Beep, beep, beep
“Huh?” “What?” “What’s happening?” “Oh it’s my phone and also an unnatural time for either time zone that I’m used to. It’s midnight for me at home. Ughhh.” Can you tell that I’m such a morning person? Anyone who knows me well can attest to that fact. My mother practically jumps out of bed, somehow already ready for the day. “We’re going to Plitvice National Park today!” She exclaimed excitedly. How does she do that? After a quick breakfast and a short walk over to the meeting point, waiting for our bus to arrive.
Soon, the minivan showed up, and we were headed off to the park. Our group was small - 8 in total. We took a tour through Viatour. The tour was around $250 total, and I was nervous to see if the tour was worth the price.
As we all piled into the vehicle we were told that it would be around a 3 hour drive out to the park. Three hours?! How are we going to pass all of that time. Our guide started a story with, “Let me tell you a little bit about the history of Croatia.” And with that, we passed the three hour driving time quickly.
From what I can remember the history went roughly something like this:
The History of Croatia According to Our Guide Note: please excuse biases, glossing over of terrible tragedies, and any errors. This is the history as far as I can accurately recall from our guide. Take this all with a grain of salt. If you would like a comprehensive history of Croatia check out this book. I am currently working my way through it; it's very well written. Lots of people live here. Byzantine empire take over! Bye-bye, hello Romans. Bye-bye Romans. Lots of groups of people joining together and separating, with Croatia staying mostly with Austria (because of the Hapsburg Empire). They don’t want to be part of the Ottoman Empire. Enter World War I. Side? Austro-Hungarian Empire. Lose the war. Groups of people join together, name Croatia and Serbia. What? Greater Serbia, we didn’t sign up for this! Croatia joins with Germany because they both lost the war. They’re both bummed about it. Break out of World War II. The Croatians don’t like who they joined up with - Serbia. Nazis come to take over Croatia and the Croatians see this as a time to use the Nazis to free themselves from greater Serbia. Looks like they joined up with the Nazis. Hmmm… Insert war crimes. WWII ends. Power vacuum? Tito is here to solve that. A good-bad country emerges: Yugoslavia. Good points about the country: stable economy, people are working and living generally good lives, on average, as long as you like Tito and Yugoslavia. Bad points: don’t like it? You’re in prison or dead. It’s also a dictatorship. Tito dies and a power vacuum emerges. Lots of fighting over who will run Yugoslavia. Another war. Croatia, as we know it today, is born. Ta-da! You’re welcome - it’s very difficult to find a history of Croatia in English. Trust me, I’ve tried. “We’re here,” our guide says. “We’re here?” We all ask. “Yes,” he answers.
We wait for our guide to get our tickets all ready, and we head into the park. By some miracle, there wasn’t a line to get into the park. Our guide told us that it is typical to wait for nearly two hours to get a ticket just to enter the park. According to our guide, next year the park will only be letting in timed entries into the park so that there won’t be crowds inside the park. If you’re thinking about going in the future, keep this in mind!
As soon as we got in the beautiful sights greeted us.
The entire park was jaw-droppingly beautiful. There are 16 terraced lakes and there are waterfalls everywhere. The entire park is a 13km loop that you can walk around quite easily.
“Ummm, can we go swimming?” I ask our guide, as beads of sweat start to form on my forehead. “No,” he explained, “this would disturb the ecological balance of the park. You can go swimming in Krka National Park. It’s very similar to here.” “So, how many tourists accidentally ‘fall’ into the water?” I asked. Our guide chuckled and said, “I wouldn’t advise it.” He clearly knew what I had on my mind. I started to look forward to visiting Krka on our tour, coming up shortly. For now, I’d have to put up with the heat, and day dream about going into the water. We slowly walked around the park taking in the views.
After our tour was over we headed back into Zagreb, went for dinner, and happened upon one of the best ice cream places that I’ve ever been to. Yes, one of the best. If you are ever in Zagreb, check out Vincek for ice cream. The ice cream had the most intense chocolate orange flavour that I’ve ever had. It tasted like a Terry’s Chocolate Orange.
