Postcard from Zagreb

Greetings from Club Mama, the brainchild of my hosts in Zagreb and the unofficial home of Creative Commons Croatia.

Got to Zagreb on Thursday afternoon for the "Freedom to Creativity" Festival (in Croatian, "sloboda stvaralastvu"). It's the second annual version of the festival and last year was the launch of CC - Croatia. This year the theme is science and technology which is why I'm here. Lectured Thursday night at the exposition - they had translations of open science web sites, including ours, open source organic seeds, and a set of microscopes that lent themselves well to pictures.

Dinner Thursday was with my host Tom at a Dalmatian fish restaurant. He had the black risotto (black from the cuttlefish ink) and I had salt cod with boiled buttered potatoes. Tasty. Although I prefer what a cream poach does to salt cod, this was good. Dessert was a local specialty - caramel cake - which was more akin to a caramel custard or flan, but with rose liquer added for bouquet. First of many double espressos with dessert.

Friday morning I got interviewed by a Croatian TV show. I was told afterwards that it's actually more like "A Current Affair" than "Nova" - last week there was a major story on alien abductions - but that it's also the most popular show about science in the country. You pays your money and you takes your choice. I am excited at the idea that the show is frequently digitized in Bosnia and that DVDs of those digitizations are sometimes available on the black market. Me wantee.

Friday afternoon I lectured at the local university, with a solid turnout (let's just say that in my speeches, there's usually more seats than people, but this time it was a sellout). Both lectures had lots and lots of questions.

Friday night I had dinner with Tom and his girlfriend, Ivana. Broccoli soup and kalbschnitzel. Then we went to the first concert for the festival. Tom and Marcel (my other host) also run the largest electronic music label in the country and were promoting a band's first appearance in Zagreb - MistakeMistake out of Belgrade. If you like Hip-electro- ragga-2-hop reggae-step, there appears to be a serious scene waiting for you in Belgrade. It was a lot of fun. They were followed in short order by Ghetto Booties, three women with laptops. Think a modern, Croatian version of the go-gos but based on electronica. Half liters of strong dark beer were $2. And just so you know, if you see a skinhead with white laces in his shoes, beware. Apparently the ones with black laces are much less likely to stomp you.

Slept late this morning - was expecting a reporter from the local daily to call, but she let me be, apparently - then took a long walk around the center of town, the food market, the cathedral. Ate a slice of quite decent pizza, grabbed some apple brandy and plum brandy from the natural products store around the corner and came back to mama for wireless and coffee. Air france home tomorrow just in time for the super bowl and a burger in southie.

It's nice here. It really brings home the divide between the US and the Balkans though - the people my age lived through a civil war that destroyed an entire way of life, after growing up under socialism. There's a brutal honesty and an awareness of the importance of context, art, language and more that is just nonexistent in the states. We're really lucky. But it's made us a lot more boring, and made us ignore an awful lot of stuff we should pay attention to...

All Zagreb pix here.