Saturday, January 14, 2023
Zagreb, October 2022
Robb and I made it back from Sarajevo to Zagreb for his conference.
The first exciting event happened during our short walk from Glavni kolodvor to the hotel. Some fancy car crashed into a tram and caught on fire. The traffic was congested for hours, but luckily we decided to walk and avoided sitting in a taxi for who knows how long!
The hotel was right by the main downtown walking area, at Trg zrtava fasizma, so we could easily hop out for a walk, dinner or a drink. One evening we enjoyed a particularly nice dinner at an old restaurant 'Stari fijaker' where the waiter was so surprised that I was visiting after 30 years of being out of country and introducing my husband to the old homeland ('ajme, Isuse!') that he gave us a special treatment in general, including visnjevac on the house (the sour cherry drink). Sarma and venison goulash would have been a treat on their own, but our waiter went out of his way to make us feel at home and nearly brought me to tears.
Sitting in outdoor cafes reminded us of Prague - there is something special about sipping the local beer outside. It works best at that location, at that climate. Try to have the same beer elsewhere, and it doesn't have quite the same effect. Anyway, we did enjoy Ozujsko pivo here in Zagreb plenty of times, watching people walk by. Out in the streets I couldn't help noticing a large number of buildings having their facades fixed. That's a perk of joining EU, the extra money your get to beautify the cities. The main cathedral was under repair, too, this due to the damage caused by a recent earthquake. On the other hand, store prices were higher than in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the produce and cheese were mass-produced EU-style, not nearly as flavorful as in BH.
I made sure we met with Dubravko, my old friend and later the founder of Alvesta, the first company I worked at after graduation. We met his wife Sandra, too, and had an entertaining, funny, interesting dinner with the two of them (it can never be NOT enertaining and interesting when meeting Dubravko!) The next day we visited Dubravnko at his work. I knew he was a professor at FER (electrical engineering department of the University of Zagreb), but I didn't expect that he would have changed areas from laser diodes to space research so that now he overlapped with Robb's area. The two of them hit it off and bounced some research ideas back and forth. We met his current and former graduate students and briefly visited the location of his new startup. Dubravko's former student who is now faculty at FER joined Robb and me at the closing dinner at the conference. As we were chatting about switching dialects and vocabulary while growing up - for me when I traveled from Sarajevo to Mostar to visit my grandparents, and then to the seaside to the summer house where I used to hang out with the local kids - as I mentioned shugaman (our version of the asciugamano in Italian) and pastasciutta (another adopted Italian word for a pasta dish), the Italian group at our table turned their eyes to me, "You speak Italian?" And then the fun conversation really began!
What a great trip... wish it were longer!
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