Spent Over Six Hours Walking Around Zagreb Sunday.....

.....and got to know the city pretty well. Zagreb has a lot of people--over a million--but is surprisingly compact. There is an Old City and a New City as well as an Upper Town and Lower Town and the four don't mix and match perfectly but together, they make for an interesting blend of history and culture.

I slept in, ate a late breakfast, and left the hotel around 10:00 and walked back up to the Ban Jelacic Square which is the main gathering point in the city. It is a large open area with a huge statue and is surrounded by Baroque facades and sidewalk cafes. It is the favorite gathering spot for students. Walking up to the square--about a ten minute walk--I was really hit by the lack of cars on the streets even though it was Sunday morning. There are trolley tracks on every major street here and trolleys run probably less than a minute apart and are always full of passengers.

After the 1991 Revolution and the Balkan War, the Croatian government basically banned almost all parking downtown and those spots that are available are really expensive. After they banned cars, the government also abolished trolley fees so everybody can ride downtown at no cost and they do it--trolley after trolley. As a result, cars disappeared; road maintenance became a non-issue; the air cleared up; and hardly any cars are seen on the streets now. What do you do with empty city streets? Here they put in sidewalk (or in this case) street cafes. It really seems to work well. I can't imagine it working in Houston but here, it is a success story.

I walked back up by the Cathedral and the walled fortress walls that were constructed to guard against the Ottoman Turks--the old stone gate is now the scene of a religious shrine to the Virgin Mary. The Old City is just that--really old--with winding cobble stone streets and ancient buildings. I walked uphill to the Lotscak Tower and climbed the wooden spiral staircase to the top and watched them fire the noon gun cannon at precisely noon--like they've been doing for about a hundred years now. From there I walked over and visited the St. Mark's Church with its ornate colored tile roof and then visited the Dolac Market--a large open-air farmer's market in the town center.

The large ornate buildings here are just amazing: the yellow building is the National Opera Theater. The Mimara Museum is just down the street from my hotel and the National

Archives and Library are also nearby. There are several major museums in the city and I visited the Croatian National Museum on Sunday (the bottom photo).

Unfortunately, the weather took a turn for the worse late Sunday afternoon.....