Zagreb, Croatia

The day before leaving Budapest, I started not feeling so well. Just a little cold, but I needed to take it easy for a few days to get better. M also got it a couple of days later… But, we only had 3 nights in Zagreb so we were worried we wouldn’t get the total picture of the Croatian capitol. We walk a lot when we travel and you can see our dip in walking while we were in the worst throes of head congestion. But we fought through it and we are definitely on the upswing as we leave Zagreb.

Zagreb didn’t have any history or famous art museums that really got us excited but it has a lot of small specialty museums. The most famous is the Museum of Broken Relationships. A collection of weird artifacts from the dissolution of couples and some funny and sometimes really sad stories to go with them. Here are a couple of strange displays from the museum and hopefully you can read the plaques…

There was a naive art museum that we really enjoyed. All the “famous” art in Croatia seems to have been taken by the Hapsburgs and other people over the centuries but they still have some fun folk art that is still interesting. We also were interested in a 80’s museum. It was a replica of a typical upper middle class apartment in the 80’s filled with interactive stuff that I thought would give us some nostalgia of the 80’s. But it wasn’t at all familiar stuff to us. This was the 80’s of Yugoslavia behind the iron curtain and the fashions, food and almost everything was so different. It really showed how much this country has changed since the Soviet breakup. Now fashions and food are pretty similar to the US and their houses are filled with IKEA furniture just like ours. Here is a pic of a bunch of 80’s Yugoslavian food that brought me no nostalgia.

Zagreb itself was a fun place to be. Lots of markets and restaurants on pedestrian streets that we are now very used to in Europe and don’t know why we can’t have more of these in Seattle.

Lots of eating outside although the weather is getting a little on the edge with fall coming. The specialty here is Strukli, which is basically a baked casserole of noodles, cream and cheese. We will try making this healthy dish whenever we get back in Seattle.

The famous tiled roof church here is not open to the public unless you are going to an actual service. That is because it is right between the Croatian parliament and other government buildings. That’s OK. I have seen enough church insides…

They also have a tower near this church that shoots a cannon out of a window every day at noon. I guess it is kind of interesting but not something I would wait around to watch. We heard the boom while we were leaving the Museum of Broken Relationships and decided that was good enough to check off our “must sees”

Even though, we were slowed down a bit this week, we still got the feeling of Zagreb and put it on our list of pleasant European capitols to return to someday. Lots of good cheap beer, good food/restaurants and interesting markets and museums. Next stop is our 5th European capitol of this trip. Ljubljana, Slovenia.