Perth to Dubai to Zagreb, Croatia (days 48 to 49 - Feb. 23, 2023 to Feb. 24, 2023)
Blunder in Dubai :D
Day 48
After my 11 hour flight from Perth to Dubai, I set out from the airport (around 5:30am) to what I thought was going to be my hotel for the night. I still don’t know why I opened up my phone calendar, but as I took the Uber from the airport, I happened to see that there was another flight scheduled for 9:20am, the same morning as I arrived in Dubai. I thought it was probably a mistake on the calendar, so I looked up my ticket to Zagreb, just to make sure. Turns out I was supposed to be on another flight about 3 hours from the current time :D It was one of those oh crap moments, haha. I looked at the ticket about three or four times, just to be really sure, hoping I was just misreading after a long flight. I searched online for the next flight to Zagreb, maybe I could find one for the next day instead. The next available flight was 2 days away, and I didn’t want to wait that long and pay for two hotels at the same time, not to mention the ticket wasn’t the cheapest. Sheepishly I let my driver know that we had to go back the direction we started. Letting the driver know was probably the worst part of it all :D
I am really glad I caught it when I did! It was a bit of a shame, the sunrise was looking really nice and I had planned to stay by a marina for the night. Would have been some good photo opportunities. I’d like to think little Liam was probably distracting me when I bought the tickets and booked my hotel :D Turns out the hotel had been booked for the night previous to when I arrived. Gotta pay a little more attention next time around I guess :D Maybe I am getting too comfortable with all this traveling.
Made the next flight, an additional 6 hours of flight time I had not been expecting. A couple movies really helped kill the time on the flight. Arriving in Zagreb at 1pm, I headed over to the hotel to drop off my baggage and clean up after the long 24 hours of travel since Perth.
The weather in Zagreb was noticeably cooler than Australia, back to winter travel again. It is still pretty mild here, in the mid to high 50s. Most people are bundled up like it is freezing out, but a t-shirt is enough for me. I made my way outside for a quick walk, I was pretty exhausted after all the travel and now had to deal with 7 hours of time difference.
Already I could tell that this was going to be a really sweet place to explore. My hotel is right along a large open square which has tram lines running through it. Many different people hang around waiting for their tram to arrive. The buildings seemed to have a lot of character. Lots of run-down older buildings, and a surprising amount of vandalism in the area. There are lots of construction projects going on, I image they are trying to get a lot of the work done in time for tourist season.
Had a quick bite to eat at one of the many bakeries within 5 minutes of the hotel and went to bed, a bit too early, but I was pretty wiped out.
Day 49
A little glimmer of sunlight was hitting the buildings across the street just outside my hotel room curtains. That made me happy to see, I find it much more difficult to take interesting photos when it is overcast out. With the sunlight, you can get much more interesting light and shadow contrasts.
There is so much to see in the area around my hotel. You can pick any direction to walk and continually to run into interesting places. I really like the bakeries that you can find, seemingly everywhere you look. Stopped at one today again for a donut and cappuccino. Spent the majority of the day simply wandering the streets taking photos. Ended up taking over a thousand just today :D Slightly trigger happy! I won’t go into much detail about what each place is for now, but just let the pictures do the talking.
I think I am really going to enjoy my time here. There are so many cool spots to take photos. The beautiful old buildings, graffiti, public transit stops, street musicians, market areas, and people, young and old, make for some great photo subjects. You could just sit in one area for an hour or two and not run out of interesting photo opportunities.
The first 26 days of my trip can be found at: https://jwworldtour2023.blogspot.com/
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