Monday, October 29th, 2007
We woke up around 9 a.m. ready to explore a new city. Dermot was still a bit sore from his fall down the stairs the day before, but we were showered and on our way to breakfast by 10 a.m. We ordered some sort of bread product at a local bakery. The workers did not speak any English, so we used the point and hope method for choosing our food….we think we were pretty successful, and our breakfast costs about $3.
After breakfast we got on the tram and headed back towards the city center. From there we found the tourist office, bought our Zagreb card (free transport and other discounts) and then took a self-guided walking tour of Zagreb. We saw churches, monuments, farmers markets as we strolled through Zagreb. At around 1 p.m. we stopped for lunch at Ilica and Vita (the Croatian version of Hansel and Gretel). The restaurant was fancier than we anticipated, but the bill was very reasonable. We ended up being too full to have dessert (which is the reason why we went there).
We continued our tour, and we decided to take full advantage of our ‘transport’ ticket and take the sky tram up to “Tolkien’s House” for the best hot chocolate in all of europe… it was a very friendly pub, and a ridiculously thick hot, creamy hot chocolate.
We decided to end our night with more Croatian culture with seeing the comedic opera “The Barber of Seville.” We somehow got lucky with a sold out show to get 8th row tickets, for the ’student’ cost, thanks to our Zagreb Cards…. so only about $15/per ticket.
We left at intermission to make it back to our hostel for time to fold our laundry, access the web (to plan accommodation for Venice) and pack up our belongings to leave the next day.