PART TWO – SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO
The rest of my time in Zagreb was packed full of activities.
Between family dinners, games, more karaoke, more dancing, dropping V-Bombs, romantic breakfasts, climbing contraptions, going for walks, getting a haircut, scheming, drinking, flirting, fighting homophobia, staying up all night, writing, drinking smoothies, studying torture, and getting in fights with inanimate objects and losing, I managed to keep pretty busy.
On my third or fourth morning in Zagreb I had started ordering smoothies from the hostel bar for breakfast. After a couple of days of this I stopped however, because my new friend Holly started making smoothies for herself most mornings when she came down to start her shift and would always make enough to share. I also added another element to my breakfast regimen as my budding bromance with Vic had a large breakfast component to it where we started going out most mornings and having lovely meals together to start off our days, while most of the rest of the hostel was still sleeping. One time he didn’t have time for a sit down meal so he just ran out and bought himself a breakfast sandwich and a juice and returned with the same for me. So thoughtful.
In the afternoon of the day I extended my stay, I went out for a delicious lunch of štrukli (a tradional Croatian food with salty cheese baked in dough).
Holly and her work husband the aforementioned Cookie Fingers, invited me to go on a walk with them to one of Zagreb’s many parks. After a pretty decently lengthy walk, during which Holly kept insisting that the park was just around the corner, we finally arrived and strolled down the main walkway through the park until we came upon a very intriguing large metal structure upon a platform. There was only one thing to be done upon making this discovery. We climbed to the top. If they didn’t want us to climb it they shouldn’t have made it so easy and tempting.
That evening was pretty chill and mainly consisted of me destroying people at cards. It started with Cookie Fingers asking me if I wanted to play speed. After several games with a very high win percentage my next victim was Mic, and then Mic’s roommate Celine, whom I played against until she had to leave to go catch a midnight bus. Once I had exhausted the list of people willing to get humiliated playing speed, I talked with Hermione and an Algerian guy obsessed with his cat, who had been in Zagreb for over a month as a language teacher. We’ll call him Sméagol. After bragging to them about how good a cook I was, they told me that I needed to prove it, so I told them that the next night I would make them dinner.
The next morning I invited Mic, Holly, Cookie Fingers, Phil and my new roommate Gob to join Hermione, Sméagol, and me for a family dinner. After breakfast with Mic and a nice long conversation with Holly, I headed out with Cookie Fingers and Holly to check out the torture museum. If you ever need a pick me up and a renewed faith in humanity head to your nearest torture museum and check out the lovely contraptions that humans have created to brutally torture and often kill each other. It’s a real joy.
With our spirits at an all-time high we headed over to the grocery store so I could get the ingredients I needed to make dinner and so that they could get ingredients to make cookies for dessert. We then returned to the hostel and they began to prep the cookies while I hung out with them in the kitchen. After thoroughly washing his hands (I think), Cookie Fingers mixed the batter without a utensil and when it was all done his fingers were covered in cookie dough, which led to me asking him if I could lick them as one does a mixing spoon when its services are no longer necessary. He relented and I gave his fingers a good licking and then gave him his new name, which I will call him forever.
After they had finished prepping the batter I got to work on dinner. I made one of my favorite dishes a rice dish with chicken, onion, garlic, cheese, zucchini, tomato, and spices. It was a bit interesting cooking in the hostel as it is in any kitchen that is not fully stocked with the items I am used to using, and the pot I used for cooking the rice was far too small for my needs but I made it work. It was really nice to cook again. The last time I had cooked was making a big feast the night before I left Sofia to depart on my Balkans trip. Between the cheapness of going out to eat in the Balkans, my desire to eat local foods, the conditions of the kitchens in some of the hostels that I stayed in, and not having many times when I had anyone besides myself to cook for, it had just been much more convenient not to cook. I had definitely missed it though.
As I finished up making dinner a few tables in the back of the bar were pushed together and the table was set. Phil brought wine to contribute to the dinner and once the food was ready Phil, Mic, Hermione, and I all sat down to eat. Gob never showed up and Sméagol was going to eat later but was working at dinnertime. Holly and Cookie Fingers showed up shortly after we had begun eating, back from a neighboring hostel where they had gone to use the oven to bake the cookies for dessert. There was plenty of food so we were joined by a couple of the hostel workers and despite the fact that the food wasn’t quite up to my usual standards, having to make a few minor substitutions to the standard recipe, people seemed to still like it and a lovely time was had by all.
