was certainly a very different kind of encounter from the one we'd had with young students in Ljubljana, but he gave us a knowledgeable tour of the city's main sights, as well as plenty of food for thought on cultural and political issues.
He said, for example, that a lot of people, young people especially, are against Croatia's slated entry into the EU. That seems a little odd for a country that could surely use the economic boost EU membership means. But they're afraid of losing again their hard-won autonomy - an understandable sentiment, I guess, coming less than 20 years after independence from Yugoslavia. (Though it doesn't really matter anyway, Vladimir said, since everything has already been bought up by foreign investors anyway, even without joining the EU.)
Zagreb itself was a very pleasant city, lots of green spaces and parks. (I enjoyed one of them particularly, while munching on a wonderful egg-and-zucchini filo dough pastry from a nearby bakery, mentally thanking the Croatians for inventing such a wonderful alternative to the standard fare of cheese-in-filo-dough or meat-in-filo-dough.)
It took Heiko pointing it out for me to notice, though it was obvious once he said it: Zagreb looked strikingly different from Zadar or other cities we'd seen along the coast. While the coast bears a strong Italian influence from having been controlled by Venice, Zagreb shows its Austro-Hungarian influence, and looks and feels central European - far more like Vienna than Venice.
And appropriately enough, after that it was on to Austria!
We didn't have all that much time in Zagreb, unfortunately - two nights but really only day, since the others were spent getting there before and on to Austria afterward. I had the niggling feeling throughout Croatia that we'd done things a bit backwards. In Slovenia, we'd started out with several days in the capital - getting our bearings, learning about history and culture, even getting to hang out with actual Slovenians, thanks to Hospitality Club - before continuing on to other places where we were less personally connected and more just tourists.
In Croatia, we started with the coast and worked our way through a couple of national parks before ending up in the capital at the very end. Everything we saw was wonderful, and we did put plenty of time into reading up on history etc, in the never-ending quest to understand even a fraction of the complexities of the Balkan wars. But I felt a bit of a lack in the people department. Making actual connections with local people is hard when you're just a tourist - and yet for me, a main reason to travel (okay, aside from getting to hear awesome, weird, wonderful languages...) is meeting people, seeing how they live, learning about the culture. A paradox I haven't fully resolved.
We did get a bit of people-contact in the end, at least, with another person from Hospitality Club - Vladimir, a middle-aged German teacher in a high school. It was certainly a very different kind of encounter from the one we'd had with young students in Ljubljana, but he gave us a knowledgeable tour of the city's main sights, as well as plenty of food for thought on cultural and political issues.
He said, for example, that a lot of people, young people especially, are against Croatia's slated entry into the EU. That seems a little odd for a country that could surely use the economic boost EU membership means. But they're afraid of losing again their hard-won autonomy - an understandable sentiment, I guess, coming less than 20 years after independence from Yugoslavia. (Though it doesn't really matter anyway, Vladimir said, since everything has already been bought up by foreign investors anyway, even without joining the EU.)
Zagreb itself was a very pleasant city, lots of green spaces and parks. (I enjoyed one of them particularly, while munching on a wonderful egg-and-zucchini filo dough pastry from a nearby bakery, mentally thanking the Croatians for inventing such a wonderful alternative to the standard fare of cheese-in-filo-dough or meat-in-filo-dough.)
It took Heiko pointing it out for me to notice, though it was obvious once he said it: Zagreb looked strikingly different from Zadar or other cities we'd seen along the coast. While the coast bears a strong Italian influence from having been controlled by Venice, Zagreb shows its Austro-Hungarian influence, and looks and feels central European - far more like Vienna than Venice.
And appropriately enough, after that it was on to Austria!