Zagreb: Day 2

My perambulations around this lovely town continue, but I’ve little time to post and so I may have to catch up on the backlog when I come back to the U.S.  I’m also keenly aware that most of the pictures so far are about food, but that’s only because I’ve spent more time sitting in restaurants than touring museums and sights. That will change, though, as I’ve several sights to see, including the Museum of Natural History, where I’m told I’ll be shown actual Neanderthal bones today, and the Museum of Broken Relationships, which I’m very keen to visit.

First, though, dinner on Saturday night. I was already full from a huge lunch, but my generous hosts pressed more food on me. As I requested before I came here, we went to a traditional Croatian restaurant. We began with beer (of course), and rolls with a cheese spread. These rolls had pork cracklings and paprika in them (thanks again to Pavel for identifying the food).

My main course was pašticada, described by Wikipedia like this:

Pašticada is a stewed beef dish cooked in special sauce, popular in Croatia. It is often called Dalmatinska pašticada because it originates in Dalmatia. It requires long and meticulous preparation: first, the meat is pierced and stuffed with garlic, cloves, carrot and bacon, then salted and marinated in vinegar overnight. The marinated beef is then roasted and cooked with roasted bacon, onions, parsley root, nutmeg, prunes, tomato paste, water and prošek up to five hours, depending on meat. After cooking, the vegetables are blended into a sauce. In Dalmatia, it is a meal for important feasts, including weddings. It is usually served with gnocchi or homemade pasta.

It was rich, delicious, and served with gnocchi, great for mopping up the sauce:

Pavel and Igor, wanting lighter food, had kalja, a soup/stew made of cooked lamb and vegetables. There’s a glass of slivovitz (plum brandy, the national tipple) on the side:

For “dessert” we had a dish that wasn’t sweet, and can be served as either a soup, an appetizer, or a main course: štrukli, the Croatian equivalent of pierogi: dough filled with cheese and covered with bread crumbs and sour cream. The dough here, though, is wheat flour rather than potato flour:

The next day we visited the Neanderthal Museum and site in Krapina, a very important place where, during mining operations in 1899, a huge trove of Neanderthal bones and relics were found. Some of those bones were used by Svante Pääbo and his colleagues to get the first Neanderthal DNA sequence, which of course was important in many ways, not the least to show that Neanderthals bred with “modern” Homo sapiens (I consider the two forms to be subspecies rather than full species).

There’s a museum on the site with replicas of Neanderthal bones and dioramas of how they might have lived, as well as a movie and other information about evolution. Here are some shots.

The museum exterior:

A diorama inside; note that one person has lost his hand; this is deliberate, as the movie showed a bear biting off the hand of a hunting Neanderthal man:

A comparison of the skulls modern H. sapiens (H. sapiens sapiens) and Neanderthals (H. sapiens neanderthalensis):

Modern:

Neanderthal:

A neanderthal cranium bit showing the more prominent brow ridges:

And the teeth, larger than those of modern H. sapiens. In a few hours, with luck, I’ll get to see real Neanderthal bones instead of casts.

A reconstruction of where the Neanderthal fossils were found. The cave was blasted out of existence before they found the bones, which were excavated from layers of soil. This is the site where they were found, but the cave is gone:

A stromatolite section in the evolution bit of the Museum. Stromatolites are the earliest “fossils” on Earth, dating back about 3.7 billion years ago, and are the remnants of layers of cyanobacteria (“blue green algae”) built up over years. Moreover, stromatolites are still forming in some saline places on Earth like Shark Bay, Australia.

Here are some modern stromatolites forming in Shark Bay (photo from Wikipedia):

After the visit to the Museum, Pavel, Darko and I repaired to a lovely country inn overlooking a castle for a substantial and delicious lunch. Here’s the restaurant:

While we waited to be seated at the Sunday lunch crowd, we cracked local walnuts, which the restaurant had conveniently provided on a wine barrel, complete with a big wooden mallet to crack them. Pavel is opening one:

Lunch was COPIOUS. We split three dishes: a Croatia “everything plate” with samples of all kinds of meat, veggies, and potatoes, as well as duck (shoot me now) with mlinci, a type of noodle or flatbread (it’s both) made from flour and eggs, baked, and then boiled.

But Pavel and Darko began with a soup made from štrukli, the dish we had for dessert the night before:

Duck with mlinci:

The giant meat platter:

A well-laden table. Darko is on the left, Pavel on the right:

Dessert was Palačinke u vajnšatou – crepes with ground walnuts and wine “chateau”: runny mousse made of white wine, whipped eggs, vanilla and cinnamon. I show the dessert as it was served and then a bit dissected:

It was a terrific meal in a wonderful setting, and we spent several hours eating and chatting, including some discussion of free will. Here’s a view from the restaurant, with a medieval castle atop a nearby hill:

Stay tuned for further adventures. . .