Palace Hotel, Zagreb, Croatia

This is the second of three days we're spending in Zagreb before heading to the coast, and the only day we're spending entirely in the city.

In the morning we did a quick bus tour of the major landmarks, followed by a walking tour and then lunch.

The weather here is pretty miserable, in the mid to high 80s and with ridiculous humidity, with thunderstorms in the afternoon. During lunch today the skies just exploded, sending people scurrying. Joanne of course took this as a great time to try out the parka she got at Eddie Bauer, and Pat was there to film it all.

In the afternoon the the Seattle Junior Tamburitzans (SJT from now on) did a couple of informal performances. The first was at a Croatian government-type place (sorry, forgot the exact place; I'll edit when I find out), and the second was at an orphanage the SJTs sponsor and was the highlight of the day.

This orphanage is run by ten nuns and has thirty children (the maximum allowed by the state), ranging from their teens to at least one infant, and including five from one family (down from seven). The state gives the children an allowance of 100 kuna per month, which is the rough equivalent of twenty US dollars. The rest the money required to run the place is via donations, and the SJTs have contributed several thousand dollars over the course of the last 15 or so years.

The kids were just great, and have an amazing attitude. They go to school, date (after bringing in and receiving approval of the person they're interested in by the nuns) and seem to be doing the best you can expect given the situation. They all consider themselves one big family, so much so that they used money from some of their own fundraisers to pay for one of the older children to get their driver's license. Given the lack of funding in general it says a lot about the closeness of the group for them to put up that kind of money for something like that (licenses in Croatia are much more expensive than in the US).

After performing a few songs the kids challenged our kids to a game of football (soccer), which they play on an asphalt square about the size of half a basketball court. These kids are terrific soccer players and they just dominated us, winning 8-0. The closest our side got to scoring was when one of them headed the ball and it accidentally went in the basketball hoop.

BTW, I did get a request to talk about the food, but I'm going to wait until I'm closer to the end of the Croatia leg to do that because it changes quite a bit when we head to the coast. I'll try to remember to do a food-specific post and gallery in a week or so. Long story short: they're big on Ćevapčići and calimari here, and huge on seafoods on the coast. I've tried the Ćevapčići and eagerly await calimari. The other thing that's amazing are the baked goods. Here are some goodies the kids at the orphanage had for us:

Think multiple layers of fila-type dough with custard or fruit filling, topped with powdered sugar. It's somewhat similar to a cookie my mom makes at Christmas called pita, substituting nuts & butter in the filling. I'm told pita is a general term for "pie" and what we had today was called pita as well. If there's any way I can get my hands on some of this stuff and ship it home I'm going to try, because it's really that good.

Tomorrow's a big day: we head out from the city to check out Trakoscan Castle, followed by SJTs first formal performance. The forecast is 91 and thunderstorms, so it should be interesting.