Today was a good, active day, although it was cold. Particularly on corridors, or stepping out of a room, the sudden cold wind penetrated to the bone.
I took my trusty tram to the center of town, with the plan of taking the tourist bus at 10 am. But I got there at 9:15 am, so I had to walk briskly around the cathedral not to be turned into an ice statue. Zagreb has a grand cathedral, but with the years it had been neglected, and in the last couple of years it has been in reconstruction (the same is true for many of the museums and public buildings, so either they do the maintenance over the winter months, or they just got a whole bunch of EU money to beautify the city). Reconstruction means that the cathedral was closed to visitors, but I spent some interesting time looking at the blocks they took out of the twin spirals, half original work and half reconstructed volutes and gargoyles. It is like a giant Lego puzzle!
The Hop-on Hop-off was a small bus, and I was the only tourist on board. It is also not a very long route, so I decided to ride the whole circuit, making suitable noises of admiration as the driver pointed to the different worthy sights. I disappointed him, however, because I was not inspired to take photographs and selfies along the route. The city center is comparatively small, and one pass with the tourist bus was enough to give me feeling for the geography of the place. There is basically an uptown, where the cathedral and the government house are located, and a downtown, where the big public buildings are located.
Staring with the uptown, across the plaza from the cathedral is the market, which includes the open market stalls on top, and the better established shops in the basement. Walking through the stalls I truly felt I was in Europe, with lots of elderly ladies pulling on the ubiquitous wheeled market baskets. Folks here like to go to the market and buy a few potatoes here, a cauliflower there, a slice of cheese at the diary shop, and a rack of lamb at the butchers, which makes for a busy and quite colorful vignette of old Zagreb life.
Climbing a long street lined with bakeries (here you can live out of bakery goods for several days at a stretch) and curious shops I got back to the Government House and the Parliament House, and in the plaza between them found a church with a beautiful mosaic roof (which I couldn't approach because the whole area is barred by the security police). Now that I was on top I walked in the garden that overlooks the city, where a statue honoring an old gentleman attracted my attention. It was the monument to Andreja Mohorovičić, Geophysicist (I hope some of my students will recognize the name of the man who identified the crust/mantle transition in seismic refraction records ("the Moho")).
In the downtown area one can find the imposing buildings of the Academy of Arts and Sciences (closed for renovation), the Palace of Fine Arts (closed for renovation), the Opera House (closed for renovation), and any number of museums (also closed for renovation). The very fine Hotel Esplanade, by the main train station, was built in record time in the early 20th century, to attend to the needs of the passengers of the luxurious Orient Express, which went from Paris to Constantinople (via Zagreb).
Eventually I reached saturation from ancient buildings I could not visit, so I took the tram to the east side of the city, to walk in Maksimir Park, a forested space that functions like Chapultepec for Mexico City or the Jardin de Plants for Paris. It has several artificial lakes (now frozen), a small zoo, and children playgrounds, but mostly it has many paths through the forest for dogs to run, youngsters to jog, and older folks to have a nice walk. It is a very peaceful place.
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