Zagreb, Idiots!
Did you ever have an encounter with an idiot that keeps you laughing twenty years later?
If you mention to my children the not well worn phrase, “Zagreb, Idiots” they will bust their gut.
In 2003, we traveled to Europe during my sabbatical. Aaron had finished his freshman year of college. Alana was studying for her SATs. Benjamin was anticipating his Bar Mitzvah the following summer. We booked an overnight train from Dubrovnik to Budapest, groggily changing trains in Zagreb. We had half an hour to lurch from one train to the other, with a mandatory detour to the Zagreb ticket office. “In Zagreb you MUST get your ongoing ticket voucher to Hungary stamped,” our travel agent warned us.
We pulled into Zagreb about 5:30 in the morning. Nobody slept well on the train. We found the darkened ticket office and banged on the door. After a few minutes, a couple of mustachioed men, each reminding us of Nintendo’s Mario pushed us aside and went in. They turned on the lights and went to the back to make their coffee.
Tick Tock. We had a train to catch. I banged on the bell and Mario One came out and spoke to me in Croatian. He had not yet had his coffee, and his mood reflected his need for caffeine. I did not understand a word he said. I took out my voucher and showed it to him. I made a stamping motion with my right hand. He looked at me and waved me away. I tried again, this time in French. “Pardonez moi, monsieur, j’ai besoin s’il vous plait” . . . and again the stamping motion. He waved me away and went back to drink his coffee.
With only minutes left, we ran for the Budapest train and barely made it, pulling Alana onto the moving train as it rolled out of the station.
“What are you going to do?” Judi asked breathlessly. “I dunno, what are you gonna do?” I replied. “We’ll hand over the voucher and he can stamp it on the train or wherever.” We shrugged our shoulders and fell asleep as we crossed the border into Hungary.
We were awakened by the sudden opening of our compartment door. The new conductor, dressed in his black uniform came in to examine our documents. I gave him the voucher. My Hungarian is only a tiny bit better than my Croatian (read on and you will understand), but I didn’t understand a word until he took his right hand and made a stamping motion on the voucher. I shrugged my shoulders. He left.
Next stop, a new guy came in dressed in white with epauletes gracing his shoulders. He spoke English. Too bad for us.
“You have to pay 500 Euros,” he told me. I replied, “Sir, here is the voucher.”
“This voucher is no good. No stamp (and again with the hand motion).” I explained as calmly as I could that we went to Zagreb, met the Marios in the station, showed them my voucher, asked for the stamp (again with the hand motion), and they refused. “So you can take the voucher and put whatever stamp you want on it. I am ok with that.”
He shook his head. “Zagreb idiots! This no good. You have to have stamp. 500 Euros or get off train next stop.” He slammed the door.
We were struck dumb. My children’s choir began to sing, “What are you going to do Daddy?”
“Mom will handle it. She is good at these things.” Judi shook her head.
The train journeyed on.
Next stop. Nothing. Phew.
And then the door blew open and a different man, dressed in white with the epauletes plus a broad white official hat with a black brim trimmed in gold and some regal doohickey affixed to its center demanded our documents. I gave him the voucher. Now for the third time we performed the “Zagreb Idiot” theater, complete with the hand motions and explanations and the offer to hand him the voucher to stamp it whenever and wherever he wants. He declined. “500 Euros,” he said sternly.
“I don’t have 500 Euros. I have seven dollars. You can have seven dollars if you want. That’s all that I can do.” I turned my pockets inside out. “And you can have this voucher if you want it. I am sorry.”
He looked at me and my family, giving us a quick study. What was he going to do? Throw five Americans off the train? He was stuck. He had his rules to follow. We were stuck too. We had a paid for voucher rendered worthless by two Mario idiots in Zagreb.
Some thirty years earlier, I spent a teenage summer with Judi doing volunteer work in New Brunswick, New Jersey. It is not commonly known, but New Brunswick then had a sizeable Hungarian population. I asked one of my friends to teach me some Hungarian. I learned two words and committed them to memory. I am sure that my spelling is off, but let me teach them to you, too.
Shoverna urborka means sour pickles.
Nem kell hushlavesh means there is no soup meat.
Only by dint of providence and my inability to forget meaningless things were we saved from being cast off the train in the middle of nowhere.
I glared at the official with the gold trimmed black rimmed official doohickey hat and I blurted out the only words that made sense to me at that moment.
“Nem kell hushlavesh (there is no soup meat)!”
Unexpectedly, my mad hatter laughed so hard and so deeply that he shook his head, closed the door and we traveled on to Budapest uninterrupted. Nem kell hushlavesh. Those special words rendered me a hero and savior, if just for a moment, by my puzzled and admiring family.
Unfortunately, I no longer have the voucher. But I do have a wonderful story. And I am a hit at Hungarian cocktail parties.
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Let’s try this:
If you have your own “Zagreb, Idiots” story from around the world, send it along to me at backwardsforwards.newsletter@gmail.com. Please make it not too long. And I might could publish it in future editions--no promises.
Travel can do a lot to teach us new things, appreciate what we have and leave behind stories that are worth a thousand pictures. (My wife Judi takes the pictures. She has thousands of them. I tell the stories). The Zagreb Idiots stories, the ones that keep us smiling are usually the best.
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And speaking further about idiots, please add me to the list, at least temporarily. My last newsletter on El Salvador mistakenly listed the year of my visit as 2013, when I actually went in 2023. A lost decade? Nope, nem kell hushlavesh, sometimes there is no soup meat before I push the send button. My apologies.
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I have no idea what religious life is like in a small southern town, which is why I wrote about the churches in Brookhill, Mississippi—my non-existent southern town, with such imagination. Brookhill has two pastors, Pastor Jeremiah Troy and Pastor Earl Grey. Pastor Troy is the spiritual leader of the Second Baptist Church. You will have to read Take My Dog to know what happened to the First Baptist Church. Troy is the town’s alpha pastor. Pastor Grey from St. John’s United Methodist church is a fool. Both of these pastors are upended in Brookhill.
Please enjoy and stay tuned. Backwards and Forwards will appear, again, magically in your inbox in a few weeks. In the meantime, feel free to drop me a note at backwardsforwards.newsletter@gmail.com.
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Whether we are going backwards or forwards, none of us is standing still. And successful people can move both forwards and backwards at the same time.
Until next time, shalom,
Jonathan