We left Slovenia today and headed toward Zagreb, Croatia, which was only about 1.5 hours away, but took us a little over 2 with the border crossing (they just aren’t all that quick). I know I’ve already said it a bunch, but packing up is HARD, getting into the car by 10 a.m. it felt like I had already accomplished a major feat.
Zagreb is a very “lived” in feeling city. It’s the capital, so it’s bustling…it’s a little grubbier, more in the “I’m not a tourist city, just a real city” type of way, but still very pretty in parts. Ljubjlana was handed to you on a silver plater of beauty, this city you have to try and find the beauty in between the gruff. Example; we walked down this small alley that had this super cool painted "red runner", which from the tiniest of distances it did actually look like a rug--the sides of that same alleyway were all graffiti. There was a lot of graffiti everywhere actually. Slovenia to be fair though, is a much wealthier country. than Croatia--and it's post-communism transition has been smoother. it's really quite pristine compared to Croatia overall.
It was murder to get into our apartment though. There was absolutely no street parking whatsoever, and what looked to be maybe parking had all kinds of weird signs/restrictions and I was way too freaked out to park in anything but a "real" lot because I’ve heard nightmare stories of cars getting towed and big ticket fines. I must have driven around the block 10 times and still found nothing. Finally Ava and Lucia went into the reception and figured out a place for us to park (we already knew the address we were parking at, but it had a gate that we couldn’t enter until we checked in—which we couldn’t do until we parked).
We then had to unload, and store our luggage for another hour until the apartment was ready. When it was finally ready we walked 4 blocks with all of our stuff to this apartment right off the center square that looked super sketchy from the outside but the actual apartment is really nice—a little hidden oasis smack in the middle of the city. Third floor, but this time WITH an elevator (which, as a side note, Romeo also currently has a fear of being trapped in an elevator...he won't go in them, least of all the super old kind with hand closed doors.)
We strolled around after getting settled for a moment and had great burgers at this organic, burger bar—it was fantastic. The only one that didn’t have a burger was Gia (she opted for one of her hotdogs wrapped in pastry puff from the bakery around corner). I find them disgusting to even look at, but she loves them, she’d eat them every day.
We visited the cathedral which is beautiful, and cruised thru street after street of restaurants and little shops. Everyone was dragging though, especially Romeo who is getting up too early and going to sleep too late. He’s grouchy. So much so that he lost use of his IPad tonight for being a general pain in the butt. The problem with having four kids is that they rarely ALL want to do the same thing at the same time. If you suggest we get something to drink and some tapas at a bar BEFORE going to dinner, than one of them wants dinner first. If that person wants Mexican, two others want burgers, and a fourth one wants steak. It’s all really just a matter of how much patience you can maintain to try and navigate them all in one direction. Mine was only moderate today.
We came upon a little city park with an activity area for kids where Gia was able to do that bungee jumping—actually, I'm no not quite sure what you call it, but they harness you in and they jump up and down really high. She had a blast of course. The park had the oddest art fixtures…they had giant hoop dresses hanging sporadically in the park, almost like umbrellas.
The kids are all excited to get on to Budapest and get more settled into the next apartment. They aren’t big on the bouncing around so much, I guess they think it’s a lot of work too. Budapest is one of the cities I’m most excited to spend time in too, can’t wait. I will conclude by saying that I'm pretty happy to have survived my first day without John--first day is always the worst, and then we'll settle into this new normal.
Signed, ME {lv}
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