It's a wanderful life, so it is

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the most important rule of travel is to acclimatise to the local conditions for the time of year. The weather won’t change to suit us so we’ll just need to adapt to it. Even if that means…putting ice in our cider! 😱 I know, it’s a shock for us, too. When we were regulars in the Polworth Tavern, the bar staff used to set warm bottles aside especially for us. Now, thanks to the 35°+ heat, we’re diluting our drinks with frozen water! 😂

On our two hour drive through to Zagreb, we stopped off at Dubovac Castle, where we learned about some boyo from Westmeath named Laval Nugent, born in 1777 and who joined the Hapsburg army at the age of 12 . It seems he had a remarkble life and won the coolest sounding honour but then it turns out his da had been a Count and the Governor of Prague which made it another case of not so much who you are but who your relations are.

Arriving in Zagreb, we’d wondered why there was scaffolding covering so many buildings. The answer lies in one of those events that happened during Covid but never made into our news cycle – a series of earthquakes that hit Zagreb in 2020 and damaged a lot of its buildings. 

At the main cathedral, for instance, the shocks were so severe the tops of the towers crashed to the ground and are still being repaired. Some of the museums remain shut but plenty of them are open and they clearly love a museum here. There’s the Tortureum that claims you can try out 70 of its exhibits, although I’m not sure whether you pay to be the operator or the victim. There’s the 80’s museum – those of us that remember the fashions know this offers a different level of torture altogether. There’s even a mushroom museum because, well, mushrooms. 

Then there are the museums that invite exhibition entries from individuals across the world, such as the Museum of Hangovers and the cheerfully named Museum of Broken Relationships. We skipped them all this time round and hopefully won’t be donating anything to that last one at anytime in our future!

There’s so much to see in the older part of town or the “Upper Town” as it’s known. Like any self-respecting capital, it fires a daily gun, which goes off at noon, an hour earlier than Edinburgh but it still makes a helluva racket!
Apart from using iced cider to cool down in these narrow streets, there is a tunnel that runs under part of the city that’s both a shortcut and a very welcome escape from the heat.
And dotted around the city, there is a more sobering reminder of European history in the “Stolpersteine”, literally stumbling stones, reminders of the victims of Nazi terror.
Every square inch tells a story and it feels like a rich, local mosiac, evolving over a thousand years, with each piece squeezed in to anywhere it can make a space.

By comparison, the “Lower Town” has much more breathing room and clearly a planner’s eye, with the tree-lined boulevards of the Austro-Hungarian empire and its majestic buildings. Even some new hipster areas that these oldies enjoyed gatecrashing! 😎 🤏