Stari Kraj and Stranded in a Forest: Croatia Part 1

So, I got back from spring break a couple of days ago, and it was awesome. I've been putting off blogging about it, just because there's a lot to tell and it's sort of overwhelming. I think I'll split it up into two posts, so feel free to skim if my verbosity has lost its charm.

As planned, we (Kyle and I; we had planned to be traveling with two other girls but their plans changed at the last minute) left at dawn to take a bus to Sofia and then an airplane to Dortmund, Germany. I was stressing (typical) about my backpack weighing more than 10 kg, so I wore like four shirts on the plane and  left a lot of stuff here. Naturally, they never even weighed our backpacks. They just looked at them and let us on. The flight was uneventful and we got to Dortmund around 1 pm. Our flight to Zagreb was the next morning at about 9, so we had to find somewhere to stay for the night. Being generally unprepared, we took a bus into the center of town to look for a hotel that wasn't too expensive (we were pretty wary of being in a euro zone). We didn't even have a map, though, so we struggled with wandering around blindly for a while.

Kyle on the giant teeter-totter

While we couldn't find a hotel, we did find a giant seesaw. So we played on that for a little bit (in a completely inconspicuous way). Eventually we found a Starbucks and used their wireless internet (Kyle can use the internet on his iPod) to look up and book an inexpensive hotel by the airport. After that we wandered around the town some more (it's actually a really nice place to walk around). We got dinner at a pasta place where a local befriended us after overhearing us speaking English. He recommended a beer hall for us to go to have a real German beer, so we went there afterwards. We didn't stay that long, though, because we needed to take the bus/tram back to near the airport for our hotel.

Trg Bana Jelačića

The flight to Zagreb was similarly uneventful, although there were very few passengers so the stewardesses had to get everyone to "spread out" which prompted me to imagine the plane out of balance and crashing. My fears were unfounded, though, and everything was fine. We took a bus from the airport in Zagreb to the main bus station and from there we took a tram to the main square, Trg Bana Jelačića. Our hostel was located right off of the square on a street called Tkalčićeva (try saying that five times fast...or when asking for directions). Tkalčićeva is a pedestrian-only street lined with cafes and bars. We had some difficulty finding our hostel because I forgot to write down the house number (remember, generally unprepared). So we found an internet cafe and looked it up. It was located right on top of a cafe and was nice and cheap. We dropped our stuff off and got a restaurant recommendation from one of the employees and had a quick bite to eat.

Tkalčićeva Street

At five, two of my distant relatives, Vlado and Suzana, met us on our street. It's sort of hard to explain the exact connection, but here's an overview: My great-grandparents on my dad's side immigrated to the United States. My great-grandma, Ana, had a sister (Marija) who stayed in Croatia. So Suzana is one of Marija's descendants and Vlado is her husband. They took us to an ice cream place and were really nice. Vlado speaks relatively good English, but Suzana doesn't speak that well so she spoke in Croatian to me while Vlado talked to Kyle in English. I could understand most of what Suzana said, but she spoke so fast that at times I would get lost. After the ice cream, they took us on a walk around the city and we got to see some of the sights at night, like the national theater and trg Bana Jelačića. When we got back there (trg is the Croatian word equivalent of plaza in Spanish), there was a political protest starting. Suzana and Vlado left, but we stayed and watched for a few minutes, until more and more police cars started to surround it. Then we headed back to the hostel. One of the workers there recommended a bar with live jazz music and it was a considerable walk away, but we decided to make the trek and it was definitely worth it.

The Cathedral

The next morning, we met Vlado at the main square at 10 am for him to give us a tour of the old part of the city. It was kind of cold out (Zagreb was uncharacteristically cold the two days we were there), but it wasn't unbearable. He took us to the Cathedral of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which was absolutely breathtaking. Also, it was the first Catholic church that I've been in since I've been abroad, and I almost got choked up when I first walked in because it made me realize how much I miss it. I knew before I came here that Bulgaria has a very small number of Catholics and that there's no Catholic church in my city, but until I went to Croatia I didn't realize how much I really want to be able to go to mass. I'm sure those feelings will only intensify around Easter.

Anyways, sorry for the tangent (to those of you that have read this far; congrats parents and grandparents). After the Cathedral we walked past the Dolac, a big open-air market. We stopped for a coffee before continuing on to the Sabor (House of Parliament), St. Mark's Church, and the Lotrščak tower where they fire a canon every day at noon (we missed it, though). After that we walked down through the lower part of the city to Vlado's car. He took us to Suzana's mother's house in the outskirts of Zagreb. Her name is Marija and she had prepared an enormous multi-course lunch for us. She and her husband spoke no English, so I talked to them in Croatian while Vlado talked to Kyle in English (and occasionally rapidly switched over to Croatian to talk to us, leaving Kyle with no conversation partner, a situation he mitigated by eating continuously).

