Ferry from Dubrovnik to Rijeka (Croatia)

Instead of risking our lives with the bus drivers who may or may not deal in the illegal drug trade, we opted for the slower ferry ride.  First, we were planning to just go to Split and then take the train from there, but we wouldn’t have gotten to Ljubljana, Slovenia until very late.  So instead we took the ferry all the way to Rijeka which got us there at 7a.m. the next day, which also meant that we got to spend the night on a boat.  (We pretended like it was a nice cruise going through the Carribean, but the similarities were not very strong.)  We were hoping that we would be able to relax on the deck while it was sunny and read for the majority of the day; however, the cold winds on the back of the boat put the kibosh on that idea.  It was a very nice relaxing day though.  Much needed really after so much traveling.  We took a nap, read our books, ate some bad food (bad spaghetti, stale bread, bad ravioli, and burnt pancakes even though he offered us pound cake) in the restaurant, and washed our hair in the sink. 

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Dubrovnik, Croatia

The bus ride to Dubrovnik along the coast was as beautiful as it was scary.  The road runs along the cliffs that drop off into the Adriatic Sea and when taking them at 70-80 miles an hour, it is a little unnerving to say the least.  Surprisingly, the careless driving was not the scariest part of the trip.  We had to pass through the border into Bosnia for a little while which went fine.  The sketchy part came when we stopped at a rest stop just a few miles past border control.  Once we got there, Austin and I got off the bus to stretch our legs and “see” Bosnia.  When we got back on, a man came out of the restaurant, opened a hidden compartment by the stairs we were sitting behind and pulled out 4 cardboard boxes, then walked quickly back into the restaurant.  He was not on the bus before or after that stop, so Austin and I may have been involved in our first international drug trade.  In combination with the man breaking the window of the tourist information booth and this, Austin and I have (hopefully) experienced the strangest parts of our travels.

Everything we read and heard about Dubrovnik said to just stay at stranger’s houses.  They will find you at the bus station or at the harbor where the ferry drops off and try to lure you in by offering you a place to stay.  We had decided previously to pass on the hostel and have a bit of an adventure.  That being said, the first lady that approached us offered us a place right outside of the city walls so we took it.  Austin snuck a picture of her license plate before we got into her car (with her and her large “friend”) just in case they tried to kidnap us.  But they didn’t.  The apartment wasn’t what you would call nice, but it was a place to stay and it was close to the old town so it was really all we needed.  It did have some noteworthy design touches including an exposed wire and light bulb which composed the whole light fixture above the bathroom sink, and the ceiling was given texture in a somewhat unusual fashion: textured styrofoam glued all over the apartments ceiling.  We were planning on staying longer in Dubrovnik but once we decided to take the ferry instead of the bus back up the coast, we only had one day but that was probably enough anyway.  During the day, we did a lot of sitting in the sun, reading our books, and eating sandwiches.  We also walked around the city on top of the walls which is a must-do in the city.

When we were going out to dinner for Valentine’s Day, we stumbled on a parade.  Somehow when Austin and I travel, we end up finding special celebrations and festivals without knowing anything about it.  Carnival is celebrated in many places in Europe and Croatia is actually one of the countries that celebrates it most extravagantly.  It is unlike New Orleans’ version of Mardi Gras mainly in that it seems much more organized.  They represented a bunch of different slavik countries who all had a specific theme with ornate costumes, a special dance and song/skit.  Dubrovnik was another pretty city that would have been nicer if we could have done some swimming, and not worn our winter coats the whole time but regardless it is beautiful and looks just like a scene from a movie.

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Split, Croatia

Once we got to Split, things were immediately looking up.  We arrived around 7 o’clock at night and checked into our (sworn off) hostel, which was immediately infinitely better than the last one.  It was clean and we only shared with one other person who was in bed by 11.  The town is right on the water and even though it was still very nice.  We’ve noticed that the food here and in Italy are about the same style so we had some delicious pizza at a place recommended by the guy who runs the hostel.

