Day One of our European vacations is mellow out of necessity. After traveling for twenty or thirty hours with little or no sleep, it is wise to take the first day fairly easy. Having said that, we don’t like to waste time either.
The airport at Zagreb is tiny – I think the Akron/Canton airport is bigger. Passport control asked no question, but did stamp our passports, and customs had a “nothing to claim” line that led right outside. Once outside, we jumped on a bus that would take us to the city bus station. In an example of the dominance of American entertainment culture, the radio played nothing but pop songs in English the whole twenty-minute trip to the bus station.
My impression of Zagreb was mixed. The outskirts of the city seemed to be all communist-era huge apartment blocks that thought concrete was the end-all and be-all in architecture. On the other hand, there seemed to be parks everywhere, with good bike trails and sidewalks.
From the bus station, we picked up a tram ticket that would take us to the main square of the old (non-communist) section of town. While we waited, we struck up a conversation with a young American couple who were in Croatia on their delayed-from-October honeymoon, with a planned visit to Moscow at the end of the trip. That is an adventurous couple!
The tram arrived, and we were whisked to the very cute old part of town. We still had a ten-minute walk with some backtracking to find our hostel. We dumped our luggage and put into practice our sure-fire way to break jet lag – we took a two-hour nap. There are two common trains of thought about European jet lag – get to the hotel and sleep, or stay up all day until normal local bedtime. In the first case, we have always felt that going to sleep right away just keeps you on your old sleep schedule, and you would be wide awake in the middle of the local night. In the second case, staying up for what would be thirty or more hours sounds like a great way to be miserable on your first day. We compromise by taking a two-hour nap and then forcing ourselves to get up and go to dinner. It lets us still get some touring in (about three hours today), but keeps us feeling more or less normal.
We basically wandered around the old part of the city, based around a giant public square. We took a quick look inside a free exhibit on the European Space Agency, and we saw a fun little sculpture of the sun, and two to-scale tiny sculptures of Mars and Venus (they were planted around the city by a second artist, which caused the locals to have to figure out where they were). We bumped into a Croatian male a cappella singing group (a national genre), which we listened to for a couple of songs. We heard a beautiful song in Croatian coming out of a church on the main square, one that we know in English. We rode the shortest funicular (steep train) in Europe to get to the hill overlooking the city, wound around the streets to a beautiful church, down past the old red-light district, which is where the restaurants now are, where we ate on the sidewalk of a good restaurant and we people-watched. We had dessert at a cookie place (we had the excellent mint brownies), and we finished off by wandering over to the cathedral, which had a beautiful illuminated front entrance. By then, it was starting to rain, so we walked back to the hostel to call it a night. It was not an ambitious day, but it was not supposed to be – it was just Day One.
