Zagreb, Day 28: In which I don't buy a toilet seat

16 min read

Deviation Actions

fartprincess's avatar
By
Published:
6.9K Views
<da:widget type="twitter.share" value="{'url':'fartprincess.deviantart.com/jo…, 'text':'Check out aimee_ebooks Zagreb Day 28: In which I dont buy a toilet seat'}"><da:widget type="facebook.like" value="{'href':'fartprincess.deviantart.com/jo…, 'send':'false', 'layout':'button_count', 'width':'450', 'show-faces':'false', 'font':'verdana'}">

Today, I went to the post office. Or the Hrvatska Pošta, rather. There seem to be only 2, one in Novi Zagreb and the other in Grad Zagreb. I figured I'd have better luck with the one in Grad Zagreb, so I hoofed it there. That's right, I idiomatically expedited myself there. My only other post office experience in Europe was in Barcelona. I obviously had a much easier time visiting the post office there given that I actually speak the language spoken there. Here, I simply had no idea what I was getting myself into. And when allixsenos asked me, "Are you going to the post office?" and I said yes, and he laughed... I figured it was probably going to be chaos.

The post office here wasn't awful at all, though. Like the one in Barcelona, it operates in a ticket system much like you would experience in an American DMV. The machine that gives you the ticket only has instructions in Croatian, however. You have to pick which category you want. I was able to understand enough of the Croatian on the screen... to know that I wanted "prioritetno pismo" (I know "pismo" is like "letter", I could only assume the word preceding was an adjective meaning "priority"). The post office seemed too empty to be needing this ticket system. I couldn't ever imagine it being more busy than it currently was.

Untitled by fartprincess

Within a couple of minutes, my ticket was up. "Govorite li engleski?" "A little bit." I knew enough Croatian to communicate what I wanted to send, but at the same time, I didn't want to risk having my stuff end up getting delivered to a goat farmer in Belarus, so I started to, for her benefit, get comically loud and slow with my English, not realizing that when she said "a little," she really actually meant, "I speak almost fluent English and am very ashamed that I don't know words like 'compunctious' and 'docile'." "Yes, I have TWO ITEMS. I WANT TO SEND THEM BY MAIL." She kind of backed away and laughed a little. "Okay! Both to the same address?" "No, no. Separate. One is a post card. The other is a letter. I don't have an envelope for the letter."

The lady kept asking me if I wanted "normal" or "airmail." I said, "I don't know the difference." She said, "Airmail is 12 Kuna. Normal is 8 Kuna." I laughed, "So the only difference is that I pay you more?" Apparently, the humor was not lost because she laughed too, "No, it's faster." 

I said, "Fine, Airmail, I guess. For both." The price difference was so nominal... I mean... $2 to mail something internationally? That's so minor. The postcard she had me put inside of an envelope as well. I wasn't sure if that's how they handle all postcards here or if it was just because the postcard was made of balsa wood. Which I also thought was kind of dumb, but whatever. 

Untitled by fartprincess

I think the woman sensed my enthusiasm for learning vocabulary, because she gave me a brief primer on postal/mail related words, like envelope. I knew nothing about this woman, we exchanged no small talk, but somehow she just read it in my face that I was inquisitive. I walked away from the exchange having successfully mailed two things and learned a few words :)

Untitled by fartprincess

After leaving the post office, I walked out to the main square in the city. Zagreb has a lot of plazas. And I don't know any of them by name. This is the plaza everywhere knows though. With the bank. And the statue. And the trams. The market was down in the plaza. I hadn't bothered to really check it out because farmers' markets are farmers' markets. I lived 2 blocks from one of the biggest ones in the US for a while, so I know what it's like to walk around tents and see people selling soap made of goats milk. A friend here told me "oh they have all these unique flowers." I called bullshit on that, because I don't think there is a tremendous difference in vegetative and floral growth within the same longitude. I mean, yeah, there will be a bit of difference here and there, but nothing that is going to blow my mind. It's going to be similar to plants I've seen in North America in the same climate. 

