Week 9 – Split & Zagreb (Croatia)

 Split:

·         A beautiful city at the edge of the Adriatic Sea.  We spent 7 nights there

·         Ana gave us a walking tour.  We were the only ones who showed on that Tuesday, so It was a private tour.  She’s an art historian who helped restore a 20-foot bronze statue in town  - she showed us pictures of the work and said they found a bottle of liquor inside, which the team drank, then left a new one behind for the next team to enjoy.

·         Split’s claim to fame is Diocletian, a Roman emperor, built a palace there in around 300 AD.  He rose up through the soldier ranks and is the only Roman emperor to retire (abdicate.)  Over the centuries the palace morphed into a dense village with no cars and narrow, semi-random alleys throughout.

·         I chatted with a guy named Declan standing outside a restaurant, who it turned out owned a local business with a virtual reality setup for how the palace looked in its prime.  We tried it out on Saturday.  There was a virtual guide (a slave of Diocletian’s), which was a nice touch instead of a sober documentary style.  He said the production cost 20,000 Euros a minute to create (it was 15 minutes long) and they opened at the start of Covid.  It made we wonder what other scenes I’d like to see on VR – Gettysburg battle?  Pompeii?  Roman Coliseum?.  Glacial Lake Missoula draining?

·         Ana said when she moved there from a nearby island in 2005 there were 4,000 people living in within the palace walls.  With short-term rentals moving in, there are only 100 left.

·         We took a boat tour to 3 islands.  One was a small town mostly shut down for the season, so we walked and Karen chatted with olive pickers by the side of the road, who explained there’s about a 10-day window to pick and they grab them all, regardless of color.  I tasted one and it was very bitter and unripe.  We met Joanna, who extended a business trip from Athens to enjoy the city a few days.  Another stop was the Blue Lagoon, where a few of us swam (the water was warmer than Maine in August.)

·         We took a bus tour to a national park with waterfalls, with Sandra as our guide.  Joanna changed her tour to ride with us and we hung out with her for most of it.  We also met Brady, from small-town Nevada, who leaves in 2 months for another Peace Corps tour in Ghana.  And Angelique from Germany.  We also hit a winery on the way home and tried 6 wines.  We bought a bottle and I hope we drink it all in Slovenia (not ideal for backpacking.)

·         Karen read 73% of solo travelers are female, which runs counter to the stereotype (at least in the US) of women bowling alone less often than men.

·         It was a relief to be there offseason - there was a cruise ship or two docked most days and we wouldn’t want more pedestrians than we saw in town.

·         Split’s busiest beach is in a cove with water the size of a baseball field and concrete all around the edge – no sandy beach or even gradual entry into the water.  Clearly there’s a lot of partying in the area during prime time.

·         Expensive meals with a foodie vibe at several but no exceptional dinners. 

Zagreb:

·         We didn’t give Zagreb a fair chance:  Our train got in on a rainy afternoon.  We walked to the hotel, around town for a couple of miles, grabbed dinner, and caught a 7:30 bus to Ljubljana the next morning.  Much more cosmopolitan than Split, with more aggressive drivers.

Misc:

·         I thought New England had a lot of rocky fields and walls per square mile but the I’m lucky I never had to push a plow in the Balkans.

·         Two or three of the guides in Eastern Europe have mentioned how you need connections to get a government job, such as teacher or cop.  Another form of the corruption, leftover from Commie days but maybe it predates that.  I remember my dad saying when he was training judges in Sarajevo they said based judgments on knowing someone instead of on the evidence (one of his goals was to change their approach.)

·         My guesses are Karen has taken about 3,000 pictures so far and I’ve taken 500.