Zagreb Restoran Dvorisce
We had a wonderful meal at the Restoran Dvorisce. The local Croatian wine was very good and the food excellent: Carolyn had the spaghetti with crab and I had swordfish. The restaurant is stylish and clean and the service was excellent.
The night before we ate at Masklin I Lata, a cute little local homestyle restaurant with a great selection of local brandies. I had vegetable farina soup, Carolyn tomato rice. She had seafood risotto and I seafood spaghetti. All excellent.
Zagreb Strip Club
We went to a strip club in Zagreb on Andreje Hebranga Street at Ulica Gajeva. The club was stylish and upscale with very attractive women. Carolyn and I asked one of the very polite attendants what the process was and he helpfully explained:
A group of one or more men come in, and are charged an entry fee of 100 Kuna each (about $20 US at the moment). About two girls per guy sit around them and chit chat and smile and flirt (they don’t for a couple – they’re not quite that progressive yet). Eventually they ask you’d buy them a drink. The girls “drink only champagne” and while the rest of the drinks are very reasonable for a strip club (about 40 Kuna, but fairly light on the alcohol) Champagne is expensive: the menu lists 12 liters of champagne for 60,000 Kuna. Clearly the drink is a small part of the deal – the Champagne is not for the guest. If you want champagne, a strip club is not the place to go. They also list table dances (about 350 Kuna) and lap dances (about 500).
We had a few regular drinks, watched the girls go through their routines for a bit and then left. The wiki travel page seems a bit timid about strip clubs in the Balkans, but the whole process was straight-forward enough and while not a bargain compared to US standards, not a rip off either.
The sex shop with the funny icons was close to another restaurant we went to. The strip club was minimally marked on the outside and we just happened to walk by the first night we were there.
Lufthansa @ Bologna
Due to some bizarre construction at the Bologna airport (take an immediate illegal U-turn when you come up out of the underpass rather than driving half way around the airport to the rotary and save 5 minutes) we arrived at check in for our BLQ-FRA flight about 30 seconds after the agent had closed it.
As we walked up she said curtly, “the flight is closed.” We asked how much we had missed it by and she said “the flight is closed.” We asked if we could get on the next flight at 18:10 and she said “Maybe, I will get to you in a few minutes.”
So we stand around pleasantly and wait. Eventually she takes our passports and swipes them, a few seconds later she gives us a big smile and says she’s sorry and she will make a call and thinks we can get on the plane after all…
And after all that, the plane was 20 minutes late. .