Never flying through Heathrow again.

After a relatively uneventful American Airlines flight to London, we were confronted with one of the worst transfer and security clusterfucks we've ever experienced. Getting from terminal 3 to terminal 5 required several vigorous sprints to suddenly intransigent massive queues. Busses weren't running directly from the terminal as advertised. So we walked, I swear, over a mile just to get to the stupid busses. Very little signage, and a lot of dumb guesses.

The only upside was a chance conversation in the terminal bus with a geriatric red-nosed man who chatted me up because I was wearing my "Slava Ukraini" shirt. Turns out he's an ethnic Hungarian who fought in the '56 uprising and went into exile in the US, where he's lived (in California and Oregon) since that time. When he mentioned he was going to visit Debrecen, I responded in Hungarian "Debrecenben voltam. Tanultam magyarul." He was blown away. So then I got my history nerd on, and we ended up encapsulating the history of Hungary in the 20th century with the obligatory nod to the truncating effects of the treaty of Trianon. Ah, sweet irredentism!

When we were boarding our Zagreb flight, I was so out of it, I was unwittingly whacking people sitting in the aisle with my neck pillow tied to my backpack. Steven said it looked like a scene out of the film Airplane.

Well, we're here now. We barely figured out our weird Spanish car rental. And now we're exploring Zagreb. I'm having a lot of emotional moments right now. Especially when we traced back the road to the apartment I lived in back in 1982.

When I first visited Zagreb in high school on the big Lawrence East European camping trip, I distinctly remember standing in front of this address, saying to myself "someday I'm going to live here." And five years later I did!

Right now some beer therapy.  Not sure how long we're going to make it today. We're both really wiped.

After a couple mugs and some burgers at Pivnica Medvedgrad in Ilica Street, we still felt up for a stroll.  We wandered down Ilica (the "Broadway" of Zagreb) to Cvjetni trg (Flower Square unofficially, Petar Preradović Square officially).  This is, duh, where the flower market sets up during the day.  Now some 35 years later, it's also the scene of several cafes and restaurants (I estimate around twelve).  Off on a side street, we found a cute little vinoteka (wine store) called Miva, where the owner recommended a couple of reds and gave us a terrific list of wines--both red and white--to look out for as we travel through the Zagorje, Slavonija, Dalmacija, and Istrija. A good cheap red, by the way, is Mali Plivac ("small swimmer").

We headed back to the apartment after that around 7:00pm. I know you're supposed to stay up as late as possible to get over jetlag, but I crashed immediately.  Steven, of course, stayed up until 2:00am, as per usual.  Arg.

Next post: A lot to catch up on... So, several posts all at once! [June 30, 2022]