Untitled by fartprincess

But I wandered through the market anyway, because I had nothing to lose and well, that's how competitive of a debater I am, that I will scout out the source for reassurance that I am indeed right. Never debate with me if you hate debating because even if I am wrong, I will still continue to work any angle I can as long as it's fair to the debate and isn't weakly supported. It's more fun that way.

The flowers on display were pretty much everything I see in north of the Mason-Dixon line in the US. A lot of Azaleas and Begonias and pots of overall shame for knowing the names of these flowers. I'm not really a "flower" person. I like seeing them in growing in the ground, but it ends there. I do like when I see a guy walking through town with some though because I feel like I just read a single page of a story. I like to think of all the possibilities and outcomes. Maybe they're "I'm sorry I fed your dog chocolate and killed it" flowers. Or maybe they're not. Either way, there's a story.

Amongst the tents of flowers and jams was one tent that did catch my interest.

Untitled by fartprincess

Toilet seats? They're not even decorative. They're just plain white toilet seats. Why? I was tempted to stick around just to see what kind of Croat is showing up at the farmers' market to buy a new toilet seat. Or what kind of situation would dictate you needing to buy a new toilet seat at a temporarily established venue. Like what if you take it home and it doesn't fit on the toilet? It's like buying a magic monkey claw from a guy on a carpet and then he's gone the next day when you accidentally turn your wife into a rodent or something. I'm not even sure if that's a good deal on a toilet seat.

There were meat markets by the farmers' market. I'm guessing these are always open, every day. It was like Pike Place Market in Seattle, sort of, except with less fish and more cuts of beef, an occasional pekarna situated in there as well. I started to think, "If you can have a pekarna and a ljekarna, could you have a mesokarna?" I'm going to just rightfully assume the answer is an uproarious "no." 

Untitled by fartprincess

I felt like I was doing espionage in the meat market, sneaking around taking awkward photos of meat with my phone.

Untitled by fartprincess

That's just way too much meat. Yesterday, I saw this gigantic grill used for cooking like a whole pig at once. In someone's front yard. It dawned on me that having a "barbecue" here has a totally different meaning to Croats. I think of the distinct smells that came with my dad coming back from the store with charcoal, lighting it, and making burgers as I ran around the backyard kicking a soccer ball. But here, just imagine running around the front yard as a little kid, seeing some glazed boar rotating on a spit. 

After I left the market, I was incredibly thirsty and somewhat hungry. Also, the sun was burning my skin. I've gotten a bit of a tan in the past couple of days. I didn't, until earlier this afternoon, have any sunscreen. The Kozmo near here only had one type of sunscreen and it was made for babies. I took it anyway. I probably smell like a baby now. 

Walking around, I realized I had not yet been in a real, sit-down restaurant here on my own. I've been in "fast food" type places where you order at a counter, but nothing where there was a waiter. I decided there was no better time than the present to have that experience. Being on my own really made the experience interesting. For Americans reading this, I'll overexplain the experience some for your benefit. More often than not, there is no hostess. You just pick a seat wherever and sit there. A lot of the time, you don't get a menu... especially if it's at a coffee place... this has been somewhat weird for me because the waiter will show up and everyone with me will kind of look at me and ask, "What do you want?" and I turn totally blank-faced and am like, "Uh, I don't... know... what do they have?" And no one will really answer that question because I'm sure it seems like a really stupid thing to ask to anyone who lives here. It seems to be a cultural thing. Because for me, it's like, if I don't have a menu, for all I know, it's just as acceptable to order a plate of spaghetti as it is to order an espresso. I'm sure years of living here would engrain the culture into your head so that it's second nature, but to an outsider, it's not something you can easily get accustomed to.  Not to mention people here love coffee. And I don't really drink it (I know, I'm awful, right?) 

The first restaurant I walked into, I waited about 15 minutes. No one ever came to take my order. I started trying to make eye contact with a waiter. After that, I got impatient and was kind of waving my hand like, "hey, over here." But no one ever came. So I got up and left. The second place I ended up at, the waiters were all very busy and I wasn't sure when was the polite or appropriate time to try to get their attention. In the US, a waiter or waitress will finish one task and then return once their hands are empty. Here, they kind of shuffle around with their little serving tray trying to do everything at once. It's like the waiters operate on priority queue data structures rather than a basic queue.

