Sorry about the delay. I lack the money to develop my film. But that shall soon be remedied, and you shall all pay! Wa ha ha.

The Streets of Zagreb

Most of my stay in Zagreb was spent wandering up and down the streets of the downtown. The thing I love the most about Zagreb was how pedestrian friendly the entire place was. No one drove cars anywhere downtown unless they were police officers or a taxi driver. The few straggling cars puttering around were totally at the mercy of the pedestrian traffic, creeping along at a few miles an hour. The picture in the upper right connects two of the larger streets lined by shops and cafes. The really cool thing about the small streets is that all the ivy, stonework, and stairs are fairly typical. The main streets are similarly paved, but they tend not to have as many steps, and they are lined with cafes where we sat and drank Ozuijsko (a really good beer brewed in Zagreb - it's competitor is Karlovachko) and cappucinos roughly once per hour. The primary means of entertainment in Zagreb appears to be sitting at cafes all day or spray painting graffiti all over everything at night. the graffitti is visible in both the narrow streets shots. The predominantly orange streets on the left is right by the twenty four hour bakery where my mom and I bought numerous rolls stuffed with various things such as cheese, jelly, chocolate, apple, and hot dogs. That street empties out at the spot on the bottom right. What you don't see on the bottom right is that just a little behind me was the pizzeria where we ate the most psychotically enormous pizza I have ever seen in my life. That pizza put New York pizzas to shame in terms of size, running in somewhere around thirty inches across. That's the one neat thing about buying pizza in Croatia - even if you order pizza for one they bring you a pizza almost as far across as a Papa John's large pizza. The final picture, the picture of the statue in the market on the bottom left is the market that contains all of the local crafts, crafts that intermingle insididiously with souveniers. And man, talk about high pressure sales tactics. The dudes who run the stand literally try to shove things into your hands, saying "and you'll buy this too." One guy actually seemed to be trying to slip a belt through our companion Doug's belt loops. However, that being said, I found lots of neat stuff in that market, and any trip needs its souvenier shopping stops, and that one turned out to be quite productive.
That's all for today. Tune in next time for shots of the incredible cathedral that is one of the big tourist draws of Zagreb. Its hundreds of years old and hundreds of feet tall, the kind of building people started working on when they were young and died before it was completed.

The Cafe Outside Hotel Dubrovnik

Our first Croatian stop was in Zagreb, where we stayed at the outstanding Hotel Dubrovnik. Outside the hotel, there was this rocking little cafe with purple umbrellas in the street where I sat every day I stayed at the hotel to drink cappucinos after failing to successfully describe an American cup of coffee. To the side of the hotel, this homeless alcoholic sat all day with his acoustic guitar and a brown bagged bottle singing American songs. The most interesting part was that he had an excellent voice, but either his accent was too thick or he didn't know the words well enough, but he just could not pronounce the lyrics to the songs. I feel kind of bad, because I always meant to give the fella some change, but every time someone gave him change, he would buy a bottle of something or other and slam it down in front of everybody. The smaller picture is a picture of my mother at the cafe on the last day we stayed at the hotel. The waiter thought we were cazy because we ordered three cappucinos apiece.

Welcome!!! + !!!

So. It's come to this. I've been forced to create a blog with a little intelligence to it. Damn you intelligence, my old nemisis. So...this blog will contain pictures, commentary, and descriptions of various endeavors of mine, starting with my journey to Croatia. When I run out of things to say about Croatia, I will either look up more things about Croatia or write about some place or something else. You will have no say over what this stuff might be, so don't you dare try to force your dogma on this page. Wa ha ha ha. Ahem.