Zagreb
Continuing my theme of expectations, when I arrived in Zagreb, I had precisely no idea what to expect. I hoped for a functioning transport system, full shelves in shops and not too many bullet holes in my dorm room. And these were reinforced by an extremely dodgy train ride from Budapest. They just kept selling tickets to the train, so it turned out to be impossibly over-crowded. I've been in trains where its so hard to find a quiet seat that some people just hang out in a corridor, but on this little puppy there were over twenty people in the corridor that we settled for, finding a cosy spot in the corner near the first class toilets, just far enough away to receive only infrequent wafts of urine. Aaah... this is living. After a few hours most of the bloody Hungarians got off and we scored a cabin. (We is Shona and Craig from Scotland, met in Budapest.) The second we crossed into the Croatian border town, though, a battalion of little old ladies hit the train and began to furiously clean the carriages, sweeping the floors and emptying the rubbish like their lives depended on it. You could almost hear them muttering "Damn disguisting Hungarians." We cheered them on appropriately. Then the passport check finished, the cleaning storm troopers departed and we were on our way again.

And then we arrived, and blow me down if Zagreb isn't beautiful. It wasn't significantly damaged in the demise of Yuogslavia (apart from one or two Presidential palaces that were bombed), and it was (apparently) always fairly affluent. Walking down the streets of Zagreb, you'd swear that you're in Italy -- high fashion parading past on beautiful people, gelaterias tempting you at every corner, excellent cafes serving espresso after espresso, even really rude and reluctant service! It was like I was back in Florence!

I was sharply pulled back into the Eastern bloc by the hostel we stayed in. A handful of old war refugees lived on my floor, including one guy who was getting around on two wooden legs. Strange living with those guys -- there are fewer things scarier than awakening at 7am, still groggy by the early hour, and stumbling into the toilet to discover a fat, hairy, old and basically nude Croat peeing in the sink. The rooms were shoeboxes and very noisy. The shower was awful, the reception staff seemed to be capable of communicating in English only with a "fuck off tourist" tone, but once again the place was scrubbed clean until the paint begain to wear off.

The Coast
I've left Zagreb now, and I'm on the Croatian coast. Spent a few days in Pula, right up the top near the border with Slovenia and Italy. The middle of town has a Roman ampitheatre, about the size of one-and-a-half football fields. Jamiroquai played there on Friday night, and he was excellent. They'd just picked up his normal show and put it on the middle of a 2000-year-old stage, but added some funky lighting effects on the walls of the amphitheatre. I was about twenty metres back, just off to one side. Excellent, excellent, excellent.

So now I'm just going to be a beach-bum for a week or two. Or more. In the week I've been in Croatia I've seen four clouds and the temperature hasn't dropped below 25 degrees, so it will be hard to leave. The guy who owns the internet cafe I'm using lives in Sydney for half the year and then comes over here for half the year. He never leaves summer, in other words. Right now, he's my idol.