After our late night check in, we were not super settled while sleeping in a new place. There was some oscillating drone all night, the temperature was too cold/too hot, the pillow was too thick and were were woken early because the blind were really thin. Once we got up and had our wits about us, we realized the droning was the refrigerator vibrating. We figured out the right air conditioner temperature setting to be comfortable. We found thinner pillows in one of the cabinets. Later in the afternoon, after looking at the neighborhood buildings from the outside, we came back and found there are roll-down shutters that can be operated from inside. All things that a new place/new country/new culture introduces, but can be frustrating in the moment.
Here is our place from the outside...
...and typical street view...
...interesting architecture.
Intentionally, we chose to switch from hotels to furnished apartments in Croatia to have a kitchen the we could cook meals in. This is primarily due to the higher costs here, but now also because eating out seems to not be a part of the culture (at least where we’re at in Zagreb).
We finally found an open restaurant at ~10:30a and had these for breakfast...
The burgers were gigantic and only ~$5/ea, so we reconsidered what “expensive” may have meant in what we’d read.
After eating what we could of the burgers, we went to a small grocery near the apartment to get some supplies. We bought a couple items but there was a limited selection, so we decided to find a larger supermarket for real shopping.
While we were out we also needed to find a telecom store to get a new SIM card, hopefully with international call minutes this time. This proves frustrating, as several stores didn’t carry SIM cards that worked in U.S. phones, and those that did provided no international minutes in their prepaid plans. Tammy thought she’d read a blog with what we’d wanted (but we couldn’t access away from WiFi) so we decided to do some more research and shelves this for now.
We found a Spar store near the telecom stores, so did our real shopping there. Groceries stores are one of Tammy’s favorite places to explore while in a new place. We bought enough for the rest of our time in Zagreb for ~$20. The one stumbling point we encountered was the pricing for fruit. We had seen a similar process in Iceland, where it was expected that the produce would be weighed/priced by the customer when it was picked out. We could not figure out the way Croatia coded produce though and were clearly struggling, so Tammy asked a local to help, which she happily did. She showed us what to look for and how to get our fruit priced...people are nice :-). Here are a couple of our grocery items:
Delicious steak
Shelf stable milk
Granola (oddly, this was the most expensive item in the cart...more than the steak)
With our food supply addressed, we headed back to research the SIM card, do some trip planning and catch up on a little writing.
Tammy looked back at the blog and realized that it wasn’t international calling that was mentioned, so no clues there. Rethinking why we really wanted to call internationally, it really was to deal with some of our flight cancellations with Alaska Airlines. Tammy found that she could use the new reservations chat feature to get the changes we needed done. We cancelled our original flight home from Portugal 😢 and got all the various flight segments credited back to our account - yay.
Since we were in the room and deep into internet navigation, we decided to work through some more trip planning. It feels like we’ve said this many times over the last month, but it is a necessary evil for choosing to have a more spontaneous trip that was decided at the last minute. Mostly this process has been exciting and low impact, but for some reason today’s work created more drama for us. We needed a rental car, but to decide how long and whether we would drop it off in another town, we needed to outline the rest of our itinerary. This lead to choices about seeing which towns for how long, whether we would go island hopping in the Dalmations, what was on the various islands to see, how to navigate the border with Bosnia and Montenegro and more. A couple hours later we were both aggravated and snappy...and hadn’t rented a car yet.
Reset.
Tammy made some mushroom soup while Don went through rental pricing scenarios based on our draft itinerary. A car was finally picked and we were pretty excited about what the next three weeks would entail.
It was getting late, so we opted to have our one dinner out while in Zagreb and got back on the streets. Like the previous evening, the weather was starting to look moody as we walked (it was full-on angry when we got here the night before). We went several directions but legitimately struggled to find a restaurant. We did get these neat images while looking though:
We finally found a fancy street food restaurant and had shrimp tacos and spare ribs, with gin and tonic cocktails, with a tonic that we’d had in Dublin but couldn’t find again - yum!
We wouldn‘t say the atmosphere was great, nor the server friendly, but the food was good and we had a good time nonetheless. As we stepped outside to walk back, the weather’s mood got worse and it rained pretty hard our whole way to the apartment. Once we got in the apartment and warmed up, we made all the adjustments we learned earlier and hoped for a good night’s sleep. 💤
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