A couple hours after dinner we all headed out to a nearby bar where we hung out for a few hours with some folks from our group trickling back to the hostel one by one as the night progressed. I stayed out quite a while but finally decided to head back at about 2:15 after realizing that for some reason I just wasn’t going to be getting drunk that night. Not that I was trying to get drunk, all I really wanted was to get a nice buzz going, but despite four glasses of wine with dinner, several shots of rakia and a couple of ciders at the bar, I was completely sober when I returned to the hostel. On top of being sober I was wide awake so I went and grabbed my laptop and came down to the bar to work on the photo gallery for this blog since the wifi at that hostel was much better in the middle of the night when far fewer people were on it. As I worked Mic, Holly, and a hostel worker we’ll call Pontius watched The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Eventually Holly and Mic headed off to bed and Hermione and Sméagol returned to the hostel to take their places watching the movie. Sméagol kept complaining that the fruit wedge in the jug of water at the bar looked like dentures and Hermione kept shaking the bowl of popcorn and made a huge mess all over the floor. They had both had a pretty good night. They gradually headed off to bed as the movie ended while I continued to work. I finally began to feel a bit tired at around seven in the morning and took a brief ten to twenty minute powernap on the couch in the bar before getting back to work. It was a weird night.
When Holly got up that morning she made smoothies for us and we chatted for a while before deciding that since it was Valentine’s Day we would each make a super ridiculous Valentine’s Day card for Cookie Fingers and see which of our cards he liked better and who he would choose to be his Valentine. After reading both of our cards he decided to deliver his reply in written form by paper airplane. He ended up spurning us both and choosing Mic as his Valentine, despite the fact that Mic hadn’t even given him a card. Holly and I were both highly offended and decided that since we were both still without a Valentine we would make cards for all of the rest of our friends at the hostel and see who had more people choose them as their Valentine at the end of the day, in a competition that we labeled the Top Secret V-Bomb Competition. In the afternoon we delivered out second V-bomb of the day in both card and rap form as one of the hostel workers Jerry, got to experience our Epic Rap Battle. Unfortunately, despite the fact that I was busting some mad rhymes while Holly was stumbling over some free verse, Jerry chose Holly as his Valentine. I think she must have paid him off.
Later in the evening Mic and I were preparing to go out for our big bromantic Valentine’s dinner together. Before we left I extended my stay another night after Holly promised to cut my hair the next day if I did. Mic and I hadn’t thought ahead to make a reservation for our big date so we were turned away from several restaurants before we finally found a spot that wasn’t full up. Once we returned to the hostel I went and picked up some candies to go along with our V-Bombs and finished up my cards and then pressured Holly to finish hers as well because midnight was quickly approaching. Before she got back to work on her cards she asked my advice about a guy she had gone on a couple of dates with who seemed like a nice enough guy in person, but had sent her a lot of really creepy text messages. Going over these messages gave Holly the inspiration she needed to complete her cards as she ended up using the things he had written as the text for the rest of her cards. We then delivered the rest of our V-bombs to everyone except for Mic, whom we thought was out with a woman, but who had actually just gone to bed already. Phil and Seth the bartender picked both of us to be their Valentine in a great showing of neutrality. Hermione and Sméagol correctly chose me as their Valentine, but Pontius chose Holly, which tied the game up at 4-4. Fortunately, I knew that unless Holly was willing to succumb to Mic’s advances Mic would choose me, and since the only other V-bombs we had to deliver were the ones that we wrote to ourselves and the ones that we wrote to each other I figured I had the competition in the bag. I had hopes that I might even win by a decent margin as I had taken a different approach on the card I wrote to Holly and instead of writing a ridiculous card I had written a very sincere one, thanking her for helping make my Valentine’s Day (which can often be a pretty crappy day for us single folk) a really fun one. Unfortunately, while she seemed touched by my card she still chose herself, and the card she wrote to me had the weirdest, creepiest drawing on it forcing me to choose her over me.
Of course I didn’t admit it at the time because the gloating would have been too much to handle, so I waited until I had left town to inform her of the fact that she had actually won the competition. After the competition was concluded and most everyone had cleared out of the bar Pontius, Holly, Hermione, Sméagol, and I watched The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, before finally going to bed around four in the morning.
