After a long day, 9-1/2 hour flight from Atlanta to Paris, 3 hour layover, and 2 hour flight from Paris to Zagreb, I arrived in the rain, descending steps from the plane to the tarmac and loading onto a bus with other passengers to reach the terminal. I was in back of the plane thus I was in back of the custom’s line. I was so much in the back of the line that my luggage was the only one on the luggage belt, going round and round and round. I abandoned the idea of taking the airport bus and then tram to the hotel and hailed a taxi. Zvonimir was my driver. Tall and slender with brown hair styled just so and wearing eyeglasses with white sides, he was personable and helped me with my Croatian.
I wanted to know how to say hello. I wrote it down phonically so I could actually say it, the guidebooks were not that helpful. This is what I wrote down:
Hi — Book (bok)
Hello — d0-ber-done (Zdravo)
goodbye — do-ber-gin-ya (dovidenja)
thank you — cuel-la (hvala ti)
how are you? — qua-ka-sin (kako si?
Then he told me his dream. He said I seemed like a great person and might enjoy his idea. There was a contest put out by a radio station, a promotional gig for people to like the Enter Zagreb radio station (Enter Zagreb 97.0). Becks Beer was sponsoring. The idea is to get people to record that they like the radio station and then upload it to the Becks website. The winner gets an all expense trip to Denmark. So, this was his idea: to get foreigners to say they liked the radio station when riding in his taxi. He saw that other people were recording folks in their homes so they could be friends and family. He wanted to show the diversity of people who listened to the station in his taxi. All I would have to do was look like I enjoyed the music (it was electronic dance music) and then say, in Croatian that I liked the station. I wrote it down phonetically: Ya brogan yako enter zagreb.
He set the camera up on the windshield, a little camera eye with a suction cup to adhere to the windshield and set his phone to record. At a red light I looked like I enjoyed the music and then I said, “I like Radio Enter Zagreb.”
He was over the moon ecstatic. So I asked how many were needed and he said he thought about 10 or 12, but he had lots of time, it was all due on Monday, and this was a good idea. He listened to the station all the time and so did his customers. He had never before entered a contest like this and he thought if he could get an Asian and maybe someone from Denmark, it would be good. So I asked how many people did he have already, and he, still super excited, said, “you’re the first one!” I laughed out loud, hard and long. I will need to follow up on Monday to see if my video was uploaded. I love traveling.
Leara Rhodes 