Croatia: so hot right now

(good beach music)

I'm on a breathtaking busride along the coast from Split to Dubrovnik in the very south of Croatia, after having just spent a really amazing few days in Zagreb and Split. It's hard to describe just how awesome this place is.

The fruit market in Zagreb was easily the biggest I've seen yet, you couldn't see the other side of the forest of unbrellas and people

I got into Zagreb in the evening on Thursday and went to bed early so I could get a full day in on Friday. Zagreb was a lot like any big city - crowded, busy, and always awake. Zagreb is known for its sheer quanitity of museums, and even though I not much of a museum person, I couldn't help but go to one that was recommended to me by a traveller I met in Ljubljana.

Zagreb, and the Museum of Broken Relationships. No, it's not the name of a new Boxcar Children book...

The Museum of Broken Reltionships was really great. It's a collection of items donated by people after a significant relationship had ended, along with the story of the item as told by the gifter. Some of the items were donated as a sort of cathartic release for the donor, some were donated because they felt like they had an important story to tell. The museum had everything from wedding dresses that never got worn to poems given from a husband to a wife in his final days of fighting illness. Really really interesting

I spent the rest of the day exploring the city and picking up a couple extra t-shirts (thus doubling my t-shirt options). Zagreb is a pretty flat city, so I didn't find a good vantage point to take a panoramic photo of it, but I managed to get a few photos of the giant bronze horsemen that the Croatians seem to be pretty fond of.

That night, I took an overnight train to Split, along the coast about halfway between Slovenia and Bosnia. I got in pretty early in the morning, but the owner of the hostel I stayed at, Elda, was nice enough to check me in and spill me into a bed so I could get a couple extra hours of sleep.

Split is AMAZING! It's a beautiful mediterranian town, and this is just the perfect time of year to visit. The water is warm, the beaches are beautiful, and its not yet high season for tourism, so there lots of locals and not a lot of tourists crowding the markets. The main attraction in Split is Diocletian's Palace, built by Emperor Diocletian of Rome as a little retirement castle in the late 5th century CE. It's been really well preserved, because the people in the area used the castle as protection for a long time after the Roman hold on the region began to dwindle. Split was one of the few towns on the entire Balkan peninsula that was never taken over by the invading Slavs during the mideival period, thanks to the paranoia and ego of Emperor Diocletian.

Split would be worth visiting just because of the awesome ruins, but of course the icing on the cake is that theres unreal beaches and perfect weather, too.

That's the beach we swam at for most of yesterday, which is on the Island of Brac, about a 40 minute ferry ride from Split. Just like Split, Brac is just picture perfect this time of year, and you can wade out a long long ways into the Mediterranian before you need to swim.

Just to rub it in a little bit more, Split also has some amazing food and nightlife. Local Croatian food along the coast here is really fresh seafoods, olives, tomatoes, cheeses - delicious. Calimari is a specialty of many of the restaurants here, and I was more than happy to eat it every chance I got. Bar and clubs are busy well into the night all week long, but I was fortunate enough to be in town on a weekend, when a lot of Croatians come to visit, so there was a lot of locals to meet and drink with. The local specialty alcohol is Raki, which is a burning grain alcohol that is flavored strongly with different syrups and taken as shots. Most of the locals say the honey flavor is the best, but it would take seven or eight nights out to try all the flavors (theres like 50) to confirm that, so I took them on their word.

So that's about it! I'll be in Dubrovnik for a couple days, then moving on inland for some more adventures. Good luck with finals, Stanford folks, love you family.

-C