36 hours in Zagreb

Alex Crevar, a New York Times correspondent, spent 36 hours in Zagreb and wrote an article about his impressions and experiences.
"The Croatian capital is in the midst of an identity crisis. Geographically, Croatia is indisputably part of the Balkan Peninsula, but call a chic Zagrebian Balkan and prepare to get an earful. While Zagreb’s vibe is indeed more Vienna than, say, Belgrade, it can also be deliciously rough-and-tumble. Zagreb is haggling with thick-fingered, green-market farmers and wee-hour clubbing with boisterous Slavs — both just beneath the mammoth spires of the city’s cathedral. It’s a leggy, high-heeled blonde visiting a bloody-aproned fishmonger. And it’s the construction of a new Museum of Contemporary Art — due to open by year’s end — and the avant-garde validation that the city hopes it will bring." You can read the rest of the article here.
I can't blame Crevar for believing that the new Museum of Contemporary Art is due to open by the end of this year. It was due to be opened by the end of last year, the end the year before last year, and so on. I bet Croatia will have joined the EU before we can finally see some modern art in Zagreb. The location of the museum is in Novi Zagreb, behind my back from where I took the picture above.
To spend 36 hours in a town as a journalist is not too short. Zagreb's problem, however, is that the average tourist doesn't spend more time either. One or two nights, and that's it. I can think of many ways to keep tourists much longer in town, but unfortunately the Zagreb Tourist Board (ZTB) suffers from a complete lack of imagination.

Update
As I wrote before, Croatian media closely monitor foreign media. If a foreign paper writes something about Croatia then that's considered news. (Of course, I wrote about the NYT article too, but with all respect for my blog, I would not call it media).
Javno fabricated a conclusion that is clearly meant for Croats who've never visited the Austrian capital: "Like Vienna - only more chaotic"
Jutarnji list writes: "NYT: Zagreb goes through an identity crisis" and Večernji list reports more or less the same.
Meanwhile readers started discussing whether the Croatian papers have correctly conveyed the message from the NYT. Somebody urged the editor of Večernji to find a Croatian journalist who understands English, as the English article is "way more positive" than one would think reading Večernji's interpretation.
You see, navel-gazing is the popular pastime here.

Croatian Crescent's summer vacation

This is my 100th post on this blog. Time for a beer and a break. I'm going on vacation for two weeks.
I have never had more visitors than the last two days, but almost none of them showed interest for the advertisements on this weblog. I can't even fill up my rent-a-car tank with the money that Google Adsense owes me.
The Croatian Tourist Organization wants us spend our holidays in Croatia. With this spot they are trying to seduce us to get sunburned on the Adriatic coast instead of the Canary Islands, Ibiza or Turkey.
It says: Kad srce kaže ljeto, kaže Hrvatska. Tako lijepo, tako naša (When the heart says summer, it says Croatia. So beautiful, so ours.) There is also a Serbian version: Kad srce kaže leto, kaže Jadran. Jadran means Adriatic, a more neutral term than "Croatia" to appease the Serbs?
Croatia is not mine, but it is for sure beautiful and a great destination to spend your summer vacation. Vidimo se.

Free tram rides in Zagreb

Did you know that it is cheaper to ride the dazzling efficient subway of Tokyo than to hop on a old tram in Zagreb? A single ticket in Croatia's capital costs more than a euro (8 kuna). Even if you are lucky to get onto one of the new trams, it still is a lot of money. As the tram often shares the lane with cars, in the main shopping street Ilica for example, it moves pretty slowly.
Responsible for Zagreb's public transportation is ZET. Until recently ZET distinguished itself by a complete lack of innovation. To give a few examples: the fancy displays in the new trams say that "this tram has been financed by the citizens of Zagreb" but don't show the next stop; tram and bus stops in suburbs often don't have a name; some stops are nothing more than a small sign hanging on overhead power lines; stops don't have timetables...
But now ZET made a smart move. To fight the number of cars in the center of Zagreb, ZET announced that citizens don't have to pay for the first two stops from and to the main square. In other words, from Trg bana Josipa Jelačića (fortunately also known as "trg") you can ride any tram in any direction for free with a maximum of two stops (the colored lines below). That basically covers the part of town that is of interest to visitors.

Tourists are, of course, no citizens of Croatia, but I doubt anyone will ask you to show your passport. Also, the free travel guide Zagreb in your pocket mentions the free tram rides, so I guess it's save for tourists. The number of tourists in the first quarter of 2009 is down with 8 percent, so you should be treated as a king anyway.

