The train from Croatia's second largest city to its capital has two cars. It has two cars because there'd be something undignified about just having one, or indeed just piling the handful of passengers into a minivan. It has a first class compartment, which is exactly like second class in every way. You're paying for the prestige, and to be kept apart from those people so coarse as to not pay extra for absolutely no reason. It marks you as a member of -- not the elite, exactly, but a very distinctive group of people. I'm the only person in my 16-seat compartment. The 8-person smoking compartment is empty. The rest of the car holds 5 people and a King Charles Spaniel.
The countryside seems to have been abandoned. Ruined low stone walls divide it into thousands of identical plots of wilderness. There are villages of fallen-in houses. As we go by, smiling railway staff in red caps stand in front of the ruined stations of towns that do not exist. Where we do stop, no one gets on. The train's like a peddler hopelessly making his rounds with things no one wants. We take a ten-minute break in one of these so spaniels can be walked and smokers can have a bit of variety in where they smoke. Six or seven orange-vested workmen relax on an old rail, checking their phones, talking, hiking up their pants. It's only later, when we very gingerly descend into the plains, that there are signs of life.
There are views: we're always edging along steep drops over sprawling valleys and wending our way past snow-capped mountains and so on. It's one of those train trips that constantly tempts you to take pictures even though you know they'll be all glare and smudges.
Travel sites warn about bands of violent youth in Zagreb. I can say that, in central Zagreb, everyone was too busy flaking out on the lawns of the parks or sitting on cafe patios. Anyway, I was prepared. If I go out at night, it's always with full Clockwork Orange makeup on and a bicycle chain dragging chillingly along the sidewalk behind me.
As one of the Habsburgs' provincial capitals, Zagreb came in for a fair bit of trickle-down opulence. It also has equestrian statues of apparently-important early Slavic kings, a little medieval centre, and some oddball museums: the Museum of Broken Relationships and the Museum of Naive Croatian Art (not to be confused with the Croatian Naive Museum of Art, which is all upside-down Picassos and Imaginus posters of Van Gogh's Sunflowers). Also another archaeological museum no one else bothers to go into, but which has a buzzing cafe out in the courtyard. A lot of the bigger archaeological bits and pieces are also in the courtyard, so when you go out to have a look, two dozen diners shoot curious looks at you, as though you'd wandered into a restaurant to look at the paintings.
The cathedral's a vast gothic number, rather plain outside, possibly because it's been rebuilt since a 19th-century earthquake. Inside, soaring gothic columns, complicated vaulting enclosing a cubic mile of gloom, house-sized chandeliers, and, behind the altar, a dead man in a glass case. This is Aloysius Stepinac, a 20th century bishop known in English as "the controversial Aloysius Stepinac". He was pally with the Ustasa during the war, was tried under Tito afterwards, and was then controversially rehabilitated, controversially beatified, and controversially, and somewhat creepily, installed after his death in a glass sarcophagus in public view. (Actually, I'm not completely sure whether what you see is actually his embalmed remains or an effigy, and the rest of the internet seems a bit confused about that, too.)
The busker situation: leaving in the morning (I was only two nights in Zagreb), I had a handful of Croatian coins to dispose of. The only person I could find to give them to was a singing accordionist of such incredible awfulness that it didn't seem fair to the city to encourage him.
The train to Vienna leaves appallingly early, but is very comfortable, until they kick us off to be transferred by bus over a section of rail works. The bus filled completely, and then a pot-bellied man in spandex wheeled his mountain bike up. I'm not sure what became of him. The new train is full of people eating sandwiches, and is one of those subtly uncomfortable modern ones, with gracefully sculpted sides you can't rest your elbows or feet on. In the Austrian countryside are belled brown cows balancing on sloping meadows, turning the thick grass into rich alpine milk. It's so much like a chocolate ad that it's hard to accept it. The commercial and industrial stretches outside cities, too, have an unreal feeling. They are new and gleaming, the machines polished and drawn up in neat lines. The Austrians do not understand that these are supposed to be smelly, unhappy, oil-stained places that people only go to when they need equipment to dispose of a body.
The countryside seems to have been abandoned. Ruined low stone walls divide it into thousands of identical plots of wilderness. There are villages of fallen-in houses. As we go by, smiling railway staff in red caps stand in front of the ruined stations of towns that do not exist. Where we do stop, no one gets on. The train's like a peddler hopelessly making his rounds with things no one wants. We take a ten-minute break in one of these so spaniels can be walked and smokers can have a bit of variety in where they smoke. Six or seven orange-vested workmen relax on an old rail, checking their phones, talking, hiking up their pants. It's only later, when we very gingerly descend into the plains, that there are signs of life.
There are views: we're always edging along steep drops over sprawling valleys and wending our way past snow-capped mountains and so on. It's one of those train trips that constantly tempts you to take pictures even though you know they'll be all glare and smudges.
Travel sites warn about bands of violent youth in Zagreb. I can say that, in central Zagreb, everyone was too busy flaking out on the lawns of the parks or sitting on cafe patios. Anyway, I was prepared. If I go out at night, it's always with full Clockwork Orange makeup on and a bicycle chain dragging chillingly along the sidewalk behind me.
As one of the Habsburgs' provincial capitals, Zagreb came in for a fair bit of trickle-down opulence. It also has equestrian statues of apparently-important early Slavic kings, a little medieval centre, and some oddball museums: the Museum of Broken Relationships and the Museum of Naive Croatian Art (not to be confused with the Croatian Naive Museum of Art, which is all upside-down Picassos and Imaginus posters of Van Gogh's Sunflowers). Also another archaeological museum no one else bothers to go into, but which has a buzzing cafe out in the courtyard. A lot of the bigger archaeological bits and pieces are also in the courtyard, so when you go out to have a look, two dozen diners shoot curious looks at you, as though you'd wandered into a restaurant to look at the paintings.
The cathedral's a vast gothic number, rather plain outside, possibly because it's been rebuilt since a 19th-century earthquake. Inside, soaring gothic columns, complicated vaulting enclosing a cubic mile of gloom, house-sized chandeliers, and, behind the altar, a dead man in a glass case. This is Aloysius Stepinac, a 20th century bishop known in English as "the controversial Aloysius Stepinac". He was pally with the Ustasa during the war, was tried under Tito afterwards, and was then controversially rehabilitated, controversially beatified, and controversially, and somewhat creepily, installed after his death in a glass sarcophagus in public view. (Actually, I'm not completely sure whether what you see is actually his embalmed remains or an effigy, and the rest of the internet seems a bit confused about that, too.)
The busker situation: leaving in the morning (I was only two nights in Zagreb), I had a handful of Croatian coins to dispose of. The only person I could find to give them to was a singing accordionist of such incredible awfulness that it didn't seem fair to the city to encourage him.
The train to Vienna leaves appallingly early, but is very comfortable, until they kick us off to be transferred by bus over a section of rail works. The bus filled completely, and then a pot-bellied man in spandex wheeled his mountain bike up. I'm not sure what became of him. The new train is full of people eating sandwiches, and is one of those subtly uncomfortable modern ones, with gracefully sculpted sides you can't rest your elbows or feet on. In the Austrian countryside are belled brown cows balancing on sloping meadows, turning the thick grass into rich alpine milk. It's so much like a chocolate ad that it's hard to accept it. The commercial and industrial stretches outside cities, too, have an unreal feeling. They are new and gleaming, the machines polished and drawn up in neat lines. The Austrians do not understand that these are supposed to be smelly, unhappy, oil-stained places that people only go to when they need equipment to dispose of a body.
