Zagreb

I arrived in Zagreb on Wednesday afternoon after nearly missing the bus, due to the fact that there was a car accident slowing things down on the way into Rijeka from Krk, and that we were having a great time. I was hosted in Rijeka/Krk by my friends and colleagues who had arranged a meeting with the center for Croatistika at the University.

The bus ride was uneventful, and I was able to lug my things to a relatively nearby tram (nothing is all that close together in Zagreb) to get to my rented apartment. I did, however, make the mistake of getting off a stop early. In the States, if something is one stop away on a bus line or what have you, there’s probably no point in the ride. Here, however, the stops are not close together.

There are a lot of record shops here. What’s more, there are a lot of record shops with new stock, lots of new stock. People are willing to pay 30 Euros a pop for brand new vinyl here, judging by the level of stock kept on hand. US record stores would normally never take the gamble on that amount of new inventory, even when supplementing it with the essentially free income from trade in used records.

The heat arrived here about when I did. This is the ant-under-a-magnifying-glass heat of a punishing sort of sun we don’t seem to have back home, at least not north of the Mason-Dixon. This enervating and, frankly, terrifying ball of nuclear fire sets off primal autonomic alarm bells as soon as you step outside. It’s light with a high PSI, and it is moving in the same direction as gravity. What follows are some tourist photos from the last few days.