As I was ordering, the waiter realized I didn't speak Croatian very well... I'm not sure what happened, but we ended up communicating in German instead. I don't know how it was established that we could do this, but that's what happened. When you order here, the waiter will give you a receipt (or I guess bill) as soon as you get your food. You're supposed to flag him down after you're done to pay it. No one here takes credit or debit cards. It's a total cash culture.

So yeah, that was not really a huge momentous event at all. I remember the first time I ate in a fancy restaurant by myself. I thought it was going to be weird. It wasn't. This wasn't either, not that I thought it would be. 


Untitled by fartprincess
Meet the Pyro.

On the way back, I walked through the botanical garden. It was much different now that it was like 25 degrees out and not 0. 

Untitled by fartprincess

But I didn't want to stick around for that long because at this point I was carrying a plastic store bag with my notebook, a pen, my money, keys, and a bottle of sunblock that seemingly had the density of a dying sun when lugged in my arms. 

I went into Pan Pek before heading upstairs. I kind of bit my tongue pronouncing the item I was ordering. I do that when I say words that start with Š. I'm not sure why. I had a very heavy drawl in my voice when I did it this time and unlike other times where people haven't said anything to me, she felt certain enough that I was not from here that she asked me, oddly in Croatian, where I was from. "America." Her reaction was awesome. She kind of waved her hand in the air and said, "Ooooh" as if she were going to follow up the thought with, "majestic and fancy!" Her entire attitude towards me suddenly changed as if she thought I were some sort of member of royal court, despite the fact that I look totally disheveled and overheated. And then she turned skeptical and asked, "Why are you here?"

Crazy Shit in the US


I woke up this morning to hear loud talk radio playing. Like American talk radio. I was disoriented by it. I couldn't figure out why it was on and all I could hear were some words like "explosions" and "shooter." I thought, "Fuck," stumbled out into the hallway. allixsenos was sitting in his office. I asked, "Are you still awake or are you just up really early?" "Still up!" It was like 9AM, and he was telling me about all the crazy things that were happening right that moment. This was before they had identified the 2 guys. At that moment it was just "The police are chasing 2 people and there are explosives going off in Boston and they're about to do a controlled detonation." 

I didn't really feel that far or removed from it. Borders are just invisible lines. It doesn't matter if I were in Texas or Croatia... I was still hearing all the news. It still felt just as crazy. But what it reminded me of, and what so many people seem to have pushed into their folder of lost memories, is the DC sniper shootings from 2002. No one thinks about that anymore. It's just gone into the depths of history.

I didn't watch too much of the news coverage, but I did catch an interview with the roommate of the 2 guys. I'm not sure where he was originally from (I'm only making a note of this because he was having trouble communicating his thoughts in English). He was clearly irritated by the people interviewing him, yelling, "I DON'T KNOW." He had signed a search warrant and let police into the apartment. They were asking him how he felt. I noticed something interesting when this happened. He yelled out, "I WAS SCARED." As he yelled this, his hands made what is the ASL sign for "scared." And when I thought about that, I realized people make that sign a lot. But I don't know why it is affiliated with the emotion of fear.

Scared by fartprincess

As I have been working with ASL, I am noticing bits of visual language that transcend the deaf community. Visual language is very, very ubiquitous. It's my quest, as it is with every language I learn, to figure out where that ubiquity stems from :) 



-Aimee

© 2013 - 2024 fartprincess
Comments1
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
lost-angle's avatar
ASL is way up on my list of things I want to learn. I've always been a "hand-talker" (someone who gestures a lot while speaking), it would be nice if my gestures actually meant something instead of gibberish. Also, the younger toddlers I work with almost all learn sign language these days, because children have that level of dexterity before they have the ability to speak. Being able to properly sign with them as I'm speaking would help their ability to communicate immensely and that's just awesome (fewer temper tantrums).

:heart: