From the Eos/N95/Eee of Simon: Sunday 12th July

We sleep in a bit this morning, (a) because we know breakfast won't
start until 0800 anyway, and (b) because we were a bit tired out after
our hiking and city-seeing last night.

We've got a schedule for the day in the form of a guide of interesting
things to see in the city so we set about finding everything. There are
various nice historical buildings and statues of famous or noteworthy
Croatians, including Nikola Tesla, electrical genius. From memory his
birthday was only a couple of days ago on the 10th July.

Another thing we find of interest is a large golden (well brass or
something similar I assume) semi-spherical object, sitting in the middle
of one of the little squares in Zagreb. This is the "golden sun" which
was put there by an artist whose name escapes me for the moment, but the
sun inspired another artist to create the "Zagreb Solar System", and
this guy has placed 9 other globes around the city of Zagreb, apparently
at the right distance and the correct size to emulate our actual solar
system. We unfortunately didn't have time to find these, as the Sun was
about as tall as Celina, I can guess that just for startes Mercury is
probably the size of a marble. I wonder if they removed Pluto from the
model when it was kicked out of the solar system in '06? :P

Other things that I learned about Zagreb-

-They have a Hotel Esplanade; whether theirs came first, or the one in
St Kilda, I'm not sure
-In certain areas of Zagreb, where a lot of restoration work has been
done on the older buildings, there were a number of street signs
uncovered which had two different names for the streets. At the top, the
name is written in Croatian, and below, in a more gothic looking font,
the original German name is written.
-Zagreb Botanical Garden has turtles in it's pond!
-They love St George killing the dragon (as does every other city in Europe)

Tomorrow it's off to Hungary, Budapest in particular.

6583 - The Espy