Police, meat and booze

Ahh, Friday. Last night was my first night with my host family. It went well, not awkward like some of the girls said theirs was. I know I can be quiet when I first meet people, but they are both very outgoing and nice, and they are so adorable and funny. I really hope they like me and accept me into their lives well.

Today, we had to get registered at the police station. It took forever. We waited in line for almost two hours with a bunch of other people to get registered. Afterwards, my host parents had to go to work, so I had until 3:30 to wander the city by myself. I walked around for awhile and then it started to rain, so I got on a tram number that I'd never been on before. I just rode it until the end of the line, and rode it back into the town center. It didn't take very long, so then I just went for a walk around the main square by myself. I was going to try to find lunch somehwere and ran into a few other girls from the program.

I ate this meaty sandwich. I was nervous when ordering it from a stand on the walkway, and even more nervous when I watched the lady behind the counter shave off sheets of meat from a huge, rotating cylinder of sausage. The lettuce and tomato made the sandwich a lot easier to eat, and there was some sort of spicy sauce on the delicious bread that was awesome. After I got tired of the sandwich itself, I just ate the spicy saucy bread.

Anyway, the afternoon we spent on language classes and two younger people came in to talk to us about places to go in Zagreb. They told us about restaurants and bars and clubs and stuff. They told us about these "turbo folk" clubs, where models and football players and famous people go and they play Serbian and Bosnian and Albanian music. They made them sound really glamorous, but violent and said that there is "people dancing on tables and stomping on glasses and Italian mobsters watching girls walk around in short skirts. And then they told us we should go to them.

This evening my host parents took me over to their friends' house where we ate dinner and had drinks. They told them that because I can't drink in the US, with them I am only allowed to drink alcohol. We had mojitos (clearly a traditional Croatian beverage), and some sort of cherry liqueur from Dalmatia. Another lovely night in Zagreb.