In one of the first blog posts here, I wrote about a meeting we had where our bosses were joking about all of their "firsts" that they experienced while working at Metal Shark. Well, I decided that I should balance this by mentioning all of the "lasts" we experienced to Nate and Jacob. For example, our last Monday driving to work, our last Tuesday lunch, our last Wednesday walk from the office, and so on. These conversations were not taken as well as anticipated...
Our work week finished with the three of us wrapping up our final tasks. Nate finished "building the boat" of our passenger sailing ship. It was a very impressive design that Nate singlehandedly completed in Rhino. Jacob got his excel sheet up and running which is an amazing accomplishment. The only issue is, the ship he created it for did not meet ABS requirements so he kept receiving different directives from the Louisiana office asking him to make very slight changes to try and make the structure pass. I believe it's a work in progress. I kept moving along with my drawings, trying to make them pretty and actually printing some out for the shipyard. I got to fold an A3 paper like I was taught in CAD which was pretty neato.
After we finished our last walk from the parking lot to our apartment, our preparations to return to America began. I began packing and clearing out my room while Jacob trekked up to Trsat and Nate was chilling. Ok, so maybe our preparations didn't start yet. But they did start when we met our landlord who was shocked we didn't break anything. After that, we gave all of our herbs and spices to our friend Ola and ate a meal comprised of whatever I could find to cook. I actually can say I don't remember what I cooked for us which might be concerning.
Saturday started with a COVID test. It turns out it's pretty hard to navigate a hospital when most of the signs are in a language you can't read and this resulted in a quick jaunt into the COVID ward before being given exceedingly precise directions to get far away from the COVID ward. We did not come in contact with any patients and only made it a few feet in before one of the staff shooed us out. After this, we were on the road to the nation's capital, Zagreb! When we first got there, the first impression was that this was by far the biggest city we've seen so far. There were even some cool electric cable cars cruising around for environmentally friendly public transportation.
Zagreb was also a great cultural hub with the most famous building being the Zagreb Cathedral, the tallest building in the entire country and the biggest roman catholic cathedral southeast of the Alps (according to Wikipedia). It was quite the sight to behold, with the level of intricate detail only reserved for religious buildings back in the day.
From research, the cathedral has been under construction for some time now but besides that, there were many places in disrepair and even whole streets closed down because of the earthquakes at the end of 2020.
This kind of infrastructural damage is something I've never seen in person before and it was definitely shocking and put a lot of the world into perspective for me. Moving past this, we ran into our friend Prady within the first half-hour of us being in the city of 800,000 people. Very strange odds but we agreed to meet him after we settled into our accommodations. The directions to our accommodations seemed rather peculiar as it brought us through an alleyway into a place I later learned is Grič tunnels. Grič is the name of Zagreb's predecessor which makes up the city center of Zagreb today. From what we understand, these tunnels are just used as fast tracks through the city center but we were very confused initially.
To say I was confused walking into the mouth of a scary blue monster was an understatement. I'm pretty sure there was also a man in a cloak in there holding a strange metal object. I really tried keeping my head down so I can't say much more.
The rest of my fun facts are passed down from Prady who took a tour with some Erasmus students the day before. His mental state may have been influenced by something other than himself during the tour, but we cannot be certain. On our nighttime trek, we set out to the park. Not sure which park, Prady was guiding us. Turns out the first step was to walk in the opposite direction but we did get to see St. Mark's Church, famous for its beautiful roof tiles which is very apparent from any photo you see of it.
The next stop after this was the Stone Gate or Porta di Pietra. From the outside, it doesn't look like much so I neglected to take a picture of it. However, inside this small passageway from the 13th century, there is a shrine to the Mother of God where people constantly pray and I had to pull a picture from the internet because it was an incredible sight to behold. According to the internet, there was a massive fire in the 1700s that destroyed everything in the gate except the stone and a painting of the Mother of God which is still there to this day.
There are a couple of reasons why this information was not emphasized by Prady. The first being that this had nothing to do with his religion. The second and more important one is the witches. So according to Prady, back when Zagreb was still the city of Grič, there was a large fear of witches and people began to develop ways to solve the witch issue. The main one was the calculation of how high witches fly. It was decided that witches could only fly on their brooms at a certain height so the people decided to mount a wrought iron spiked ball on top of the stone gate to catch the witches as they fly over. It was also decided that witches could not weigh more than 50kg since brooms could obviously not lift someone heavier.
After this, Prady discovered the park was way farther than he thought so we parted ways after a bit and we feasted before going to bed early. We woke up at 0500 CET the next morning to get to the airport and after that, I am happy to say that travel was uneventful this time. We got back to Webb at 2000 EST which adds up to around 21 hours of travel.
That's about all I have to say. It was a truly unique experience to be working in a foreign country and none of us regret going. We are all still very grateful to be back home. As far as transitions go, there hasn't been much since we've been kept in rooms but I have noticed that I forget that passersby speak fluent English so I forget to greet them.
Thank you so much to everyone reading our blog, it's been pretty fun to write and I hope it was enjoyable for you to hear about our peculiar adventures!