You know it was a REALLY slow day if I’m talking about breakfast cereal.
As much as I like Zagreb so far, today we ran into a problem that we encountered in Dublin. Namely, that virtually NO museums are open on Mondays. They open on Sundays for a whopping THREE HOURS, but Mondays? Closed. The only one that was open today was the Croatian History Museum, which is in the process of moving, and as such, had one exhibit on some historical dude who freed Croatia from the feudal system in the 19th century. It was interesting… to a point. I hate to say it, but it’s not my history, and the ENTIRE exhibit was just on him.
Anyway. So I guess that was good though, for two reasons. First, John felt lousy again this morning (he likes to travel, but his stomach often has other opinions.) Second, I had a whole heap of planning to do. I was so happy last night about having reliable internet… and then it died on us and didn’t resurrect itself until after 10 this morning. I had planning to do, darn it! There are Couchsurfers to email, hostels to book in case no Couchsurfers come through, train sleeping car reservations to make, plane tickets home to price and consider, a budget to rebuild since the old one died with my phone (yeah, I have the Google Docs one, but I had a separate one I was working with that tracked just debit card purchases.) I had a lot to do, darn it!
So I got some stuff done this morning before we left for downtown, and then I kept working when I came back. This turned out to be immensely more time-consuming than I thought. First, our train passes only cover 10 days of travel, but I nailed down the rest of our itinerary, and we had 12-13 days of travel. So I priced out EVERY SINGLE TRAIN ROUTE to see which would be the two cheapest that we shouldn’t use our passes on.
This wouldn’t and SHOULDN’T have taken so long, but the raileurope.com website is hideously, painfully, immensely slow and kludgy. It should NOT have taken as long as it did. I was ready to throw my laptop after a couple of hours of searching.
And then came a painful realization… it covers five countries of travel, and we have six planned, and the one country it doesn’t cover is Poland, which, because of the night trains we’d planned to take in and out, would be the most expensive trains to take.
I spent a while berating myself for my stupid oversight, and then I went back to the pass website and realized that, for some reason, Poland wasn’t an option on the five-country pass anyway. So at least the mistake wasn’t mine, but I was still really upset to realize this.
Now we may have to cut Krakow off the list entirely, and I’m quite sad. We’re under budget right now, so I’m trying to convince John that it’s worth paying for the tickets to go in and out, even if we’d have to take a second-class sleeper car instead of the first class one that our passes SHOULD cover. But second or first, we’d still get an actual bed, and NOT get woken up in the middle of the flipping night for ticket and passport checks, which is what happened on our way to Zagreb (when we were trying to sleep on seats.)
So who knows. I really, REALLY don’t want to cut Krakow off the list, but it’d cost $500 to take the train there (Budapest–>Krakow–>Prague.) We could take a daytime train, but it’s honestly not that much cheaper, and then we’d lose an entire day of doing and seeing things, AND we’d have to pay for a hostel. So really, in my opinion the night train is a win-win situation, if we can swing it.
We should have that nailed down by the end of the week… or sooner if anyone wants to give me $500. No? Well, it was worth a try. :-) We’ll also have our flight home nailed down by the end of the week, but it’s looking like we’ll fly out of Brussels on Wed. July 28th, which makes our trip exactly 54 days long, and incidentally, means we’ll leave in a month. *sob* Honestly, it doesn’t seem like this should be Day 24, and a month just doesn’t seem like enough time to do and see what I want to do and see!! Oh well, I’m not going to focus on the countdown, I’m just going to enjoy what I have left.
So breakfast cereal… yeah. As I’ve mentioned before, we’re on a pretty tight budget. I know we’re under budget, but we’ve been keeping it under budget with the knowledge that Germany, Belgium, Austria, and Prague (I know, city not country) are going to be a lot more expensive than the Balkans have been (and Hungary and Poland will be, assuming we make it to Poland!) So we’ve been eating a lot of bread, and more recently, breakfast cereal. Which kind of cracks me up, given that we’ve eaten a lot of breakfast cereal in the past year to be able to afford this trip in the first place.
Anyway, honestly, the Balkans have had some of the best and cheapest bread I’ve ever eaten, and I’m a sucker for a good fresh loaf of bread. It doesn’t keep very long — after a day, it’s so stale as to be almost inedible — but given that the average unsliced loaf has been somewhere in the neighborhood of $0.80 regardless of where we’ve been, we can afford to get a new one every day, for pete’s sake. So we’re acquiring quite the condiment collection. We started off with margarine and jam in Ireland, then added in basalmic vinegar in Korcula, then mustard in Sveti Stefan, and I picked up a bottle of honey in Sarajevo. Anything to make it less boring, because while it’s good bread, it still gets boring after 2-3 meals a day of it. And cheese, always the cheese. We’ve currently got three kinds of cheese–two local ones and a soft cheese from Dublin that we’ve been stashing (along with the margarine and jam) in any fridge we’ve been able to find along the way. Yum.
Sarajevo we decided we wanted something different for breakfast other than bread and the occasional bottle of yogurt, and we both were craving milk, so we went to the store with the intention of getting a liter of milk and a box of cereal. Only the cereal selection was extremely limited. There was a wide variety of shapes and brands, but there were (not counting museli, which is NOT the same as granola and which I like only in small quantities) two kinds of cereal: corn flakes, and chocolate cereal.
Poor John, who wanted Frosted Flakes (which he remembered seeing at a Tesco in Dublin) went to three different grocery stores, but they all had the same selection. Corn flakes, and chocolate cereal.
This was only about half of the chocolate cereal collection. I'm not kidding.
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Ok, so there’s a Cinnamon Toast Crunch knock-off in the center there, and a box of Honey Nut Cheerios on the top right, but those are the only ones of their kind. The chocolate continues to the right of the picture and turns a corner on the shelf, and then there’s more around the corner, and then the corn flakes start in.
John finally settled for corn flakes and adding honey to them. Not the same, but better than nothing. Heh.
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