What’s a stamp day? It’s any day I get a new stamp in my passport. Technically, this isn’t even a NEW stamp, since I already have one from Hungary from three summers ago. But it’s new to my passport, and a new port of entry, anyway.

Why no more stamps, you’re wondering? Don’t we have several more countries to visit still? Yeah, we do. But most of continental Europe, including everywhere we’ll be from here on out, is party to what’s called the Schengen Agreement, which abolishes border controls (and therefore the need for passports) within the member countries. All of the countries we’ll visit from here on out (Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Austria, Germany, and Belgium) are all Schengen countries. So no more stamps. Sigh. It’s a tough life, I know.

Today is also a bit bittersweet because my paycheck went into my bank account, and that means that now I have to buy my plane ticket home. I haven’t bought it yet, but it’s a pretty sure bet that, barring volcanoes and other unforeseen circumstances, we’ll be flying home on USAir on Wednesday, June 28th. In other words, we passed the halfway point of this trip without realizing it. Wow. It doesn’t seem like it at all. We’ll have been gone for 54 days total–sounds like a long time, doesn’t it? Maybe I’ll be ready to head home by then (especially since the last few stops on our itinerary are short ones relative to the beginning of the trip.) But I’m not ready now, and so it’s kind of a depressing thought for me.

In any case, I’m happy to be here, and I’m enjoying it now and I’m not going to think about things like heading home or the fact that my next stamp will be a re-entry one to the US. This trip is too much fun to dwell on its inevitable end. :-) And I am, for some odd reason, SO HAPPY to be back in Hungary!! I really really loved it last time I was here three years ago, and I’m excited to have more time here!

Today was, as many of these days have been, a bit of a learning experience. When I looked online at the Rail Europe website (with which I have a love-hate relationship) there were two trains that would take us from Zagreb, Croatia to Pecs, Hungary (where we are now.) One train left at 9AM, the other one left at 10AM. As the 9AM train had only one connection and got into Pecs an hour earlier, I opted for that one. Only I didn’t write the route and connection information down. Stupid me.

We got to the train station, which took longer than I’d planned, and so we only had 15 minutes to activate our passes (this is our first day traveling on them, and they have to be activated the first time they’re used) and make our train. I left John with the backpacks, went to activate the passes, went back to the waiting room to look at the departures board, and realized I had no clue which train we needed, since I didn’t know where the connection was. So I went back to the ticket window. The guy behind the counter looked at me like I had two heads and told me there was no 9AM train, that there was only one and it left at 10. I KNEW there was a 9AM one and I wanted to catch it, but he wouldn’t even check his computer, and he was the only one at the international ticket window.

Now, there was only one train at 9AM that was heading north, so I guess we could have taken it, but as I would have had no idea where to disembark, that seemed like a bad idea at the time.

Now, if you’ve traveled with me before, you know that being rushed close to a departure time stresses me out just a bit. John and Joel!, quit laughing. Ok, so “a bit” might be an understatement. Whenever I fly, I’m ALWAYS at the airport at least a hour before boarding (not departure, boarding) and for trains I prefer to be at least a half hour early. At this point, the train was supposed to leave in about 8 minutes, and I didn’t know which one it was, and the ticket guy was totally unhelpful. Fortunately, we knew there was free wifi about two blocks away outside a hotel, so we headed over to check. Alas, it wasn’t enough time — by the time we got connected and on the Rail Europe site and found the 9AM route, it was 9AM exactly. No way we’d make it back and onto the train in time. Oh well.

As it turned out, the reason the guy may have said that there was no 9AM train was that I went to the international window, since my destination was international. The first train’s connection was within Croatia, so I should have gone to the domestic window. But the guy could have at least checked his computer. Oh well, lesson learned — always write down your train numbers and connections when looking up routes!!

Ok, here are some pics from the train ride (since that’s really what we did all day — riding the local train? Really kind of a bummer!)

This is a pretty typical lunch for us--trail mix, bread rolls with mustard and cheese, and chocolate pudding. We don't alway shave dessert, and we generally have fruit (there are dried cherries in the trail mix, so I counted that this time) but it's generally some variation of the above. Yum!

.

I'm still trying to figure out what this sign means. I was thinking it was "no throwing trash out the window", but there's no / through the circle to make it "no". Weird.

.

Reading while we're at a stop. After we made our first train transfer, the train was almost entirely empty, so we got the entire back of the car to ourselves. SWEET. :-)

.

