Memories of the Sava

Every so often I find myself drifting off into places like Friends Reunited and entering old school and college friends’ names into Google to see where everyone went. My old friend Vasco Franco, who I met in Zagreb, used to do much the same think by going through all his old letters and photos once a month – he claimed it was the full moon that brought it on.

And so one thing led to another, and I went in search of pictures of the place that was my home for a year in Zagreb 20 years ago, Studentski Dom Stjepan Radi?, Horva?anski Zavoj. Eventually, I found a whole album of pictures of it. Apart from the fact that the street name has changed to Jarunska 2, it doesn’t look much different, even if it does look a lot cleaner than I remember it, and the idea of having a computer in your room in those days would have been laughable.

The picture in the link above is of the post boxes, our first stop in the morning. Hundreds of them all arranged in a huge red wall. Getting a letter – or still better, a parcel – would make our day. Looking at the picture brought it all back. I often wonder what became of everyone – Friends Reunited doesn’t reach that far, and we were such a disparate band of people from all over the world. Can anyone tell me what happened to Dragan ?ordevi?, the medical student from Split? Or Ahmed my room-mate, a Lebanese dentist? Or for that matter, all the Ethiopian doctors, Sudanese vets, Chilean film theorists, Cuban economists, Spanish sports physiotherapists? It seems like another age and another planet.