I skipped through the streets of Zagreb, excited that the next day we would be leaving to go to Dubrovnik.
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-Ding dong- “Can you get that?” My mother shouted as she tried for the last time to open and close her suitcase, packing another forgotten item. We were getting ready to leave for our trip to Croatia, or Hrvatska as it's known in Croatian. Don't ask me how you get the word Croatia from Hrvatska. I never did find the answer to that question. “Hey Nancy,” I say, opening the door. “Nance is here!” I scream to my mother. “Oh goodie! Our t-shirts arrived,” she yelled down the hall, running to greet Nance. “Ohhhh!” Another exclamation arose from my mother’s throat. Our cousin had made us all matching t-shirts. Our extended family is represented on the t-shirt and Polish designs are placed in the background. We had excitedly decided to wear matching shirts during our trip. My mother held up two matching shirts, except one was much larger than the other. “Which do you want?” She asked before taking a good look at them. I used my quick reaction to choose the smaller shirt. “This one!” I said, sashaying down the hallway with my new shirt. “Wait, this one is giant!” My mother asked, looking at Nancy incredulously. “Why is it so giant?!” “You said you wanted 42 inches!” My cousin retorted. “I think this is 42 across each way. I meant 42 allllll the way around,” my mother refuted. After a moment, a smile crossed her lips, “But they are so cute!” She gushed. And off we were to the airport to catch our flight. As soon as we boarded the flight we heard the elusive announcement, “Once the airplane is in the air and the captain has turned the seatbelt sign off, you are free to chance seats. We have undersold the flight. Enjoy.” These magical words have only sparsely been heard around the magical kingdom of travellers. As soon as the captain turned off the seatbelt sign I darted off to the free row of three chairs. I sat in the middle and slowly spread out over the entire row, feeling less and less guilty as the time went on. To be fair, other people had rows and extra chairs to themselves as well, but not so many were lucky to have a row of three to themselves. My mother had two chairs to herself, close to the window. She decided that she needed to defend her territory at any cost, so she found extra blankets and fashioned herself some armour to scare off scavengers. So with a row of three do you think I was able to sleep on the plane? Nope! It turns out that I cannot sleep on planes. Ugh, well good thing I brought a face mask. Last 40 minutes of the flight I popped on my face mask and made my skin look refreshed for the next day, despite only having had slept for one hour. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have begun our descent into Zagreb International Airport…” And just like that, I stopped listening and started planning what we would do once we landed. Oh, look it’s the Air B&B. Oh look, there’s the bed. My head hit the pillow and bam, I was asleep. Two hours later my cousin knocked on the door, “Ready to head out?” Groggy, but feeling a bit better, we headed out to see the city. We headed off to see the Museum of Broken Relationships. This was a must see on both my mother’s and my must see list of Croatia. This sounded like such an interesting museum. There were objects that people had donated to the museum which told a story of their heartbreak. Some stories were cute. For example, there was a modem with the simple story of “We tried. Not comparable.” There were stories which broke our hearts reading, such as stories of rape. However, all of the stories told a truth about a loss of some kind. Each story told a truth about love and/or loss which most people could connect with. It was a very moving museum, and I would recommend it to anyone who is passing through Zagreb.
Towards the end of the museum visit, I noticed my mother squinting and droopy eyed. “Tired too, eh?” I asked her. “Mmmmugh,” she responded. I could tell that she was hungry, as we all were. We headed off for dinner. For our first night we chose a typical southern Croatian restaurant for seafood. While the different regions in Croatia have different types of cuisine, seafood seems to be on constant offer everywhere we visited. There is a Croatian saying: Fish should swim three times: once in the sea, once in wine (while cooking), and once in your stomach. It's safe to say that seafood is a way of life in Croatia. We feasted on tuna carpaccio, a large plate of calamari, a fish (sea bream), and black risotto with cuttlefish. After a delectable dinner, we started our long walk home, made longer by getting slightly lost. |