Suchst du nach der deutschen Version dieses Textes? Die findest du hier.

 

Hi everybody,

Today’s post will be a bit longer for a variety of reasons.

I arrived at home in the evening yesterday (where from? I’ll tell you later), wanted to unlock my door and thereby realized that I could open it after turning the key once without even using the door handle. There has obviously been a burglary at my flat and quite a few really expensive and also brand new technical devices have been stolen among the rest of my money. The thing that saddens me the most is that all my data is now lost forever since not only my laptop with the original data, but also my hard disk drive with the secured data has been stolen, i.e. all my projects, important documents, compositions, ideas, memories caught as pictures and texts, holiday videos et cetera are now gone. I’m currently writing this post with my small notebook which is the only thing that remained here.
Just so you don’t get the impression that people are robbed here every three weeks: everyone I talked to so far was quite shocked and told me that this is very unusual for such a small and safe town as Varazdin is; things like this rarely happen. It’s a pity though that it happened exactly to me after my first few weeks here.
Now I’ll just try to take the best out of it. The things I mentioned in my first post are still here; bed, sofa, table, Wi-Fi – I will still survive here.

Most likely all of that could only happen because my weekend was very nice.
On Thursday afternoon I took a bus to Pula, a harbour city located in the southwest of the country, to visit some friends from Ravensburg that were on a school trip there. I arrived at their campground and wanted to simply walk past the barrier at the entrance, but a young man destroyed my plans of sleeping in the bungalow my friends were staying in without paying anything by telling me in perfect German that I could either only stay until midnight or would have to rent an own apartment for the night. Due to my inexistent variety of choices concerning this matter (because I wouldn’t have had a place to sleep if I had left at midnight) I stood in a big three-room apartment with balcony ten minutes later.
The following evening with my friends went just like I planned it and does not require any further explanation.

On the next morning I somehow had to get to the centre of Pula from the campground – which is located a bit outside of the city – in order to catch a bus going to Rijeka, another bigger city which is roughly 3 hours away from Pula. However after I had had to pay the rent for the apartment – money that I didn’t plan on spending – I was lacking money for a taxi. Therefore I started walking, firm to the hope that the 7 kilometers I had seen on Google Maps would also refer to a journey by foot. Hope dies last, but in my case it died pretty soon unfortunately. Of course nobody before me had the ridiculous idea of walking from the campground to Pula, which is why there are no footpaths at all on that route. In the subsequent hour I felt the breeze of the cars driving by in my hair once in a while, wandered through a paintball field (which was not used at that time, fortunately), collected a bunch of sticks and thorns with my legs, devoured a pack of chocolate croissants and two liters of Coke and meanwhile had to fight with the fact that I had apparently drunk one or two glasses of water too many on the previous evening. Finally I arrived at the main bus station after a merciful inhabitant had seen the crazy pilgrim walking towards the city and simply picked me up by car to drive me the last meters. That was when I realized that I still would have had enough money for a taxi, but the greedy part of my brain honored my sacrifice anyway. The rest of the day was quite unspectacular in comparison to that and I was able to get on the bus to Krk (“capital city” of the Croatian island with the same name) in which Icky, Alina and Miri, “kulturweit” volunteers from Zagreb/Croatia and Ptuj/Slovenia, were already sitting. We four spent the weekend on Krk in an apartment.
Originally there should have been two other volunteers in the bus, Ruth and Julian from Sarajevo/Bosnia, but there were some complications. Julian was lacking a functional credit card and also missed that bus by about 5 minutes; Ruth was lacking a passport which was why she had to go back home again without even passing the Bosnian-Croatian border. Of course Julian had relied on her functional credit card that was going home with her again, so he had to find other ways to get to us – after all, he made it on Saturday morning. Due to our extremely exhausting working life we enjoyed those days by relaxing a lot and celebrating Icky’s birthday on Sunday midnight – all in all it was a very nice weekend.

Since there’s not much to tell about my working life at the moment, I’ll list some things here that I noticed in the past days and weeks.

Cooking pasta takes 13 minutes here. Completely independent of what the box says or what shape they are. This unification eases my life as an amateur cook with little experience enormously.

The moral concerning homework is an additional mutuality of Croatian and German students; I witnessed a class where overwhelming 10 % out of 10 students had done their homework.

When I’m sitting in my kitchen eating or cooking, I never really feel alone because the radio that’s playing in the café on the ground floor is audible there. The radio station plays a quite weird mix between the mainstream music I’m used to from German radio (including “Problem” by Iggy Azelia with a minimum rate of 15 times per day) and my rather unknown favourite music.

Either I have only got to know the good parts of the town yet or my first impression is in fact correct: Varazdin seems to be an extraordinarily clean town. The streets are almost free of any kinds of garbage and cigarette stubs are a rare thing on the footpaths. Good job.

That’s it for today; hopefully the news will start better next time. Due to my technical possibilities I can’t upload pictures at the moment, but I’ll publish the full load as soon as I can.

Greetings from the late-summer-early-autumn-like Varazdin

Florin.

In the original post I put a riddle here which unfortunately can’t be translated to English because it is based on a phonetic similarity in German. The riddle category will be continued until the end of my blog though, and I will be able to translate the forthcoming ones to English. :)