Bad Croatia

Sorry for the prolonged absence.





Part of the reason we've been so abominably bad in keeping up with the blog began in Croatia. But our Croatia story actually begins back in Budapest, or, at least, back in Hungary.

We had to take an overnight train from Budapest to Split, so we booked it the day before, got to the station with plenty of time, and got on the train about 45 minutes before the departure. We met the conductor several times, met our roommate (a middle-aged Hungarian man) and got settled after having to move compartments as our original one kept slamming the beds down on us when we were sitting. Anyway, everything was fine, conductor took our tickets, etc... then, about 4 hours later - about 3 hours into the train ride - the conductor starts telling us that Kate and I can't stay in the same compartment because they aren't mixed gender.
This is despite the fact that a) we'd bought our tickets together and nothing was mentioned and b) he had plenty of time to tell us this when we were in the station, asking him for help with the faulty seats, etc... But he waits until we are basically in the middle of nowhere to tell us that we had to either sleep in separate compartments or pay an extra 20 euros or so each to get the private double compartment. Our roommate said he didn't mind if Kate was in the compartment but the conductor was not easily dissuaded. He kept bringing this up over and over again every thirty minutes or so. But we held firm and eventually he just gave up... after about 4 hours of pestering us. Anyway, annoying, but in the end, we got what we wanted (and deserved to get) and arrived in Split (relatively) well rested.

We had until about 4PM in Split so we decided to just check our baggage at the train station and wander the town where we were hoping to meet up with Avi and his traveling companions, Richard - a friend from his study abroad in Utrecht who is actually from Rancho Bernardo and randomly happens to also be friends with my other friend named Avi, Avi Schwartz - and Ava - a Slovenian girl they met in Ljubljana who decided to

go along with them on their hitchhiking trip through the Balkans. This meetup was definitely some crazy kind of kismet as the only reason we knew they'd be in Croatia at all was that I had signed up for the Croatia message board on Couchsurfing to try to get an apartment that way and happened to get a message via the board from Richard asking fro any places to stay along the way for the three of them.

Anyway, the meetup went pretty smoothly and we spent the day wandering the ancient city and goofing around in the sarcophagi before Avi et al. had to catch their boat on to Hvar. Kate and I stayed for a couple more hours during which time we wandered up for a sweet view over the city and grabbed some pizza
before boarding our own catamaran to Korcula, the island where we'd arranged a room for the next few weeks. We got our bags, got on the ferry, and sat down as our luggage was thrown in a heap in the corner. Then we dozed for the next couple hours before arriving in Korcula that night, just in time to miss the last bus - our first experience in what would soon emerge as a ridiculously disorganized public transportation system where nothing lined up to anything.

We grabbed some food, grabbed a taxi, and finally made it out to our new home where we met our hosts - Nikola and Angela - got into our room, and started to unpack. Pretty much the first thing we did was take out our laptop to play some music while we got set up. And pretty much the first thing we noticed was that the LCD screen had a huge crack down the middle of it, something that looked like fingers radiating out from a central crack. Huge bummer, as you might have guessed. It must have happened on the ferry ride when luggage was getting piled on top and we didn't think about taking the laptop out as we always have it with us when we travel - we just didn't that day as we'd checked it into the left luggage at the train station earlier and never thought about it again. We were planning on doing a lot of writing and movie watching during our time in Croatia so the broken laptop thing was just about the worst thing we could have been greeted with. And, to make matters worse, 2 days later our iPod had to be reset, erasing all the music and data we'd had on that.

Anyway, this post has gotten pretty long and is much less exciting than I'd anticipated it would be, so I'll just call it quits for now and get a more interesting one out later (sooner, rather than) with the good stuff that happened in Croatia...