OH! Something else I learned today… or rather, John learned and shared with me, since he’s nice like that. Apparently the train toilets (or at least the ones on the local second class train we took today) empty right onto the tracks. I’ve heard of that, of course, but I had no idea that any modern European trains still did this. Crazy!! And ummm, kinda gross!

(I was going to make a joke about how European in Hungarian train bathrooms, but I decided not to. Feel free to thank me.)

ANYWAY. Here in Pecs we’re staying someplace a bit different than we have thus far — a college dorm. When school is out for the summer, a lot of universities in Europe open their dorms for travelers like us — excellent! We get a private room and bathroom with two twin beds, sheets and blankets (no towels, though) and a fridge, laundry facilities, internet access, and access to the school’s swimming pool. And it’s about $20/night cheaper than the cheapest hostel we found. Sweet. :-) It’s not in the center of town, but who cares? Not like we’re adverse to walking!

**********
Where we are now:

View Larger Map

.

Anyway, so because we’re leaving early, and because we’ve done the pack-and-scramble thing twice now (when leaving Dubrovnik, because I forgot it was Sunday, and when leaving Montenegro, because we accidentally fell asleep the night before) and it’s really not all that much fun, I really should be packing right now. But darn it, I’m comfortable here! So because I’m lazy, here’s today’s post.

Today we got up… well, kind of late. I’d wanted to be out of here at 9, and we didn’t actually get out of bed until 10. We both kind of stayed up until 4:30 (I was working on trip planning and the blog post, John was reading) and it was already starting to get light when we went to bed (I HATE it when that happens) so neither of us was in the mood to leave early. Oh well. Vacations are about relaxing, right?

So we got up, had a leisurely breakfast of bread and honey and yogurt (sold in 1 liter bottles here), and headed downtown to go museuming. Unlike yesterday (when we read “14″ on a tram and somehow both read it as “4″, and it ended up taking us an hour and two different trams to get where we needed to be) it took us only about 15 minutes to get downtown. We had intended to head to the Natural History Museum, but got sidetracked by the Zagreb City Museum (sidetracked=”this looks interesting and it’s on the way — let’s go in here!) and I’m so glad we did. Like the archaeological museum, it wasn’t huge, but it was VERY VERY well-displayed (even if there was an unfortunately small number of English translations of things — audioguides, folks, they’re the wave of the future!)

They forgot to reset this sundial for daylight savings time.

.

A lion that used to be at the entrance to the Zagreb Cathedral. Neither John nor I thought he was particularly scary. I believe my comment was something along the lines of, "Dude needs to pay a visit to the Wizard."

.

Take a look at the picture below, and take a guess which picture is the cathedral before being demolished by the 1885 earthquake, and which picture is the cathedral after the earthquake (well, and subsequent remodeling.)

If you guessed "the left one", you win... something. I think I have a piece of Tupperware I can give you.

.

Here’s a frog that used to be on the old cathedral. I mean the new cathedral. I mean the old one that was renovated in 1885, when they added the frog, and it became old and so they removed it when they started doing restoration in the 21st century.

They say you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince...

.

After the City Museum, we went to the Natural History Museum, but that was so tiny and depressing that I didn’t even take pictures. It’s not a *bad* museum, it’s just incredibly incredibly outdated. And I’m not talking Smithsonian Air and Space Museum outdated either, with its 1980s exhibit on the personal computers of the future (anyone know if they’ve gotten rid of that? It was still up when I was there in November 2008.) I’m talking display cases that were built sometime in the late 1700s/early 1800s and haven’t been moved or dusted since. Motheaten stuffed animals (as in, dead and stuffed, not the cutesy plush kind.) Virtually no displays that explain to the viewer (in any language) how what they’re seeing all ties together… just dead, stuffed animals, and signs in Croatian, Latin, and English as to what they are. I will concur that they had some interesting specimens, and for the most part, their dead animal collection (which, I kid you not, mostly dates back to the late 1700s/early-to-mid 1800s) is in better shape than the one in the Smithsonian Natural History museum. But still… yeah. Needs a lot of work. And note to the museum — an entire litter of dead, stuffed tiger cubs so small that their eyes weren’t even open yet? Depressing, even if they were killed in 1812.

After that museum, we wandered around for a bit.

Skyline of part of the upper part of the city. The two spires in the background are the deceptively-young Gothic Zagreb Cathedral.

.

St. Mark's Church, built in the mid-to-late 1800s. The crests on the roof are for the city of Zagreb and for the Kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia (Slovenia), and Dalmatia (which is now Croatia.)

