Croatia

This past weekend, I traveled to Zagreb, Croatia with another intern from Brazil. We caught the train bright and early Friday morning and began our six and a half our journey. The train was nice and quiet and we, along with everyone else on the train, had a nice nap...that is until the LOUD group of British tourist got on. The train was only two cars long, one for 1st class and the other for 2nd, and was fairly empty. This large group of tourists, clearly oblivious to the fact that there were others on the train, got on and proceded to spread out throughout the entire car, sitting with only one or two people per area. Them spreading out was not what made me annoyed, I was annoyed by them spreading out then shouting to each other from one end of the car to the other, insulting and complaining about everything and they woke everyone up who had been sleeping peacefully (including me and Vitor...I was not happy). This affirms my hatred of tourist, but that is a different story (I know, I am a tourist myself, but I like to think I am not a super obnoxious, obviously touristy, tourist).

Once in Zagreb, we made our way to our hostel...Funk Hostel. I was a little skeptical at first based on the name (ok, that was slightly hypocritical of me because I wanted to stay in the Hobo Bear soley because I thought the name was funny), but we had read good reviews and decided to try it. It was the best hostel I have stayed in. It was nice and clean, had a large drawer with a lock to keep our stuff, a large kitchen, free laundry, wifi and a large lounge type area in the basement with cable. The staff was friendly and helpful and I would recommend it to anyone who would like to visit Zagreb.

When we first got to the hostel, there was a guy sleeping in the same dorm room that we were going to be staying in. Once he woke up, we started talking and he turned out to be a Croatian student from Zagar, who was just in Zagreb for the weekend. Dario was very nice and offered to show us around the city. So we took a long walking tour of the main highlights of the city. Zagreb is a smaller city and we were able to see the majority of the city in one afternoon. Since we were able to see the majority of the city on Friday, we decided to go to the beach on Saturday. However, Saturday morning it was raining and it was supposed to be raining all day at the beach and decided to skip the three hour trip (each way!!!) and just hung around Zagreb. We went out to a park, which I loved because I finally was able to feel as if I wasn't trapped in a city for a few hours, Vitor was not so into it but was nice enough not to complain about me dragging him there. We were going to go to the zoo, but we were both hungry and decided to go eat instead. We went to a grill that one of the guys at the hostel recommended and it was fantastic. It was kind of funny because both of use have been missing eating salad and we completely devoured it before even touching the meat. The meat, a combination of lamb, pork and beef, was fantastic. I don't know what they put in it, but it was great.

Saturday night, we decided to go to this fireworks show. Dario went with us, but we ended up getting on the wrong tram going in the wrong direction. So once he realized it, we got off and waited for the correct tram to come by. However, it turned out that they were working on the tram lines and the one we needed wasn't running. By this time it was late (close to midnight) and we decided that we didn't want to deal with catching a different tram, a bus and then walking about fifteen minutes. Therefore, we just went back to the hostel.

Since we felt we had seen pretty much everything we wanted to see in Zagreb, we decided to head back to Budapest Sunday morning so we could watch the Brazilian soccer game (Vitor, the guy I traveled with, is from Brazil). The train ride seemed forever long, stopped a million times and was very crowded by the end, but it was not bad. In the beginning, Vitor and I had a little cabin to ourselves and we watched a movie on his laptop and played cards. The cabin had bench style seats and we decided to take a nap after being on the train for about four hours already. Of course, about ten minutes later we got to Lake Balaton (the biggest lake in Hungary that I mentioned in my last post) and the train got crowded, ending our nap rather quickly.

Overall, the trip was really good, no crazy stories or anything, just a couple of annoying British tourist and some slightly unfriendly Australian girls (they also shared the dorm room with us in the hostel but aren't really worth mentioning more than this). Since Croatia is not part of the EU, I was able to get some more stamps, aiding me in my quest to completely fill my passport before it expires (sort of, they stamped pages that already have a bunch of stamps on them...not quite so helpful in filling blank pages).