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.