Saint Mark's Church

When I first walked in, Marija started talking about how much I resembled her (in my forehead/brow and eyes). She dug out an old picture of her when she was 21 and gave it to me to keep. The picture looks a lot like pictures of my aunt Cookie when she was younger, but it does sort of look like me (mostly in the eyes, like she said). She also showed me pictures that she had of my grandparents' wedding, my grandpa when he was a little boy, my dad and his sisters when they were little, and pictures of her side of the family. The coolest thing was an envelope from a letter that my great-grandma Ana had sent her sister in Croatia (Marija's grandma) around 1960. It was from the address where my grandpa grew up in Illinois and it had my family's old last name, Umiljenović. She gave me a photocopy of it to bring back with me.

Marija and me

The meal was delicious and although it was stressful to have to talk in Croatian the whole time, I think I did an ok job both with understanding and being understood. It was certainly good practice. The best part was getting to meet Marija, though. She was so sweet and so happy to meet me. It was neat to get to talk to her about Lika (the region in Croatia where my great-grandparents were from) and what it was like there. She gave us chocolates and homemade šljivovica (plum brandy) to take with us. After we left, we went with Vlado to his house, where we saw Suzana again and got to meet their two kids, Iva and Marko. Iva is eleven and she was sort of shy at first, but later when everyone else wasn't paying attention she talked to me in English. She was really sweet and excited to have us around. Marko is around 3 and he was really entertaining. He kept wiping his mouth on his sleeves and Suzana changed his shirt at least once while we were there. He also really liked cars and trains and would frequently shout about them. He tried to get Kyle to read him some story books in Croatian, which was amusing.

Afterwards they dropped us back off at our hostel. The next morning we thought we would be in Zadar by nightfall (we eliminated Pula from our travel plans because it was sort of out of the way and it would have added a lot of travel time). We planned to take a bus from Zagreb to Plitvice Lakes, a national park about halfway between Zagreb and Zadar, and to spend part of the day there before continuing on to Zadar. Plitvice Lakes is supposed to be absolutely beautiful and many people had recommended it to me as a "can't miss."

This is what we thought it would look like:

...and....

This is what it looked like when we got off of the bus:

There wasn't an actual bus station, just a little shelter. We had all of our stuff with us, but we decided to walk to the entrance of the park. We discovered that the park was closed, no one was working in the information center, and it appeared that no one was anywhere within miles, save for the three asian tourists who had also gotten off of our bus. There were several restaurants and hotels that were all closed. There was a bus schedule taped to the window at the information center that said that the next bus for Zadar left at 10:50. At this point, it was only a little after 10, but we decided to go back and wait for it because 1) the next bus wasn't until much later in the day and we didn't want to miss it, and 2) it was really miserably cold and neither Kyle nor I wanted to try to see the lakes in that weather. So we parted ways with our South Korean friends and headed back to the bus shack.

Kyle annoyed that I made him get
 off of the bus in a tundra

We sat there with all of our stuff for a long time waiting for the bus to come. It was freezing cold (which neither of us was adequately dressed for), but at least we were out of the snow. Across the street, two women with luggage came and sat in the shelter (for buses going to Zagreb, not Zadar). Since at that point it was after 10:50, I crossed the street to ask them if they knew anything about our bus. They didn't, but they did say that they had come from a hotel a couple hundred meters down the road. Around 11:15, Kyle and I were freezing from being outside for an hour and half, so we gave up on the bus and walked down the street to try to find the hotel. While on our way, the bus to Zadar passed us but didn't stop because we weren't waiting at the shelter. Incredibly disillusioned, we did find the hotel further down the road. We were just so happy to be out of the cold. We asked the concierge for a bus schedule and found out that the next bus to Zadar was at 1:50. So we sat in the hotel bar and had cappuchinos.

The bus shack at Plitvice

The hotel was actually really nice (we clearly looked like bag ladies who would not have been able to afford a night there). So we just killed time with our coffee and enjoyed not being in the snow until around 1:20. We got all of our stuff together again and left for the sojourn from the hotel back to the bus shelter. Around 1:35, when we were around halfway back, the 1:50 bus to Zadar passed us on the road. Kyle started running and chasing after it in desperation, but it was to no avail. We sat in the bus shelter for about half an hour in case another bus came, but finally at 2:15 we decided to go back to the fancy hotel.

We asked the concierge for help again. Since that was the last bus to Zadar, we knew that we had to either rent a car to drive to Zadar or skip Zadar and go to Split (Split is a bigger city, so more buses go there). Our favorite concierge told us that no rental car companies operate in Plitvice, but he tried to call a friend of his to drive us. His friend wanted to charge us $240, though, so we declined. So, we decided to just continue on to Split instead. We caught a 4:30 bus to Split (and this time we were waiting at the bus stop well in advance).

If this last part has sounded unfortunate, it was; but at the same time, even a misadventure is still an adventure deep down. Stay tuned next time for the rest of my spring break tales, set in two of the most beautiful cities I've ever seen: Split and Dubrovnik.

Oh, and about the title: "stari kraj" (pronounced sort of like "starry cry", but with the "r" sounding almost like a "d") means "old country" in Croatian and is something my grandpa says. Meeting the relatives and traveling through Lika (where Plitvice Lakes are, sort of) was my first ever exploration of the old country.

Sneak preview of next time: