Free Lunch for Workers' Day

It was last week when it happened that International Workers' Day, also known as Labour Day or May Day, this year was in the middle of the week on Wednesday. It's a holiday and a non-working day in my country.

The day before, on Tuesday, a friend of mine called me and while we were talking about something else she asked me out of the blue, "Are you going for a free lunch tomorrow?"

At first, I was like, "What free lunch? What tomorrow?" To be honest, I don't care much about most of those public holidays and non-working days as I have the feeling that they are just stealing my working time. Accordingly, it slipped my mind that "tomorrow" was the May 1st, and a holiday of the International Workers' Day.

The thing is that in my city (Zagreb, the capital of Croatia) Labour Day has been celebrated since 1890. It was even a year before it was formally recognized as an annual event at the second congress of the Second International held in Brussels (Belgium) from August 16 - 22, 1891. And it was a year after it was proposed, more as the call for international demonstrations than the holiday itself, by Raymond Lavigne (French politician, syndicalist, and trade union activist from Bordeaux) on the first congress of the Second International held in Paris (France) on July 14th, 1889.

In short, by now, Workers' Day in Zagreb has 129 years long tradition, that all these years, has been celebrated at the same place, Zagreb's biggest city park called Maksimir. The same was this year too.

The only exception was that this year, as far as I recall, we decided to give it a try to this free meal for the first time, although we were joking among ourselves how it's not truly free of charge meal as we surely paid for it through various taxes.

Never the less, city authorities organized a free lunch for the citizens in the form of a portion of stewed beans with bacon and sausages and a bread rolls.

The portions were shared on the booths lined up alongside one of the biggest Maksimir park's meadows.

Taller, long wooden tables were placed across the meadow where people could lay down the plates. As there were no chairs to sit down, my husband called it a stand-up lunch! 😀

At one side of the meadow stands the stage where the official program was held with lots of local singers and bands performing.

We met my husband's colleague there, and after finishing our stand-up lunch, we went for a walk around the park altogether. The park was full of people that were mingling around and enjoying their time in different ways.

For a short coffee break, we walked to the coffee bar located in the central building of the Maksimir's park called Vidikovac (viewpoint) with a huge open terrace on the plateau all around it.

All in all, and as it was really a beautiful, warm, and sunny day, we enjoyed in that middle of the week outdoors with the walk around the park and after the prior raining days' fresh air full of oxygen, and of course, in almost unavoidable "free" stand-up lunch. 😄

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All photos in this article are my own, taken with my Samsung Galaxy S9+ mobile phone or from our family album, and edited with PhotoScape X. ~ © 2019 AMS - steemit.com/@ana-maria and whaleshares.io/@ana-maria ~ All rights reserved worldwide!}