Welcome to Zagreb...

Country number 24 (on the 30 Countries Before 30 challenge with Toby) came in at just under 36 hours in Croatia - unquestionably one of the most fascinating and unusual places I have ever visited.

It all started with some fun and games on Saturday morning: forgetting to pack, losing my passport (and finding it), discovering that the Piccadilly Line wasn't in the mood to take anyone to Heathrow last weekend, finally getting to Heathrow to discover that my mobile phone was happily snuggled under my pillow where it had been shoved after having the audacity to go off at the time I'd set it, having to page Jemma so we could check in together (oddly enough, she'd already guessed that I would forget my phone and was waiting for the page). Once on the plane we pogo-ed across Europe in an alarmingly lively pin-ball-ricocheting-off-clouds manner which meant I had to spend the entire flight with my head between my knees (when faced with any adverse flying conditions, my body usually elects to pretty much check out, in a charmingly Jane Austen heroine kind of way - I really should start carrying smelling salts) prompting the Aussie sitting next to us to enquire whether Jemma was okay because she didn't look great either, and Jemma to indignantly reply that she was perfectly alright thank you, that's just her natural complexion - we finally bounced out of the clouds and onto the tarmac in Zagreb.

I absolutely love exiting planes via a stairway onto the tarmac - it just feels like a proper arrival - and the misty evening and deep pink, hazy sunset lent the visible Croatian countryside a pleasingly other worldly air. Shortly afterwards, thrilled to have received another stamp on my still depressingly new passport, Jemma and I were confronted with the realisation that we had absolutely no idea what the currency was, nor its exchange rate to pounds. Or any idea how to get to our hotel. Or anything of the language (with the exception of the helpful phrases that lovely Mel of the Melbourne girls had emailed me, but I did worry that "eight beers please" and "do you have a girlfriend?" wouldn't do much to covey to a taxi driver our desire to go to our hotel). After a bit of lively wild-guessing at the ATM and vaguely wondering whether or not we'd just cleaned out our bank accounts, we discovered that Croatian taxi drivers speak the universal language of "Sheraton" and we were off.

At speed. Over the course of the stay, we learnt that Zagreb(ian?) taxi drivers are lively to say the least (perhaps that's what the pilot had originally trained as): we came within inches of rear-ending seemingly innocent drivers, had a couple of hair-raising diversions onto the pavement and more than once flew round corners at such startling speed that we were flung across the backseat into positions that platonic friends rarely find themselves in.

The scenery and outskirts that zipped past looked… foreign. Extremely foreign. I think that these days we are so saturated with images of Western Europe, the US, Canada and Australia in various media, that even when we arrive in such places for the first time, everything looks somewhat familiar. At the very least, I tend to have a mental image that may or may not be quite right, but is at least a starting point. Croatia, on the other hand - with the exception of war torn images from the mid nineties, I am ashamed to say that I really didn't have a clue what to expect. The first few buildings that heralded our arrival into the city looked appropriately Eastern European - dark grey concrete blocks of flats, the kind with deeply black windows that look like dead eyes, broken occasionally by a depressing line of washing or faded duvet cover thrown over a balcony. But then there would suddenly be a terracotta structure that conjured images of the Mediterranean, and the text on street signs or advertisements was written in non-European characters, text that to my ignorant eye looked Russian. The other thing I noted was the lack of globalisation - not one MacDonalds, Starbucks, Co-op, Spar. I couldn't guarantee that they don't yet exist in Croatia, but I certainly laid eyes on not one familiar brand name this weekend.

By the time we had chucked our things in our hotel room and freshened up from the flight, it was 10pm and having not been able to catch much in the way of dinner as it gaily flew around the plane, we were both quietly thinking that the other looked surprisingly tasty. So it was off out to hit Zagreb on a Saturday night…