I took a Lufthansa flight through the Frankfurt airport to get to Croatia. Three planes in all from Portland, Oregon. I slept through one of the legs and missed my flight. This cancelled my entire trip, and I had to re-book a portion of my flight.

I had a lot of work to do at home with the company I was working on, so I shortened my trip down to 3 days.

You won't see this often on this site, but this is what International travel mostly feels like. It's about waiting in lines on jetways, waiting for your row to be called to board, and getting transported to the airpot

My experience of Zagreb was one of lonliness and emptiness. With the exception of the escort, I was usually taken to empty restaurants. I got to dine with the CEO of T-Mobile Croatia and Dr. Nikolas Taleb, but there was no one else in the restaurant. They cleared the whole place for us. I dined alone the night of the tour in an empty restaurant.

Honestly, the highlight of the trip was the olive oil. I have never tasted olive oil so pure and rich. I'd go back for that olive oil alone.

Plitvice Lakes

Dr. Nikolas Taleb and I were flown by T-Mobile Croatia to speak in Zagreb, Croatia's capitol city. I was given a driver and an escort.

On the last day I had the driver take me to Plitvice lakes, one of the wonders of the world. Like the Great Wall Trip, I asked the driver to pick me up from the hotel at 5am so I could get to the lakes early. I slept in the back of the vehicle on the way there, and arrived three hours later.

The driver asked me where I wanted to go next. I told him I'd like to go to the zoo. On the way there we passed a curious building with a 4 story tall slide hanging from the top of the building. "What is that?" I asked. He told me it was a museum of modern art.

I asked the driver if he'd ever been to the museum, and he said no, so I offered to pay his admission so he could experience it as well. I couldn't imagine him sitting in the parking lot for 3 hours waiting for me.

Once we went into the museum, we discovered it was a free day! He was very happy to see the museum and told me all about the different artists, even translating some of the work for me. When we reached the top floor I got access to the giant slide, and I eagerly hopped in and was taken all the way to the ground floor. What a great installation!

I liked this installation best. Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf in the Digital Era? by Croatia architects Penezic and Rogina.

The artists thematized the notion of home by transforming the notion into three groups with eight symbolic, spatial pictograms and devices.

"Shelter" as a person's basic protection, a functional "house" that enables the comforts of living in the modern era and "wires", i.e. interwoven communication networks that turn "home" into non-physical space.

Its elements are placed on an augmented chess board, symbolizing the manual-machine-digital production procedue. In their work, Penezic and Rogina are focused on the phenomenon of contemporary changes, of the transition from analog to digital systems.

The world is - as high technology reveals to us - less "dangerous" than its complex "architecture" shows us. Precisely because of that, say the artists, we should not be "afraid of the big bad wolf in the digital era".

If in fairy tales little pigs and goats manager to overpower the dangerous and evil wolf, the symbol of fear of the unknown and alien, in their worlf should be understood as a metaphor of the haughty and vulgur philosophy of the contemporary world based on mercantilism, profit, and unethical behavior, and it is out task to, figuratively speaking, conquert that "Wolf".