A Taste of Zagreb

By QIONG WANG

I cut through Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, a rather low-key European capital city. I did not know what to expect prior to arrival. I only got to spend a couple hours near the city’s central railway station. Across from it stood a palace-like building with an open plaza filled with pigeons. It was drizzling, windy and cloudy, not much color to see, except for the butter-like color used on many historic buildings. Somehow, this miserable gloomy weather casted perfectly an aura of solemnity, glory and hardships upon the surroundings, leaving a tone of melancholy floating in the damp air. There, I could savor a sense of age, power and past brilliance even without much knowledge of what it really was, probably an influence of the former Russian empire. I would really like to freeze everything I saw just the way it was at that moment, I thought to myself as I left.