I’m almost finally caught up on my blogging – I’m actually typing this while on the train leaving Zagreb! You should be getting a fresher impression of my experiences in the city again, instead of the slightly stale ones I’ve been delivering lately.
I’m not quite sure what it was that convinced me to go to Croatia. I think it was my old high school friend Alex Bohbot – we met at a party at some point, and he said that it was his very favourite place in Europe that most people never visited, definitely not to miss it. He’d been backpacking a few times – twice through Europe – so I valued his opinion. Apratim (remember him?) also mentioned having been there, and it sounded like a cool place. As I was planning May out, I found direct trains leading into and out of the place, so I figured I didn’t have much to lose by making a stop. I was nearby enough, and I don’t know that I’ll ever be this close again with this much time to spare. So why not?
Zagreb the city turned out to be kind of disappointing, actually. It doesn’t have what I like in a European city - big and majestic buildings and palaces. It wasn’t even as cheap as I expected (or hoped?) it to be, being in Eastern Europe. The journey, however, was not a waste. Even though the rain stubbornly followed me southwards and mostly kept me indoors or drenched, I had a good time and learned a lot of interesting things.
While on the train to Zagreb (a train which stopped at a red light for a while and ended up about 3 hours late – kind of a bitch for an already long 7 hour journey – oh, also, I had my passport checked five times at the Hungarian-Croatian border. Five times! And by five different people! They formed a line at the entrance to my cart! I’d give one my passport, they’d give it back, and I’d hand it right away to the next one. What’s the point??? Anyway, back to our story:) I met a Croatian University student, Christian. Actually, I met his friend too, but he chose to learn German in school instead of English, so I didn’t get to know him too well. His friend was particularly angry about something (amazing how you can still pick things up despite such a huge language barrier) and was flipping through pages and textbooks, circling and underlining things. Christian told me that they had both just failed an exam. I told them not to worry about it – people fail all the time, who cares? Don’t sweat it so much. Christian told me that the Prof had corrected 130 exams in half an hour, and that only 20 of the students had passed it. He said they had studied for two whole months for the exam.
“But there must be some higher authority you can appeal to, then! An ombudsman or something!” But we aren’t in North America. He told me that the education system is corrupt – about as corrupt as the education minister (and the government too, I surmised). I asked about tuition and he told me that the average tuition was about 6500 Kunas a year – at 7 Kunas to a Euro or 6 to a Dollar, this comes to about $1100. That’s pretty cheap I thought. I then asked about wages, and he told me that the average wages in Croatia ranged from 3000 to 5000 Kunas ($500 - $800) a year. Regardless of the exchange rate, you can’t possibly afford any tuition with salaries like these. It also explains why students are failed so blatantly since they’re then forced to pay tuition for another year.
I asked about exchange programs or leaving the country, and he said that only the elite students get such opportunities. I asked what he wanted to study, and he said that he hadn’t really given it much thought since he didn’t have much of a choice - unless you were among the very best in a subject, you might not get a place in that program and will get shuffled to one where there is room. At this point I’ve almost got tears in my eyes – even with a university degree, or working towards one, you’d think you’d at least be happy or working your way up in life, but from the sounds of it, you never manage to get out of debt, and you’re likely to drop out due to lack of interest or talent in whatever program you end up in. I think back to people like Julien (sorry to single you out buddy) who studied Business, Philosophy, Religion and Psychology before finally deciding on English and Theatre. Students like Christian don’t have the opportunity to jump around the programs like that, and they certainly don’t have the budget.
Christian did mention that the elementary and high school educations were very good, since most people didn’t pursue further educations - which reminds me – I asked him where he learned his English, school? He laughs, tells me he never paid much attention during high school, and that he learned most of his vocabulary on wikipedia, youtube, google… etc. I think that’s pretty phenomenal.
Right around this part of the conversation, a Jewish New Yorker named Anton joined our cart in the train. It turned out that he had a room booked in my hostel, and I spent most of the time with him and an Irish Aussie, Kieran, while in Zagreb, walking in the rain.
Christian seemed really glad to have met us. (“Every day for me is the same, you know? You are the third Americans I have met.”) Later in the night, in his semi-drunken stupor, Christian said to me, “you don’t understand how sad I am that I am in this country.” I have no idea how to respond to a statement like that. After all, his only ambition was to be a graphic tattoo artist, but since there were only two tattoo parlours in the city, he couldn’t land an apprenticeship. He couldn’t even study art in school or get any financial backing to open a third one if he wanted to. (There probably isn’t that high of a demand for a third tattoo parlour, anyhow.) He isn’t aiming that high on the food chain by North American standards, but I guess there’s no such thing as the “American Dream” in Croatia. He even showed me some of his drawings – he’s actually extremely talented, and it’s probably going to go to waste.
The whole experience was incredibly eye opening. I have to point out that Christian unwittingly gave me the impression that his family was in fact better off than most – he had a nicer phone than I’ve ever had, his brother owned a car, and he seemed less upset about failing his exam than his friend did. And still he had my heart sinking.
He might have been lying to me our whole time together, but I doubt it. It didn’t look like he was trying to garner sympathy or anything like that – he seemed very genuine. I’m not always necessarily the best judge of character, and in fact we’ve discussed that I’m very naive and trusting, but he never asked for anything and he didn’t screw me in any way. Quite on the contrary – he introduced me to his brother and friends in a bar next door to the hostel, and they all treated me and Anton to drinks all night: 
Let’s discuss Zagreb itself. Rainy. But how? So promising on the way there: 
Zagreb is in fact very small – the whole of the downtown area spans like 5 or 6 blocks. The closest thing to a beautiful European building is this one, by this random dragon statue:
This is the street that leads to the downtown area:
And here’s the biggest (read: only) square in Zagreb:
I have to point out that Zagreb is the capital and largest city of Croatia. It has a population of over 800 000 people – almost 1 million, definitely not negligible. Yet the downtown is pitifully small. I couldn’t even find a Croatia keychain to add to my collection. I’ve found some in Cuba and the Dominican Republic – it goes to show you the difference in priorities of a country.
Along our street we found an eternal fire:
I spent half a day walking around the Jarun lake. It was rainy and kinda crappy, but a nice walk. All of the clubs and bars are situated near this lake:
Oh yea, how can I forget to mention the most exciting thing that happened in Zagreb this weekend: 
Zagrebisms
Let’s start with food.
-A cheese Burek:
-Cevapi: 
-Horseburgers:
It was closed the whole time I was there!!! Man! I would have eaten horse in a heartbeat! (The people working at the hostel were sceptical that they actually served horse…) For the record, the country apparently shuts down on Sundays – no stores or anything are open. Except maybe grocery stores, and even then it was just barely.
-Every guy I met in Croatia is at least 6 feet tall. No joke.
-This one’s for the physicists and mathematicians:
-Some of the beers here had odd bottle caps:
-Snails!!!
-Turtles!!!
-A shrine - in the train station:
So there you go! Three days in Croatia!
Right now, I’m going to Vienna for about 24 hours (they’re having some kind of music festival) before taking an overnight train to Krakow the following day.
Technical Note: During the first month of my blogging this trip, you could click on any image and it would zoom into the picture in another window. I don’t know what I fiddled with – something to do with how I’ve started sizing the images – but I somehow turned off that feature as a default. I can turn it back on, but I have to do it for each and every image individually. On this netbook, doing this actually freezes the program a little and takes 15 seconds for each image, so I haven’t really being doing it. People have been asking for it, though, and train time is slow time (thinking of Shawshank - “prison time is slow time”) so as long as the battery isn’t dead I’ll make an effort to do it for you.