Crime numbers

There has been a lot of talk lately about crime and corruption in Croatia. Corruption statistics are hard to get by, as the nature of corruption doesn't encourage people to talk about it. Concerning crime, I found the following data on the HRT website, under the title: "Foreigners are not only victims".
Compared to 2005 the number of criminal acts of which foreigners were victim fell from 4630 to 3481 last year. From 2773 something got stolen, 52 foreigners got severely injured, 45 were threatened, and 30 got robbed. There were two cases of rape and ten murders.
Many foreigners lose their lives in road accidents, last year 64 of them. 267 strangers got injured, which is twenty percent less than in 2007.
3025 foreigners were involved in criminal acts, mostly related to drugs (1282), eluding the customs control (582), theft (239) and falsification of documents (222). Ten were denounced to the police for murder, 29 for inflicting severe injuries and another ten for rape.
The only thing that surprises me is the number of murders (10), both committed by and inflicted upon foreigners. That is quite a lot. The number is not broken down by nationality, so it might be that most of them of Serbs and Bosnians (and they are generally not tourists), I don't know.

The British conspiracy against Croatia

Croats love conspiracy theories. Also, they are very touchy when it comes to their beautiful homeland. Therefore, if someone criticizes Croatia it must be that that person has a reason, a hidden motive for doing so. After a critical BBC report about crime and corruption in Croatia, Croatian politicians resorted to stereotype conspiracy theories.
More about that later. First the critique on Croatia. Yesterday I referred to a BBC article, which was actually based on a BBC Radio 4 report. You can listen to it online. The essence is that on the surface Croatia is a fantastic country, but underneath... Corruption, organized crime, murder.
As if that was not enough, the The Economist ran a worrying article on Croatia too. Already the title "A Balkan state in balk" is considered offensive by many Croats, as they believe that Croatia is not a Balkan country. The article mostly concerns the Slovenian blockade of Croatia's EU negotiations.
The sting, however, is in this passage: "Even without the Slovene problem, the Croats have a lot still to do to satisfy Brussels. One big difficulty will be a reform of shipbuilding, which employs as many as 17,000 people, but survives only with huge subsidies. Other profferings of public largesse designed to sweeten voters before the local elections are also causing trouble. Many economists said the government could not afford the public-sector wage rises of 6% it announced in January. Now deteriorating public finances have forced a humiliating reversal of the decision. The IMF has joined critics in arguing that Croatia must shrink its public sector."
I think The Economist is perfectly right. Croats are led to believe that the border dispute with Slovenia is the only thing that keeps Croatia out of the EU. Economic reforms, which are so necessary, are hardly being discussed. A great deal of Croatia's moribund industry and agriculture might be wiped out by European competition once the protective tariffs are eliminated. It is very difficult to find out how high the import tariff (or legalized theft, if you like) for, say, wine is, but a glance at the wine section of a Croatian supermarket tells me it is pretty high. There are not many foreign wines on the shelves, and those available are ridiculously expensive.
How did Croatian politicians respond to these harsh articles? Let me start saying that I can perfectly understand that Croatia is unhappy with these negative reports. Foreign tourists are supposed to save the Croatian economy and tourism is a very vulnerable sector. If some shit happens in Kosovo, people rule out Croatia as a holiday destination. As simple as that.
Instead of taking some criticism to heart, prime minister Sanadar said: "Some regret that we have more and more tourists", suggesting that other countries envy Croatia for its competitive edge in tourism. Other ministers used words like "malicious", "biased" and "vicious". I heard Foreign Minister Gordan Jandroković saying that is it suspicious that this report came right at the beginning of the tourist season... Or take the opening sentence of the HRT website: "It seems that the British media are united in depicting Croatia as a Third World country". Well, we are talking about the state-run national TV here. Self-reflection is not their strongest point.
It reminds me of the Croatian anger over an Australian TV show about the apathetic attitude of Dubrovnik's police when an Austrian girl went missing. Why are they doing this to us? They hate us. They want to harm Croatia. That is the typical childish response.

