Tomorrow morning we’re heading out of here bright and early at 8AM to hop a train to Pécs, Hungary, yet another checkmark on a list of my attempts to see as many UNESCO World Heritage sites as possible (we’ve seen 3 so far on this trip: the old city of Dubrovnik in Croatia, the city of Kotor in Montenegro, and the city of Mostar in Bosnia.)
Anyway, so because we’re leaving early, and because we’ve done the pack-and-scramble thing twice now (when leaving Dubrovnik, because I forgot it was Sunday, and when leaving Montenegro, because we accidentally fell asleep the night before) and it’s really not all that much fun, I really should be packing right now. But darn it, I’m comfortable here! So because I’m lazy, here’s today’s post.
Today we got up… well, kind of late. I’d wanted to be out of here at 9, and we didn’t actually get out of bed until 10. We both kind of stayed up until 4:30 (I was working on trip planning and the blog post, John was reading) and it was already starting to get light when we went to bed (I HATE it when that happens) so neither of us was in the mood to leave early. Oh well. Vacations are about relaxing, right?
So we got up, had a leisurely breakfast of bread and honey and yogurt (sold in 1 liter bottles here), and headed downtown to go museuming. Unlike yesterday (when we read “14″ on a tram and somehow both read it as “4″, and it ended up taking us an hour and two different trams to get where we needed to be) it took us only about 15 minutes to get downtown. We had intended to head to the Natural History Museum, but got sidetracked by the Zagreb City Museum (sidetracked=”this looks interesting and it’s on the way — let’s go in here!) and I’m so glad we did. Like the archaeological museum, it wasn’t huge, but it was VERY VERY well-displayed (even if there was an unfortunately small number of English translations of things — audioguides, folks, they’re the wave of the future!)
They forgot to reset this sundial for daylight savings time.
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A lion that used to be at the entrance to the Zagreb Cathedral. Neither John nor I thought he was particularly scary. I believe my comment was something along the lines of, "Dude needs to pay a visit to the Wizard."
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Take a look at the picture below, and take a guess which picture is the cathedral before being demolished by the 1885 earthquake, and which picture is the cathedral after the earthquake (well, and subsequent remodeling.)
If you guessed "the left one", you win... something. I think I have a piece of Tupperware I can give you.
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Here’s a frog that used to be on the old cathedral. I mean the new cathedral. I mean the old one that was renovated in 1885, when they added the frog, and it became old and so they removed it when they started doing restoration in the 21st century.
They say you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince...
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After the City Museum, we went to the Natural History Museum, but that was so tiny and depressing that I didn’t even take pictures. It’s not a *bad* museum, it’s just incredibly incredibly outdated. And I’m not talking Smithsonian Air and Space Museum outdated either, with its 1980s exhibit on the personal computers of the future (anyone know if they’ve gotten rid of that? It was still up when I was there in November 2008.) I’m talking display cases that were built sometime in the late 1700s/early 1800s and haven’t been moved or dusted since. Motheaten stuffed animals (as in, dead and stuffed, not the cutesy plush kind.) Virtually no displays that explain to the viewer (in any language) how what they’re seeing all ties together… just dead, stuffed animals, and signs in Croatian, Latin, and English as to what they are. I will concur that they had some interesting specimens, and for the most part, their dead animal collection (which, I kid you not, mostly dates back to the late 1700s/early-to-mid 1800s) is in better shape than the one in the Smithsonian Natural History museum. But still… yeah. Needs a lot of work. And note to the museum — an entire litter of dead, stuffed tiger cubs so small that their eyes weren’t even open yet? Depressing, even if they were killed in 1812.
After that museum, we wandered around for a bit.
Skyline of part of the upper part of the city. The two spires in the background are the deceptively-young Gothic Zagreb Cathedral.
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St. Mark's Church, built in the mid-to-late 1800s. The crests on the roof are for the city of Zagreb and for the Kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia (Slovenia), and Dalmatia (which is now Croatia.)
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Since it was hot out, John and I went in search of air conditioning and something sweet to eat. We found a nice little bakery/sweetshop that had a line out the door. We figured that was a good sign, so we ordered.
Here's my cake...
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...and here's John's caramel sundae. I wish I had his metabolism.
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Ban Josip Jelacic Square, the main square in Zagreb. That's the ban (governor) on the horse on the left.
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And since I for some reason like to do short videos of my surroundings (in case you haven’t noticed!) here’s one of Ban Josip Jelacic Square. Ignore John talking about random stuff in the background — he tries to videobomb every video I take. :-p
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Where we are now:
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