Stuck In Zagreb – Part 3

PART THREE – THE ZAGREB EXPERIENCE

I arrived back in Zagreb at five in the morning and walked the familiar path to my hostel. I entered and chatted with Pontius at reception for a bit and put my bags in storage before heading to the back of the bar and waiting for Mic to wake up and join me. Mic finally arrived and after a passionate embrace the two of us went out to our favorite breakfast joint and I got my typical order of the Zagreb Breakfast, which if you haven’t read Stuck in Zagreb – Part 2 is a delicious dish consisting of a large piece of bread topped with cottage cheese, sour cream, horseradish, grilled ham, crispy poached eggs, raddichio, radish, and spring onions. After breakfast we returned to the hostel where I met Woody (a new volunteer at the hostel) and hung out in the back of the bar for a while chatting with Mic, Woody, and Phil.

Then Booty entered the room.

I decided that sentence needed to be a paragraph all its own because when Booty enters a room she lets you know she has entered the room. Booty was another long-term guest, originally from San Francisco and the other three were quite familiar with her, but this was the first I was meeting her as she had arrived at the hostel a couple weeks after my last visit. Within five minutes of her arrival she had called all of us bitches, talked about watching porn in a sleep tube, and said that she wanted us to go to the park and smoke weed about seven times. Oh, Americans…

Phil, Woody, and Mic all had work to do, so it just ended up being Booty and me at the park. I smoked for the first time since Bratislava and between the fact that I hadn’t smoked in a while and the fact that I had barely slept the night before the weed hit me pretty hard. So, after arriving back at the hostel and going and grabbing a bite to eat with Mic, I returned to the hostel again and finally checked in. Once I got up to my room I put my bag in my storage locker and climbed up into my bed. A little while later I had passed out.

I woke up a couple of hours later and came downstairs to find all the folks that I knew and a few I didn’t sitting out in front of the hostel enjoying a dinner of burgers that Booty had cooked up. I joined them, pleased that I had not slept through dinner and chowed down on a delicious burger that had my name on it. After dinner several of us decided to go out. We went to a nearby hostel/bar and hung out there for a couple hours, drinking, chatting and slowly upgrading our table all night as better tables opened up until we were finally sitting in the mac daddy seating area. After a while there we headed out to another bar that I had never been to before. Most of our group was pretty wasted by this point but I had been taking it fairly easy all evening so I was still pretty sober. I was however growing quite exhausted by the time we left the bar, my nap not quite making up for my sleepless night, so when everyone else headed off to another bar I returned to the hostel with Booty, smoked a little, and then went to bed.

The next day Mic and I got a delicious lunch at a wok place. Afterwards we returned to the hostel where Mic got to work and I ran into Woody and Booty coming out of the park after a smoke session. They were supposed to meet up with a couple of girls at another park nearby and were running about an hour late but still headed over there. I tagged along and when we got to the other park they were so stoned that they kept thinking they saw the girls every time we saw two people together from a distance, but it never did end up being the girls and after circling the park and coming to the conclusion that they had gotten sick of waiting around and left, we walked Booty to yoga. We arrived at the street where her yoga place was and then just like searching for the girls at the park Booty ended up thinking every door we passed was the door to her yoga spot, which ended up being the final door of the street and looked nothing like any of the other entryways that we had passed.

Woody and I then returned to the hostel and hung out in the kitchen area for a while chatting with Carly, a Canadian girl who had just arrived. As we chilled our group continued to grow with more people making their way back into the kitchen, most of them providing offerings of bits of food to join our group. It was pretty excellent. After a while we all left the kitchen and most of us walked down the street to get some quick food. I got a big sandwich and we returned to the hostel where some of us smoked weed in the park before playing a big game of UNO, which took way too long because we were playing with rules that you should never play with for a big group. A few of us then played Jenga as the night wound down. I went up to bed and followed along with the beginning of the season opener for the Mariners before passing out.

The next day while out getting breakfast with Mic, Woody, and a few of the others we had met the night before Mic kept talking about The Zagreb Experience and how the two of us should start a tour company taking people around to all of our favorite spots and giving them a real feel for what the city is like, and the things it has to offer. An idea he expanded upon over the next few days as he started talking about all of the different spots we could take people and the things we could do with them and leading the same kinds of tours in other locations as well. We have no plans at the moment to actually make this happen, but if this whole writing thing doesn’t pan out maybe we’ll start looking into the feasibility of that idea a bit more.

After breakfast we walked through the booths in the main square and picked up some doughnut balls, which were delicious. For lunch that day our breakfast group grew into an eight person crew and we went to a beer garden where I had some beef soup and strukli. That afternoon Booty, Carly, Money (a Canadian guy who had been with our group since the previous evening), and I all smoked in the park and then went to the Illusions Museum, which was pretty great. Apparently they weren’t as stoned as I was because they didn’t seem to be able to appreciate the museum on the same level as me and left a half hour before I did.

That evening Mic, Carly, Money, and I went to the Korean BBQ joint that Mic and I had visited my last time in town and had ourselves a delicious feast. We then returned to the hostel and along with Woody and three others guys that we met when we returned we played another game of UNO, this time with much better rules that led to games that actually ended. I had a cider while we played and at a little past midnight an alarm on Woody’s phone went off reminding him to go wake up Booty as requested so that she could come down and smoke. We then got nice and baked for bed and then went off and had pleasant dreams.