Everybody loves Croatia (less)

On the day that media speculate about the political future of Tourism minister Bajs, there is even more bad news for the man already under fire. First, the BBC has a lengthy article on its website about Croatia with the title "Croatia cursed by crime and corruption". It reads:
"Britain's Foreign Office is warning visitors to Croatia this summer to beware of a threat from organised crime, following a number of assassinations and attacks on prominent figures, reports Matt Prodger. "We heard a very loud and low noise, something like voooom!" On the evening of 23 October 2008, Irena Scuric was eating.." You can read the rest here.
I heard the "voooom" too, as I was waiting for the tram on Zagreb's main square. First I thought the cannon on the Lotrščak Tower was fired. Every day, precisely at noon, the old cannon fires, something that can be heard at great distance. As it was around 17.30 I guessed they fired it for a special reason.
When I came home, I found out that the "voooom" was a blast that blew up Ivo Pukanić, a prominent journalist, and his car.
Once more the BBC. "Car bombs are one thing, corruption another, and you do not have to go far to find it. The newspapers are full of stories of dodgy dealings and prominent figures with unexplained wealth."
All of this is true, partly also because Croatian newspapers largely ignore things that happen elsewhere in the world. But is it necessary to warn visitors for "a threat from organised crime"? I think that is a bit too much. There is the unsolved murder case in Dubrovnik, but generally Croatia is a very safe country. Just stay away from politics, war criminals, business tycoons, and you'll be pretty safe.
Anyway, the Foreign Office's warning comes at a delicate moment. Croatia is hit hard by the economic crisis and fears for a bad tourist season. Additional bad news is that less Europeans plan to spend their holidays in Croatia. According to the EU's Survey on the attitudes of Europeans towards tourism 2,3 percent all non-domestic holidays would be spend in Croatia, significantly less than the 3,4 percent of 2008.
This fact is lost on Croatian media. Novi list, for example writes under the title "Europeans love Croatia" that "one out of four Slovenes, 8 percent of the Czechs, 3 percent of the Poles and 13 percent of the Romanians and Slovaks" plan to go to Croatia in 2009.
Wonderful! But still bad news if you know that in 2008 an amazing 41 percent of Slovenian holidaymakers went to Croatia, 20 percent of the Slovaks, 18 percent of the Czechs, and so on.
So, when you do come to Croatia, you might have it all for yourself. Not so bad.

Open doors to the East

We have been waiting for several months, with clamped firsts and and in full hope. Today it was finally delivered: the baby of Damir Bajs, Croatia's Minister of Tourism. Alas! The baby, with the name "Action plan for tourism", is stillborn.
Let me start mentioning a proposed measure that makes sense. Bajs wants to ease the visa regime for tourists from Russia and Ukraine. Also, some local fees will be cut. But that's pretty much it. It is still being considered whether visa requirements will be suspended for Chinese and Indian tourists too. One out of three people in the world is Chinese or Indian, but Croatia is not sure if it's smart to let them save the Croatian economy (every fifth Croatian euro is earned in tourism). Croatia's VAT rate of 22 percent might be cut next year at earliest, so the Russians and Ukrainians won't come here for a cheap cup of coffee.
I would have appreciated if, for example, Bajs had urged tourist agencies to be more customer friendly, to provide accurate information and, most important, to offer tourists access to Croatian cultural heritage. I can give countless examples of how Zagreb could become a much more interesting tourist destination than the rather dormant provincial town it is now. However, this example is from Križevci, a small town northwest of Zagreb I visited last weekend. You might say: "Who cares about that part of Croatia?" But then you don't know how much Croats expect from rural tourism and how frequently one can see reports on Croatian state TV about the "rich cultural heritage" of town like Križevci (not to mention places without any obvious touristic potential, like Sisak).
Here is a photo manual:
1) If you have no car, take a train or bus. If you are from Africa or Asia, please ignore the few idiots that make fun of you (this is not a joke, unfortunately).
2) Križevci welcomes you in Croatian. "City of history, culture and the Križevci statutes".
3) Walk to the centre. This 35-minute walk will lead you along the socialist history of Croatia. As it is unclear where the centre is, please follow the locals who have left the train with you.
In the good old days, factories provided much more than just an income. So did and do the local tileworks. (Radnik means "Worker")

4) Pay attention to culture and nature. You'll see storks all over.
5) Visit the true treasure of Križevci: its churches. There are normally closed, so you need ask the nuns to open the doors.
The director of the local museum proved to be very kind and helpful.
6) Sit back and relax with a beer.
Finally, have a second beer to wash away your grief over the fact that you couldn't visit the beautiful Kalnik mountain range because there is only one bus per day from Križevci.