This morning I was drinking tea in my kitchen in Zagreb. Now I’m having a beer in Italy, in Trieste.
My favourite thing about Europe is how you can hop on a bus and be in a whole other country just a few hours later.
But I am also completely amazed at how close I am to home, yet how different it is. I mean, this isn’t a whole other continent or anything, but it’s still so different.
Take this bar. Noone is smoking. There’s food, but it’s not a restaurant. It’s cosy and casual, and not even remotely pretentious.
You could not find this bar the length and breadth of Croatia.
The language is different, the cuisine, the approach to food, how to spend Saturday night. But just a few hundred metres away is Slovenia, and not much further than that is Croatia. How can these rather different cultures share such small geographic places?
The world is so small that you can catch a bus to find yourself somewhere completely different. And it is so large that it can fit all these different cultures in it.
Sante.
