Motivation

Well, I've been off the net for a while now. Mostly that's due to jet lag and my struggle to overcome it. This trip was really bad in terms of that. I finally calculated out how long I was awake, and it came out to roughly 29 hours. Now I wasn't awake for all of that, I managed to get somewhere between 15 and 45 minutes sleep on the flight from Chicago to Frankfurt, but other than that I was pretty much awake the whole time.

So, last night was the first night I actually managed something close to a regular sleep pattern.

Anyways, the weather here has turned nice again. It was bitter cold the first couple of days, but now it is up in the 50s and quite comfortable outside. This, unfortunately makes working in the library hard because it is so hot inside they literally had the windows open in the Newspaper and Periodicals Reading Room yesterday to try to keep the temperature livable.

So, today is a writing day. I have three things I need to get done while I am here, and one of them is due to my advisor by the 1st of March (actually, its been due for a while, but that's another story), so today I'm not going to do research (especially since the reading room would be an oven again today). Instead I went to get some pictures that I decided I should have taken before but didn't. On the way, I ran across this little think on the square. It's a booth for a petition against Croatia's accession into the EU and NATO. Nothing strange about that in particular. The latest polls I've seen have EU membership running just around 50% approval, and NATO much lower (the Croats have been on the wrong side of a couple of military alliances in the past 100 years, so no surprise there). But the flag is an issue.

That particular flag is from the NDH (the Independent State of Croatia). It's kind of like flying the old WWII Italian flag in down town Rome. I'm not sure how it would go over there, but here no one seems to even give it a second thought.

So, to the point of my title. One of the things this project is going to show (I hope) is that the Ustase and the NDH were, in fact, a rejection of Croatian national identity, not an expression of them. If I can do that, then maybe some of the "nationalists" who want to run around using the memory of the NDH to bolster their cause will be exposed for the frauds that they are. The NDH was a mistake the Croatian National Project didn't recover from. The fact that it is still viewed with affection by some here is a sad state of affairs.

Chimney sweeps

That's the answer to what the two men in the last photograph are. Though they don't so much sweep any more as check for gas leaks and do maintenance on heating systems, but they still get to wear the black outfits.

So, I am back in Zagreb. Fighting jet lag, but trying to be productive starting today. I've been up since 2 am, but I've managed to get all my books together and get completely unpacked.

More later when I can concentrate better.