The next morning we were planning on going straight to Dubrovnik but decided that we wanted to explore a little bit first.  And, like any good day, it started in a bakery!  After breakfast we wandered around the 1300-year-old castle for a little while and then headed up the hill where there are great views of the city.  We had heard that there wasn’t much to do in Split, but what we did, we really enjoyed and part of it had to do with the fact that it was the off season which has its pros and cons. On the one hand, there are not so many people, things are cheaper, and you get an idea of how the people actually live.  On the other hand, it’s cold. 

The best part of this city came (like most good things do) with lunch.  We headed off to another recommended place, which served traditional Dalmation (from the Dalmation Coast) food.  I had a meat dish that I have forgotten the name of but it tasted a lot like goulasch served with gnocchi.  Austin had “fried fish of the season.”  The waiter apparently thought it was pretty funny that he was trying to eat the little fish (with their heads still on) and squid with his fingers so he kept winking and making faces from around the corner.  After cuing us in on how to actually eat the local cuisine, he gave us another local specialty: pancakes!  They are actually more like crepes filled with chocolate or marmelade.  It was all very good and somehow a meal is always much better in retrospect when you get a complimentary desert out of it!

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Zagreb, Croatia

Zagreb managed to single-handedly ruin hostels for me. It smelled like cat urine in the corner where the locker for my backpack was. That was also very close to my bed. When the three Australian guys came back after what was presumably dinner/breakfast (they didn’t get back the from the night before until 3p.m.) they brought with them the always pleasing smell of cigarette smoke. Unfortunately, that was the best part of the room. At 4a.m. two of the three came back and decided that would be a good time to talk and joke loudly about what they had just done. Even after much debate about what the best way to avoid throwing up after drinking all night was, they both ended up in the bathroom anyway. Austin found some of that evidence in the morning when he woke up to go to the bathroom.

After we got out of the hostel, Zagreb was much better but that’s not really saying much. For being such a big city (the capital of Croatia), there really was not much to be done. They have the most museums in the world per square foot; however, none of them are really attention grabbers. We decided on the “Arts and Crafts Museum” which does not hold knitted products, macromé, decopage, or puff paint; however, they had a special exhibit with 110 different Rembrandt etchings. The thing about Rembrandt is that all of his artwork is very small. About 4”x4” was average. Nonetheless they were impressive, maybe even more impressive because of the minute scale.

After the museum we went with advice from Lonely Planet and ate the “Steak a lá

St. Stephen's Cathedral

Zagreb” which is essentially cordon bleu but it is wrapped up into a little log instead of a schnitzel shape. Mine came with delicious roasted potatoes and Austin got the french fries. So, if you are going to Zagreb just to eat, I guess that would be ok. If you are trying to see the sites, you may want to pass on by.

 

When we tried to leave, we ran into more troubles (should have expected it at this point). First, we tried to get on the train but it was apparently the wrong door and we got yelled at because he thought we were freeloaders. When we went over to the conductor, he said we needed a reservation even though the man told us the night before that we didn’t. After running back to the ticket office and paying more for our ticket, we made it onto the train in time which was lucky because neither of us wanted to go back to that hostel for another night.

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From Austria, through Slovenia, into Croatia…

…all in one day.  The close proximity of European countries to one another still blows my mind.  In 4 hours and 20 minutes we have covered ground in three different countries with three different languages (of which, only one we could partially understand) and two different currencies.

Nonetheless, after waking up and checking out of our hotel (which was very nice, Hotel Daniel) we hiked up the “mountain” to get a good overlook of the city.  Graz is a city that is prettier from above, quite the opposite of Dresden actually which is beautiful when you are right in the middle of it.  It only took about 15 minutes to get to the top even with the breaks to take pictures.  It used to be some sort of fortress/castle but other than that I don’t know anything about it, including the name.  Instead of walking down we took the elevator (not because we are lazy, but because we wanted to see what the elevator that goes “through the mountain” was all about.)  It was a short trip that afforded less views of the inside of a mountain than was expected but for only 60 cents I would do it again. 

We wandered back through the historic district of the city with the cobble-stone alleys which is another pretty part of the town.  We also stumbled upon the bakery that we were supposed to go to (according to the tourism brochure from the city) but we had already had our pastries for the day.  It’s called Hofbäckerei Edeggar-Tax and they sell old-fashioned baked goods in an impressive old wooden house.  

For some unknown reason we did not get another pastry for lunch but tried the restaurant across the street from the train station which sold pretty good wienerschnitzel, very mediocre french fries, and horrible onion rings.  Won’t be stopping in there again!

At 2:30 we caught a train (or 3 rather) going to Zagreb, Croatia.  We are very used to and comfortable with the German rail system (Deutsche Bahn) and it is so easy to use and really pretty fool proof.  Apparently, Austria has a little less high-tech system which doesn’t involve telling you what track your train is on until about 15 minutes before it arrives, but Slovenia and Croatia stepped it up.  Although we had no problems, there are no signs telling when the next train is coming, where it’s from, or where it’s going.  If you are lucky, there is a sign on the train itself that hopefully has your city on it, if not, you just have to find someone who speaks the native language and English or German to translate the overhead speaker for you.  It was all very intimidating but in the end we had absolutely zero problems.  Plus I got two new stamps in my passport!  One from Slovenia and another one about 5 minutes later from the Croatian police!

When we got to Zagreb we waited in line at the Information booth to see where we book our train for tomorrow going to Split.  The person in front of us must have had something very complicated, because it took a long time for him to be helped.  At one point, the woman working at the TI had to leave to get something for him and while she was gone a man in his late 20s or early 30s became very impatient and needed his ticket stamped for some reason.  He apparently decided he couldn’t wait any longer so he reached his hand through the little hole in the glass window to grab the stamp.  Unfortunately, he couldn’t quite reach it so when he pushed a little bit further, he broke the glass window, pulled the stamp out, hit it against his ticket, and walked off.  All of the other people in the line, including us, were too bewildered to say anything at all I guess.  The employee of the TI came back a couple minutes later and tried to tell the man she was helping something when he stopped her an pointed at the window and explained to her what happened.  When she looked up and noticed the broken glass she ran around the desk and called the police.  

Here’s where the wholly unexpected part comes in.  The man who broke the glass came back!  Security came around the corner to greet him, they spoke in Croatian for a while all very calmly though.  Then a little bit later, the official police came and they were still talking to him by the time we left the train station, finding out that we didn’t need a reservation for our trip tomorrow after all.

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Our Big Trip

Tomorrow after we go to the airport in Frankfurt we are off to Berlin to start our 19 day trip around Europe.  So here’s the plan:

Wednesday the 4th we will go to Berlin and stay there until Sunday the 8th touring East and West Berlin, Potsdam, and possibly the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in the area.  Then on the 8th we will take a short 1-2 hour train ride to Dresden.  On Monday (9th) we’ll be on an overnight train to Graz, Austria and stay there for two days.  On the 11th we will head to Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia just for a night.  The next day we go to Zagreb, Croatia.  The next day we pack up to Split and on Valentine’s Day we will take a bus from Split to Dubrovnik that runs along the coast.  After spending a couple days in Dubrovnik, we will make our way back towards Heidelberg stopping briefly in Zagreb again on the 17th then going (on the 18th) to Salzburg, Austria for a day and a half.  We are going to end our trip by spending the 19th through the 22nd in Munich which will give us just 3 days before we fly out to go home!  

Hopefully we won’t run into any troubles while we are traveling and hopefully we don’t freeze while sightseeing.  I will try to keep posting pictures and updates about our travels but I am not at all sure how readily accessible internet will be, so be patient 🙂

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