The next day Hermione, Holly, and I went out for a walk in the afternoon and Holly made a promise to both make pancakes and cut my hair later that day, but first she was going to take a nap when we got back after having stayed up until four and then getting up for her shift at ten. Her plans hit a snag and no pancakes were made that day. I told her that if she didn’t cut my hair I was going to have to extend my stay another night, because I was not leaving without a haircut and she replied that in that case she wasn’t going to cut my hair so that I’d have to extend another night. I realized my plan to persuade her to finally give me a haircut had backfired and went ahead and extended my stay another night anyway so that it would not be a factor in my haircut. Finally after her shift ended we went out into the cold night and set up a chair outside and she gave me a haircut that actually turned out quite good. You never know what to expect when you finagle a free haircut out of somebody you have known for less than a week, but I was very pleased with the results.
After my haircut I rallied the troops and several of us headed out to a nearby bar, while Holly and Pontius hung back to watch The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. After hanging in the bar for a while and chatting while I fought off exhaustion from several nights in a row of very minimal sleep, we headed out to go dancing at a club down the road. After about an hour or so of dancing, which helped to revitalize me, we headed back to the hostel. I was walking backwards so that I could more easily talk to the others as we walked. Unfortunately, I picked the wrong group of people to put my faith in, as I would discover when they cried out a warning to me as I was already falling into a planter after having tripped over a cinderblock. After getting back up I continued to walk backwards but began checking for obstacles myself this time. A couple minutes later I spotted a place to get some food, which my roommate Gob really needed before bed after having a pretty good night of drinking. I took him there while the others continued back to the hostel. After a quick bite we returned to the hostel ourselves and he headed off to bed while I watched a little bit of The Return of the King before retiring to bed myself.
The next morning Mic and I had a delightful breakfast at a new restaurant where we both got the Zagreb Breakfast, which consisted of a large piece of bread topped with cottage cheese, sour cream, horseradish, grilled ham, crispy poached eggs, raddichio, radish, and spring onions.
Afterwards we went over to the large open-air market near the main square and Mic picked up some filets of some kind of whitefish (the language barrier restricted us from knowing exactly what we were getting) along with some cilantro and spinach, so that he could prepare a family dinner that night.
Later, after deciding what I would make as a side dish, I headed out to the grocery store and picked up some couscous along with some pineapple, bell pepper, and onion to mix into the couscous, and some lemon, for both the couscous and the fish. I then headed to the bakery down the street from the hostel where I picked up some cheesecake and raspberry tarts for dessert.
While Mic and I prepared dinner the crazy American woman from my last post kept talking to us in the kitchen and we decided to invite her to our family dinner, as it seemed like she could use the company. Fortunately she volunteered to bring alcohol, which turned out to be very necessary for the sanity of the rest of us, as after a short debate during dinner about what kind of fish it was, she continued to argue about the type of fish for most of the rest of the meal, seemingly with herself as nobody else was engaging with her on the topic after the first minute. Also present at dinner were Holly, Hermione, Seth, and Jerry. Cookie Fingers sadly was not present as he had been out of town since shortly after we had V-Bombed him a couple days earlier.
After dinner a few of us played a game called 30 Seconds. It is one of many versions of the same basic game where you have a list of things that you have to get your teammates to say in thirty seconds without using any words from the item you are trying to describe or any rhymes or other things of that nature. The teams were 3 on 3 with boys vs. girls. Hermione and Holly were on the girls side along with a Finnish girl who was newly arrived to the hostel, and I was teamed up with Burt, a Dutch-Russian guy (with many other coincidental commonalities with Hermione) who had gone out with us the night before, and Donald, an Austrian with a complicated heritage that I can’t quite remember. The competitive attitude that had dominated our Valentine’s Day reappeared and there was some mad shit talking between Holly and I throughout the game. Fortunately, my boys and I were the only ones able to back it up. After we finished playing shortly before midnight we discovered that we were a few minutes away from Burt’s birthday and we quickly threw together a little celebration for him. I grabbed a sweet wafer that had been brought out for a snack after dinner and topped it with a tea candle that was on the next table over and Mic donated his dessert which he had not gotten around to eating yet and then at midnight we sang happy birthday to Burt, who was pretty astonished at how quickly we had thrown everything together. We then got him a bottle of rakia and we all did a shot with him. The rest of the evening was spent lounging around the hostel bar with the family, along with a brief excursion to get cigarettes for Hermione, and more food for Mic and me.
