Day 26 – Zagreb

This summery day started with a nice breakfast together with fellow travelers in the hostel’s garden. Sun was shining, it was already really warm and it would get warmer during the day.
I set off to explore the city and walked a while through residential area until reaching the center. Zagreb immediately amazed me. Without any prior expectations at all I found out that this capital is extremely lively and beautiful. Unlike the other Balkan capitals and even Athens, the whole Central is packed with beautiful old, impressive buildings in belle epoque -style, perfectly intact, colorful and spreading a very European aura.

Walking across the center, finding every corner more astonishing than the last one, I saw a sign saying “tunnel” which awoke my curiosity and followed it. After crossing a lovely green terrace of a cafe in a little patio park immediately next to the main square, I found myself inside a huge pedestrian tunnel system, originally from the second World War but newly reopened just in 2016.
Walking roughly in the direction of the upper town, I found a very good photography exposition, set up in one larger part of the tunnels.

After getting out basically one street ahead, I made my way up to the upper town. This part of Zagreb felt like a small intimate town inside the metropolis. A beautiful church marks it’s main square, houses have that typical Eastern European building style and there are almost no cars.

My destination in upper town was one of the few places I had been planning to visit since the beginning of my trip: the Museum of broken relationships. The different concept and original idea of this museum had made me very curious when I first read about it and different travelers on my way had additionally recommended it.
This museum exposes artifacts of broken relationships whose owners have decided to share them and the corresponding stories with the public. Funny, strange and sad items and stories of love relationships, family relationships and even relationships with own body parts, that ended by breakup, death or disease are displayed for the visitors to take part in; Items that their owners didn’t want to keep nor throw away. There is the piece of skin of an ex-boyfriend someone retained even after their breakup, the weeding dress of a woman whose husband died the day before the wedding, the last voice-recording of someone’s father before he passed away, the toaster someone stole from their ex’s apartment when they left just to bother them, the radio that had accompanied a girl during the war as the only source of information, the bra of a woman who had had a mastectomy, the pizza-mix of someone who had been diagnosed with food intolerance …

The exposition was – as expected – very intimate, funny, sad and somehow collectively personal. The book of visitors was full of comments with more stories, of couples who had come to visit together, of breakups, of fellow travelers that have also set off to travel the world to heal from their broken relationships. The museum is still accepting donations of items and their stories of people from all over the world and regularly tours around with the exhibition.

After getting out of the museum, I left upper town and made my way downwards through the city toward the botanical garden. I walked through endless streets full of cafes, smelling like flowers and strawberries from the countless stands selling these two products. I came by several theaters, art museums and palaces and through beautiful parks full of flowers, fountains and green. The botanical garden itself was probably the biggest I have ever been in and some plant-loving friends and family members of mine would have loved this huge terrain full of different plant species with their names on little signs, trees and greenhouses.

I settled down for lunch under a tree, enjoying the shade and birdsong.

Afterwards, I walked further south towards the National Library. My university had invited me a few weeks ago to give a class on the 2nd of May and I had been postponing the work ever since. The library wasn’t as nice though and the weather was too good to be inside so I walked all the way back and finally sat down in a café in the city, where I spent the rest of the afternoon working.

I came back to the hostel pretty late but with not even a quarter of my work done. Conversations with people in the hostel weren’t very relaxing either. I don’t know what happened, but after everyone was super cool and interesting in my first weeks, nice people are getting less frequent now and weird and annoying people are getting more (and it’s not my perception that changed!). Maybe because it’s Easter holiday, or because of my destinations? I don’t know, but if changing places every two days was sad before, now it’s mostly releasing.