Peter drove me and my pregnant friend Jessica the two hours to Zagreb from Plitvice Lakes. The man was on a mission to get our car, with no snow tires and a couple inches of clearance off the ground, out of the strengthening snow-storm in the mountains around Plitvice Lakes as quickly as possible. It wasn’t long before we descended out of the mountains and were on a flat freeway to the Croatian capital city of Zagreb.
We met the host of our Airbnb at a coffee shop and she jumped in our car to show us the way to the flat as it required a one-way drive through the main pedestrian square. Again another pleasant Croatian woman. The people in Croatia, as a generality, were overly welcoming and kind our entire trip. We had a great spot right in the middle of town that was walking distance to shops, restaurants, and the local indie theater. Peter had discovered that the Zagreb Film Festival was playing while we there so we had bought tickets to an Icelandic movie called, “Of Horses and Men.”
We got settled in our place then Jess and I set out to do a little shopping. She was looking for gifts for friends and family back home and I was shopping for my developing nephew. It was a successful trip. Of course at the time my nephew Luke wasn’t born but I did just get this picture from Lisa of Luke wearing his Zagreb outfit. He is too cute, right?
A fun coincidence we had while staying overnight in Zagreb was that a friend of Jessica’s was living nearby in Slovenia playing professional hockey. Hunter and his wife Tara met us at a coffee shop, Mala Kavana, after Jess and I had finished up our shopping. Hunter is from Alaska as well and because Fairbanks is a small town and my brother was also a hockey player we quickly realized we knew a ton of the same people and he and my brother had played hockey together. Jessica and Hunter’s parents are close friends so they decided to do a Facetime call while we were all together.
After Peter finished up some work he joined us and we all headed over to a pizza spot for dinner, Nokturno. We had a great time with Hunter and Tara. We talked a lot about travel as they have also travelled a good amount and they had an upcoming trip that they were trying to plan. They asked our advice on different places to go. We discussed a handful of different countries: Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Thailand. They ended up in Italy which is never a bad idea.
At dinner we enjoyed pizza, calzones as big as your head, wine, and beer with what felt like new friends. At this point in our travels we had hardly hung out with friends so it felt good to have a group dinner in a foreign land where American idioms and humor were understood and laughter engulfed the table as we devoured delicious comfort food.
After dinner we headed over to the Zagreb International Film Festival which was just a 3 minute walk from our flat and where we had enjoyed dinner. We had tickets to see an Icelandic film called “Of Horse and Men.” The landscape in the film was absolutely beautiful and we both mentioned to each other how great a trip to Iceland would be one of these summers. The movie itself interlocked a series of 6 story-lines that all bizarrely linked together at the end and all were somehow related to horses. In one scene, an inexperienced horse rider gets lost in the mountains and instead of freezing to death he proceeds to kill the horse and sleep inside its carcass for warmth. It was that kind of movie. Odd and somewhat disturbing. Still a fun thing to do.
After the film we took a short stroll back to our flat. Jess and I stayed up for a bit having girl talk as well as sharing some nervous excitement because in the morning we were off to…Egypt!
Peter later mentioned that this day in Zagreb was one of his favorites. We didn’t have a list of things to see nor check-off. There was sense of normalcy to the day where we met friends for coffee, ate some pizza before catching a movie. I think we needed that sense of regularity and normalcy even if it was only for half-day. It also probably helped to have that the night before a big adventure – Egypt!
Thanks as always for following along. I am trying hard to get caught up.