The next morning I reluctantly checked out of the hostel. I had made enough lame excuses to keep sticking around and since the hostel was fully booked for the night it seemed like a good time for me to finally continue on my journey. Cookie Fingers arrived back from his trip and after working his shift the two of us went out to get ingredients for cookies and made one last batch before I left. This time I mixed the batter and he licked my fingers. We got back from baking the cookies in the oven of the nearby hostel to find that Holly was finally keeping her promise of making pancakes before I left. My time in Zagreb ticked down as I hung out in the kitchen with Sméagol, Hermione, Cookie Fingers, and Holly who continued to pump out pancakes. Finally it was time for me to leave, but I just wasn’t ready to say goodbye to these people and continue on my way yet and I said ‘fuck it’ and decided I would stay one last night, even if that meant staying up all night in the hostel bar because there was no room at the inn.
Excellent decision.
That evening as I was hanging out in the hostel bar before we all went out, Seth called me over to the bar where he handed me a cider, telling me that he was considering no longer carrying Somersby and switching to this cider instead. As a known cider drinker he wanted my opinion on it. Not only was it a much tastier cider than Somersby, but it also came in a half liter bottle rather than a third liter bottle like Somersby and he would be charging the same amount. I heartily endorsed this new choice and was pleased to be gifted with not only the cider that I was drinking but also the one that Seth taste tested himself. It pays to be a regular. A little while later Seth presented me with another free item for consumption in the form of a delicious grilled sandwich. I think he was happy I was staying another night.
A couple of hours later Donald, Cookie Fingers, Mic, Hermione, Holly, and I all headed out to karaoke. After a nice walk in the evening rain which included me giving Cookie Fingers a piggy back ride, we arrived at the karaoke bar where to the delight of everyone Cookie Fingers (not typically one for going out to party in the evening) absolutely killed it performing Ice Ice Baby. Not only did he do a fantastic job, but he knew all of the words by heart. I don’t even think that Vanilla Ice knows all the words. After discovering that Donald had a very prevalent homophobic side the night before, I made it my mission to break down his homophobia in the time I had with him and turned my often flirty behavior with Mic and Cookie Fingers up a notch while at the bar, rubbing their chests and trying to show Donald that there was nothing wrong with some man love and that if another guy touched you it did not turn you gay as he seemed to be worried that it would. I decided to sing I Wanna Be Sedated by the Ramones and put it in, but after dancing up on the stage with Cookie Fingers for a while, having been told they were having technical difficulties, they then informed me that they actually didn’t have the song after all. Lame. I did end up getting up with Donald to sing a Coldplay song that he had picked out. Hermione and Holly did a duet, and Mic performed with some backup from the girls after I attempted to help him out but struggle with the song and just decided to do some backup dancing instead. I got to dance to some slower songs with Holly and with Cookie Fingers, then we eventually trickled out of the bar and back to the hostel where after hanging out for a while people began to drift off to their beds leaving me to my own devices in the bar, where I typed up a rough draft of a goodbye letter to my little family.
During my free night stay in the bar I had a brief nap on the couch at about six in the morning, and then Mic and I went out for one final breakfast. After we got back I went and crashed for about an hour on Cookie Fingers bed while he worked, then after he finished his shift I made him walk with me down to the bus station so that I could purchase my bus ticket, knowing that if I had actual money invested in leaving it would force me to actually go. After returning to the hostel I took the rough draft of my goodbye letter that I had written in the middle of the night and handwrote a final draft to leave with them. I then hung out with my Holly, Hermione, Cookie Fingers, and Mic for my last half an hour before I had to head out. We took a family photo and then I hugged them all goodbye giving them kisses on the sides of their heads (partially for the benefit of Donald who was sitting there watching as I said my goodbyes. I then went over to him and extended my hand for a handshake to which he responded that he’d rather fist bump. I bumped his fist and then leaned in and gave him a hug. His reaction to the hug was much better than his reaction the first time that I had placed a hand on his shoulder to steady myself as I walked across some chairs, so I hope that I made some progress.
I finally left my family of the last week with promises to return and see them all again. Then half an hour later I was finally on the bus on my way out of Zagreb to continue my epic journey.