.

Since it was hot out, John and I went in search of air conditioning and something sweet to eat.  We found a nice little bakery/sweetshop that had a line out the door. We figured that was a good sign, so we ordered.

Here's my cake...

.

...and here's John's caramel sundae. I wish I had his metabolism.

.

Ban Josip Jelacic Square, the main square in Zagreb. That's the ban (governor) on the horse on the left.

.

And since I for some reason like to do short videos of my surroundings (in case you haven’t noticed!) here’s one of Ban Josip Jelacic Square. Ignore John talking about random stuff in the background — he tries to videobomb every video I take. :-p

.

**********
Where we are now:

View Larger Map

.

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.

.

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.

**********
Where we are now:

View Larger Map

.

Anyway, before I post a few Zagreb pics, here are a few leftover pictures and videos from Sarajevo that I wanted to post. There are more pictures on my Flickr than I’ve posted here, so feel free to go look at them. :-)

Here’s a video I took of pigeons in the Turkish marketplace in the old section of town:

.

Here’s another video from the marketplace.

Here’s a video I took of the main street in Sarajevo — to me the main street (Austro-Hungarian influence, from when it was a part of that empire) is a really interesting contrast to the marketplace (Turkish influence, from being part of the Ottoman Empire.) Regardless of empire, it’s a beautiful city.

.

Not to get too morbid (that was Day 21′s post) but here are more roadside graves from the war, right in the center of town.

These were on the main street right across from a huge shopping mall.

.

While we were sitting at the train station waiting for our night train to Zagreb, we heard the evening call to prayer (Sarajevo has a fairly large Muslim population as it was part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries.) I’d been trying to catch this on video (well, audio) the whole time we were there, and I finally succeeded just before we left. What I think is really cool about this one is that you can hear two different calls from two different mosques. Neat.

.

Here are links to two other videos (video 1, video 2) of it that I took–I kept them both because they both have different things that I liked about them (in one of them I look around the train station where we are, and the other one I just like the sound.)

The night train to Zagreb wasn’t bad, even though there were no sleeper cars so we had to sleep on the seats. Seating is in compartments, so you can shut the curtains and door and it’s a bit more private than open train seats, although the conductors come in periodically for ticket checks and three different people came in to check our passports around 4AM when we crossed the border from Bosnia to Croatia. That was pretty irritating, because they didn’t come all at once. One came in, we fell back asleep. 10 minutes later, the next one. We fell back asleep. 15 minutes later, the third one. At that point, when that guy left, I sat up and looked around and said, “ANYONE ELSE??” GEEZ.

Other than the sleep though, the ride was quite enjoyable. We ended up sharing a compartment with a late-20s British guy living and working in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He’s a reader (although he prefers fiction like John does, rather than nonfiction like me) and has a BA and MA in international relations, so we ended up talking books and politics (British, Irish, American, and Bosnian) until almost 2AM. He was REALLY interesting to talk to! He made an observation that John and I both were amazed by — he pointed out that both Northern Ireland and Sarajevo (well, Bosnia in general) went through a really war-filled, violent period in the 90s. However, if one looks at both cities now, Sarajevo has transformed into what appeared to all three of us to be an atmosphere of peace and tolerance, whereas he said that Northern Ireland is still very filled with tension and is very segregated — that the peace largely exists because Catholics live in neighborhoods that are 90%+ Catholic, and Protestants live in areas that are 90%+ Protestant, and all you have to do to tell which neighborhood you’re in is look around to see if the flags being displayed are for the UK or not. It’s neat to see how far Sarajevo has come, and it’s sad that Northern Ireland hasn’t managed to do the same, despite centuries of tension in the respective regions.

Although to be frank, I’m pretty sure not all of Bosnia is as tolerant as Sarajevo appears to be. In the city of Mostar, where we spent the night before Sarajevo, by law, 50% of the city council is Muslim, and 50% is Christian. They also live on different sides of town and support two entirely different soccer teams. And the country of Bosnia itself is actually divided into two regions per the 1995 Dayton Agreement — the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is mostly Croats and Bosnian Muslims, and the Republika Srpska, which is the (88%) Serbian region of the country. Each has its own government, flag and coat of arms, president, parliament, police & customs departments, and postal system. Technically the country has one armed forces, but both entities maintain their own armies. To make things even more crazy, there’s one city that’s claimed by both FBR and RS, so it’s currently under international supervision. So they’re still very, very divided within their own country.

