Croatia: Returning to the Sea...Part 7

It is now noon here in Zagreb, a much more respectable time of day to be playing on the computer. My brother Jim is at the airport waiting for his flight. My mother and I started off on a walk to the city center, but paused to take a break on a park bench along the way. This park has two lovely fountains, the sidewalk near our bench was shaded and the air perfectly warm with a slight breeze. As we sat enjoying the sights, the phone rang. It was our cousin Marela calling to invite us to go back to the sea this weekend. Well, golly, thats a tough one! Btw, this note will be harder for me to correctly punctuate. I am on a Croatian keyboard at the hotel. In addition to there being some different letters, the symbols are not all where I am used to them being...or I cant find them. Or, as I just disovered, the number keys have 3 symbols each on them and the shift key is not always getting me what I need...such as parentheses in which to enclose all of this information. Anyway...

Back to the sea...because, yes, we are going back to the island of Krk. We will stay in Malinska. My mothers other cousin, Marianna - that may not be spelled right -will be there for the weekend. She and her husband have been vacationing in Pula and we did not think we would get to see them at all since we decided not to drive all the way there last week. They have rented an apartment in Malinska for the weekend - the same as getting a condo for us. So we will leave tomorrow morning and return to Ogulin on Sunday night.

Tonight we will go to cousin Teas house to do our laundry and to have dinner. Last night we enjoyed a lovely dinner with many of our cousins - Tea, Hrvoje, Daniel, and Marela. We went to a very nice Italian restaurant. I had spinach gnocchi with shrimp and a tomato and cream sauce. It was delicious. After dinner we walked for a couple of hours to some famous sites...churches, the government buildings, a lovely city lookout point that had a pubcafe sort of place nestled along the edge. There was a walkway in between the cafe and the tables and three very large, funky chandeliers hung from the trees above the walkway. It was very beautiful. A special tram ride took us down the steep hillside to the city center once more and we then walked to the National Theater, which is a beautiful, large, light yellow building with very old and ornate architecture. You can google it...Zagreb National Theatre. Since by then we had been walking for some time and it was 10pm, we stopped for refreshments. There are small caffes and coffee shops on almost every corner of Zagreb...and in between. We headed back to our hotel at 11. Our route home took us by a huge botanical garden, but it was too dark to see in the gates.

We said goodbye to our cousins with plans to meet again. Sometime after midnight I decided to text Jillian to see if she and Cadence had made it to Spokane safely. Since she was there, and since I would be losing access to the laptop once Jim left, we decided to Skype. We talked for a long time - long after Jim and Mom had fallen asleep. Eventually Cadence woke up, Monica and Danny arrived, and Ty came home. So by 3:00am I had been able to see everyone. There are times when I have not appreciated my modest home that has been furnished the same for many years...but last night it looked wonderful. It is home and for just a little while I felt as if I was there with everyone. I still managed to get about 5 hours sleep before Mom woke me up for breakfast. Not bad.

So now we are back to today. After I am done with this note, Mom and I will go do a little shopping and have some lunch. I might even squeeze in a short nap. It is another lovely sunny day here. There stiflingly hot days of summer here in Zagreb seem to have passed. Tea said it was terribly hot this year. Much more than usual. I can tell that the evenings are cooling off more as well.

It will be nice to go back to Tea and Hvrojes apartment tonight. Just a short walk from there is a very long lake that is used for canoeing, kayaking, and crew racing. It has a wide paved path all around it - about 6 km long. You will have to do the math on that one. Yesterday there were many people out walking, running, biking and roller blading on the path. Tea and I walked. Jim and Hrvoje rode bikes, mom stayed behind and took a nice, long nap. And there was, of course, a caffe bar beside it where we stopped for coffee and a glass of water. I dont know if we will walk today, but we will get to do laundry, which will be wonderful. Yes, laundry and wonderful did appear together in that sentence.

I will likely be out of touch for the weekend, so hopefully I can write about our second journey to the sea when we get back to Ogulin on Sunday or Monday. There is a laptop there in the reception area that may be for guests to use. I am hoping so.

Till then, love to you all.

Bernadette