What's there to do in Zagreb?

What’s there to do in Zagreb?

The answer to this might surprise you! Or not, it just depends on whether you’re easily surprised or not. But the answer is: No! there isn’t much to do in Zagreb, I knew that before we left for Zagreb and that’s why I only planned to stay there for a night. We arrived at 12 pm. The bus station is really near the city center and so you could just walk to all the attractions, I mean the limited number of attractions that this city has anyway. I've got nothing against Zagreb by the way, I had a superb time there; it's just that I'm saying this with genuine intentions that there isn’t much to do there.

I will list Zagreb’s attractions that I visited one after the other but I'm going to save the best for last. The last experience made the entire trip worth it. All of the attractions are right next to each other so you wouldn’t need to use much of public transportation. The whole city is so within reach, it's much smaller than Budapest. I didn’t go to every attraction there, especially not all the museums but we went to the most important ones.

1) Ban Jelačić Square

This is the main square of the city. It's nothing majestic but most of the main attractions, shopping centers and the tram are near it. This is the main square where people were gathered to watch the world cup semi-finals and the finals but more on that later on. The square wasn’t a sight to behold but it is a part of their history so we hung around there for little bit. There was a tourist information center which I liked quite a bit, they had all these brochures and were super friendly. There was also a shopping center nearby there which I can’t seem to recall the name which we liked quite a bit, we went there to change money. The exchange rate was 7. 1 kunas for every Euro. That means if you changed 100 Euros you would get 710 Kunas.

Source

The square connects the lower and upper town of Zagreb together and there are also a lot of good restaurants nearby. Actually, I’d honestly say that we had a lot of good food and fruits in Zagreb. The fruits and vegetables were more diverse than here in Hungary. They had like 5 different types of berries, one more delicious than the other.

2) Dolac Market

Located up a bunch of stairs about a minute or two away from the Ban Jelacic square; dolac market is your typical day market. Full of vendors selling flowers, fresh fruits, fresh vegetables, fresh poultry, some clothes and souvenirs. Unlike majority of fresh markets that you go to and they are dirty and smelly, this one was really clean. People in Croatia generally smile a lot, and so the atmosphere in the market was very light and friendly. They close around 2 pm-3 pm so if you want to check it out, be sure to go before that.

I really liked the flower vendors, they were so bubbly and their stalls were beautiful. We bought some berries, whose name I don’t know and from there and later on devoured it in our Airbnb room. The prices were really good, slightly cheaper than Hungary for the fruits and vegetables.

As for the clothes, they didn’t seem that interesting except all the football merch. I mean, literally 5 out of every 10 people, especially young children, were wearing football jerseys and all of them having “Modric” written on their backs. The hype was amazing; you could see the Croats and the tourists all buying so many football related merch such as caps, shirts, towels, cards and posters. This was on a Monday and on the Wednesday the historic game between Croatia and England took place. Now if you ask anyone that knows me, they’d tell you that I don’t know jack shit about football and so I didn’t care much about the world cup, not after Iran was eliminated anyway. But once we entered Croatia, the hype overtook me and I witnessed the best football game that Wednesday but I’ll write more about that later on.

3) Zagreb cathedral and treasury

When you travel to the Middle East or other Muslim countries you see a lot of mosques, whereas when you travel across Europe you see a lot of churches and cathedrals but, although they are beautiful, they can get repetitive after some time. The church and cathedral of Zagreb was nothing short of beautiful, we walked in the upper town for quite some time and reached this place. The inside of it was beautiful and, before coming in, there was a written poster that prohibited people entering the church with shorts and basically inappropriate clothing.

Source

The most interesting thing about this cathedral is that its style is neo gothic it is the tallest building in all of Croatia. That’s pretty much all I learnt.

4) Museum of Broken relationships

There are a lot of museums in Zagreb, art, history and culture museums. You could go to all those museums, that’s your choice but if there is one place that I would recommend you to go in all of Zagreb, is this place. I can’t stress how touching this place was. Let me start from the beginning. So before going to Zagreb, I had heard a lot about this museum from friends who had visited it before and I've seen a lot of posts on Instagram about it. So we made it our mission to go here.

Source

The story behind the museum is about a that couple broke up who shared a bunny toy which they would take along with one of them if they were traveling or away. When they broke up they were trying to decide who would get to keep the toy bunny that they had. They joked about the need of creating a museum in order to leave all of their belongings in there. After a while the crazy idea became serious and now it's a reality.

After getting serious about the idea, the couple founded this museum, of which there have been pop up versions of it in metropolitan cities such as Los Angeles, New York and Chicago but the original version is here in Zagreb. Basically actual people have donated items from their actual relationships to the museum, or it’s better if I say their broken relationships. There are not just relationships as in couples but also broken parental relationships and other kinds. I actually think the latter was much harder to take; my friend and I were both welling up while checking them out.

The ticket prices were 40 Kunas for normal visitors and 30 Kunas for students, that’s less than 5 euros for a student ticket. The tour of the whole museum took us about 1 hour and a half, you can even take longer. The texts are written in the local language and in English; however audio sets are available if you aren’t dominant in English and they will give you a brochure which has all of the items written in your desired language as well. There are so many stories and so many items, you could even spend days reading them. I had a few favorite ones, I’ll attach them here and it’ll give you guys a feeling in regards to what’s the museum is about.

Overall, this museum was something that I had never seen before. There is nothing else like and it makes it a very unique experience to say the least. It made my entire Zagreb trip worth it. I felt like I was one a roller coaster of emotions, going from happy to sad to excited to bat shit crazy. Feeling the pain and suffering, the longing, the hope or the hopelessness, seeing it all through the items they chose to leave behind, through their words.

Visit this museum, especially if you have ever been through a rough relationship or a heart break. Trust me it's worth it.

5) Stross Mayer Promenade in Zagreb

We found this one entirely by accident, we were walking around the neighborhood after the museum tour and we stumbled across this space and man I'm so glad we did. After the museum this was definitely the other highlight of our trip. So there is a gate that reads “Stross Mayer” and when you enter it, you see all these benches overlooking the city on the left and a few stalls selling drinks and snacks. There were a lot of people there, even though it was a Monday night, they had live music show sets every hour or so. We walked for a little while, across the promenade. I'm not sure if there were any palm trees though. Anyhow it got dark a bit and we came out of the place and walked outside the Stross Mayer place, there was a fence and you could lean against it and watch the city. It was quite beautiful even though Zagreb didn’t have any of those remarkable buildings that you would point to from afar.

Source

There is also a stairway that you could use to go down from the top of the hill back to the city center. Now as you start to come down, there is this café, I've been trying to find the name but I can’t anywhere. It’s like just there, never mind never mind, I found it! Thank God for Google stalking me wherever I go. Oops, well, actually this has got nothing to do with Google and it’s the fact that we took a picture when we went there and I just found the picture on my camera roll and traced back the location. The name of the bar/café is called Bar & Café Pod Grickim Topom. It's a really romantic and chilled place. We went here after the walk and my friend ordered some wine and I ordered a cake. Yes, I go to a bar and order cakes, I even asked them if they had tea but they didn’t. Anyways, this place offers the safe view, the interior of the café is wooden and there are so many candle lights all around. Ahh it was so romantic that my friend and I both started talking about relationships and our past experiences; but it wasn’t such a good idea to be honest.

I hope that you enjoy this article.

If you are travelling and you are in need of a place to stay, consider airbnb! Using my code you can get 25 Euros off on your first trip. Treat yourself with that money! You’re welcome!

Here you have your Airbnb code.

Photo gallery