I had arrived in Zagreb on a Sunday morning and was planning on leaving either that Wednesday or Thursday, but I hadn’t been in Zagreb more than a few hours when Mic revealed that his birthday was on Friday. Once again this city wouldn’t let me leave.  So, I moved things around and extended my stay at the hostel as best I could, which meant that on Wednesday I had to switch rooms as my room was already all booked up. For lunch Mic, Carly, and I returned to the wok place that Mic and I had eaten at earlier in the week along with the three guys who had joined us for UNO the night before.

After lunch we went to the dessert shop near the hostel and got some ice cream. I had a scoop of raspberry cheesecake. So good. Later in the afternoon, Woody, Carly, and I headed to the park with the big metal structure that I had climbed with Holly and Cookie Fingers during my previous visit, and I climbed it again, this time alone, as neither Woody, nor Carly could be convinced to climb up there with me.

We then continued to walk around the park for a while before returning to the hostel. We met up with Money on the way and when we arrived back I got a cider and we chatted for a while before deciding to play a drinking game version of UNO that we created the rules for as we went along. We were joined by a couple more Canadian girls because the hostel was apparently overflowing with Canadians on this trip to Zagreb. After we all had a decent amount of wine in us the six of us headed out to dinner along with Mic and Booty. We all got pizza and almost all of us had a shot of blueberry rakia with our meal.

Our group split up for a while after dinner and Booty, Woody, and I returned to the hostel. After watching a couple guys rock out on their violins in the bar for a while the three of us went out to the park and stood under a tree to get out of the rain, listening to “Brick House” by The Commodores, which became a theme song for Woody and me, and which Woody would end up playing over the sound system in the bar on several occasions while I was still in town. A little while later Hermione, who had been out of town since before I arrived, came by the hostel to hang out. We chatted for a while, with Woody occasionally coming over and joining the conversation and the bartender Seth occasionally coming over and drunkenly pouring us shots.

After a delicious breakfast at my favorite spot with Mic, Carly, and the two other Canadian girls from the previous evening I spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon working before Mic and I headed out to the movies. Mic wanted to see The Boss Baby, but it was dubbed into Croatian with no subtitles so we ended up seeing Going In Style (a bank heist movie with Morgan Freeman) instead. It was a pretty decent flick. That evening Hermione came by the hostel again with a couple of her friends from back home in the Netherlands and we chatted and drank for a while before going out to dinner at a spot right across from where I had eaten the night before. Pizza was once again on the menu for the evening and after we had eaten and talked for a while, going through my questions, we headed out and they invited me to join them as they were going to go out and party that evening. It sounded fun, but I was tired and looking for more of a relaxing evening so I said goodbye to them and returned to the hostel.

That evening while at the park Booty started talking about loyalty and rambling on about how she was only loyal to black women. When I told her that it was messed up that she had no loyalty to Woody and me she responded by saying, “I’ll show you loyalty, if I had a dick I’d make both of you suck it.” Priceless. People then asked Emma (the Scottish girl who was out smoking with us) to say a bunch of different words because they were all digging her Scottish accent. Woody and I then returned to the back of the bar area and chatted while pretending to play guitar until Woody headed off to bed. The hostel was full that night, so just like during my last visit, I spent a night on the couch.

Friday arrived and with it Mic’s birthday. We started out the day with Amy (one of the hostel owners) reading fortune cards for Mic, Booty, and me. The four of us then went to the park where we did some breathing exercises. Woody and I made a run to the store and I picked up some Sponge Bob napkins for Mic’s birthday breakfast. His breakfast was brought over from the restaurant and he graciously shared the meal with Woody, Booty, and me. A short while later he took off to go to the massage that we had bought him. The next big plan for the day was to go on the ridiculously short funicular that is located right next to the hostel, but which none of us had been on yet. It took a while to get the four of us all ready at the same time, but finally after Woody and I had had some ice cream Booty and Mic were both ready and we all went and took the ridiculous ride up the tiny hill. It was amazing.

After we got back and I checked into my new room we got the great news that Woody, who was scheduled to work during Mic’s party was going to be able to get his shift covered after all and he went to get ready and Mic and I headed over to the bar leaving the rest of our group, which now contained two new Canadian girls who were friends of Carly, to finish their game of UNO. The bar was a burger joint and I had two different burgers along with some fries with delicious toppings and tastes of other people’s food, before Mic’s birthday cake came out. After eating cake we all returned to the hostel and while smoking in the park everyone began to slowly pair off, while Woody and I just kept giving shit to one of Carly’s friends who was engaged and hanging out with us by default because we were the only one’s not looking to pick up anyone there that night. We headed back into the bar and Woody and I both got a free glass of wine when the folks sitting next to us left the bar with their drinks mostly unfinished. Later that night after several people had already headed off for the night, Booty, Woody, and I went to meet up with some folks at a bar, but spent most of the time sitting across from the bar and smoking a joint, just the three of us, while Booty unsuccessfully tried to convince Woody to try to buy some ecstasy for her.

The next morning I woke to find that Emma was also in my new room and got to hear her tale of horror as apparently some creepy guy who had been down at the bar the night before and who wasn’t in our room had snuck in when someone was leaving, gotten naked, and climbed into bed with her. Fortunately that was the worst of it as he did actually leave when she told him to get the fuck out. But still. That was massively messed up. I then went downstairs to meet up with Mic and Booty as we had breakfast plans for my final morning in town. When I arrived downstairs I discovered that two American girls that Mic had apparently pulled out of a hat were going to be joining us for breakfast. It turned out that one of the girls, Ellie, is a fellow Washingtonian, as most of the Americans I meet on my travels seem to be. After breakfast Amy took some pictures of Mic, Woody, Booty, and me, then Mic and I took the tram out to the bus station where we parted ways, with me heading to Munich and him heading to Dubrovnik.

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