Chloe in Croatia 💛

20/6/22

I arrived at 18.20 after getting on the bus at 08.00. The bus ride was very pretty and thankfully had excellent WiFi that I could use for Netflix and blogging. Nevertheless, I was pretty pleased to be off the bus and finally in the right place, having stopped at various places on route including Split and Sibernek, the stop for the National Park. I got a taxi (oh I love Uber!) to the centre of town and met Chloe – eeeeeep! So lovely to see a home gal! I hadn’t been with a home friend since February when I met Nancy in Jordan! We got a drink and had a brief catch up before I ditched my bag at our Airbnb and we headed out for dinner! All the streets were filled with outdoor seating and everywhere was bustling with life. Zagreb is a beautiful city. After dinner, we headed back since Chloe had been up since 3am and I had barely slept the night before and was up at 6am!

21/6/22

Today Chloe was roadtripping to Slovenia. I had decided ahead of time not to join as it was quite expensive and I had the time to go and stay afterwards. Instead, I had a low key day of a lie-in, a breakfast in a cute cafe with an iced coffee and a cruffin and then navigated the buses to reach a local park with a lake in which people swam. It was fairly busy, especially with school kids who had finished school forever. They all had different coloured tops on depending on their class and of course they had all been signed by each other – when the tops were full, they signed each others arms and legs instead!! They were high on life and I enjoyed watching them muck about!

I sat by the lake, read my book and eventually went for a swim. After my swim, I went to the local park cafe and got an Aperol and watched the world go by. This was slightly less relaxing than it sounds as some of the school kids were setting off fireworks even though it was light. The dogs sitting in the cafe were not happy! Afterwards, I headed back into town on the bus to re-meet Chloe and her two day tripping pals, Monique and Munir for dinner.

We met in the main square and headed off, guided by Monica who had been in Zagreb for three days and had been on at least four tours! (She was solo travelling for the first time and liked the structure of all the tours, which was good for us as she knew about all the best places to go!). First we stopped by a truffle, cheese, hot sauce and liquours shop to get free samples. Bizarrely, the shop assistant was very happy to give out lots of free samples and she kept asking if we wanted more – what a shop! While we were in there, there were two Singaporean girls who wanted to try the 10/10 hot sauce. They said they eat the noodle from the hot noodle challenge for fun so we were interested to see how they managed. Impressively, they didn’t even break a sweat!! Then Munir, from Oman, decided to try it and he didn’t do quite so well! Afterwards, we asked the friendly shop assistant for food recommendations. She sent us down a longggg (and mildly claustrophobic) tunnel which was historically used to connect the two old towns and was since used as a bomb shelter before being revamped to a very civilised tunnel again. Once we finally made it out the other side, we arrived at a cute diner reminiscent of Prague to me!

Of course, Monique turned out to be a nurse (we’re everywhere), and Australian (they travel as much as us Brits!!), while Munir had spent the last ten years living out of Dubai. We talked about Dubai and I mentioned that I thought it has a double standard, one for westerners and another for its own UAE people, even more so for women. He disagreed, but also said that most people living in UAE are not from there, which may be true. Munir then spent forever trying to convince us that UAE women were free to live independently. While I obviously don’t know about these women’s lives, Chloe later told me that Munir has a wife and kids, and yet he is very regularly solo travelling and she never travels. Hmmmmm..! Monique talked about nursing in Australia and we exchanged our best nursing stories! After dinner, we said our goodbyes and headed home.

22/6/22

Today was our city day. Today we would roam around. We would roam very freely since it was a Bank Holiday and nearly every Croatian had headed for the beach! This meant that sadly the cute street market was closed, but that we had loads of space to move about without crashing into people!

First stop was brunch. I had looked for a cute place online and found a pink cafe called Melt. It did not disappoint. We got glorious breakfasts with a slightly sad coffee which I could overlook! After breakfast, we headed on the Horseshoe walk through Zagreb’s main green spaces, including a botanical garden which we ended up walking round the entirety of the outside before eventually finding the entrance! Then we got a refreshing drink in a fancyyyy bar before heading to a park.

After the park we got lunch (falafel) and then we started on the museum hype. There are dozens of museums in Zagreb and we picked just two to go to. Out of various art, history and other miscellaneous museums, we went to the Chocolate Museum followed by the Hangover Museum. The Chocolate museum talked about the discovery and globalisation of chocolate and importantly hadany tasters along the way. It also referenced Mr Cadbury many times which I was pleased about as an adopted Brummie! Maybe predictably, the Hangover Museum was filled with drunken stories fromessy nights out along with various objects relating to said stories including an alarming number of dolls’ legs!! After the museums we went back to chill out our Airbnb awhile.

We headed out to dinner an hour or so later and Chloe selected another fab restaurant. We ate glorious fish with €1.50 wine – fabulous before heading to sit in a nice square with a drink.