Anyway, so it made for an interesting train ride that passed quickly, and even though we ended up sleeping on train seats, hey, it was one night we didn’t have to pay for lodging for. I’m all about that. :-)

John, trying to sleep on the seat at around 5:30 AM.

.

When we got to Zagreb, it was about 7:45 Sunday morning, and we realized that nothing was going to be open for a while, so we found a comfortable place to relax that had free wifi (outside a hotel) and we hung out there for a couple of hours.

About 10AM, the Zagreb Archaeological Museum opened, so we headed over there, and I have to say that I am REALLY impressed with the breadth their collection. The whole museum only took about an hour and a half, so it wasn’t a huge collection, but what they had, they had a lot of and quality examples of.

900,000-year-old stone hand tools -- COOL!!

.

I had to laugh at this. This is a stash of coins from a Greek hoard that was found in the pot in the picture, but whoever put the display together snuck in a 10 lipa (about 1.7 US cents) coin right in the middle. If you click on this picture and then click on the picture on the Flickr page it goes to, you can see where I put a note on which one is the modern coin. :-)

.

After the museum, which closed at 1PM, we wandered up to the Zagreb Cathedral and caught the last half of the church service. I missed Bosnia, but so far I’ve managed to go to a church service in all of the other countries we’ve been to. Neat! Anyway, the cathedral is a Gothic cathedral, but it’s not actually all original — the main nave collapsed in an earthquake in the 1800s and the whole thing sustained serious damage, so it was mostly rebuilt back then, and it’s been remodeled/reconstructed at various other times in history as well. Still, it was really neat, and there’s been a church on that site since 1094, so that’s something.

Doorway of the cathedral

.

Crucifixion at the back of the church. This was one of the more interesting ones that John and I had ever seen -- I can't remember if I've ever seen the complete scene like this as statues within a church. Also, the way the guy on the right is looking down on the onlooker is kind of creepy. Finally, anyone know what language that is above the scene? We were trying to figure it out. Aramaic, maybe?

.

I know I’m a horrible person, but I took a couple of videos during the service, just because the choir was so beautiful. Unfortunately, I wasn’t thinking and held my phone vertically to capture more of the scene, and when I used a program to rotate the video, it lost image and sound quality. Oh well. Here’s one video, and here’s a link to the second (shorter) one.

.

Inside the cathedral. Don't worry, I took this (and the other pictures) AFTER the service was over.

.

After church was over, we went back to the train station (where we’d stashed our backpacks in a locker) and went in search of our lodging for the night, a guest house we’d booked through hostelworld.com (which has been my go-to website on this trip when we can’t find somewhere free to stay.) I was a bit leery of this place when I booked, because it had no reviews and because it was considerably cheaper than other double-room accomodations in Zagreb. Well, turns out that it’s a bit of a ways outside the city (but a few minutes walk from a tram stop that serves several tram lines into the city) and because it’s pretty new. I don’t care about either one — John and I both agreed that this is a really nice place. Everything’s new, it’s clean, it’s quiet, the owner speaks fairly decent English, and while we share a bathroom, there’s only one other person staying here right now, and there are two bathrooms, so it’s really one to ourselves. Excellent. :-)

Lovely room!!

.

We ended up taking a nap for a couple of hours since we still were exhausted from the train ride, then we woke up and went in search of a McDonald’s. I know, we’re horrible typical American tourists… but after 23 days on the road, we both wanted something familiar. Well, as familiar as one can get at McDonald’s in a foreign country. I ordered a burger called a McCountry… is this something that only exists overseas? ‘Cause I don’t usually eat at McDonald’s at home, but I don’t ever remember seeing it on the menu the couple times I have been there in the past few months. It was two chicken patties (slices of chicken, not McNugget style) and a funky beige sauce that was VERY mustard-y. Too mustard-y, actually — I couldn’t finish it, and neither could John. And it really wasn’t a big sandwich, either — maybe the size of a regular McD’s burger, only with the two patties instead of one? Oh well. The fries and strawberry shake were good, even if it did end up being quite a bit more pricey than at home. :-)

Odd McFlurry mix-ins. I believe Cornetto is chocolate-dipped (on one side) ice cream cone pieces, I know Smarties are kind of like M&Ms, and a Kit Kat is a Kit Kat (do we have Kit Kat McFlurries in the US though?) But I'm not entirely sure what Daim is. And also, can we order just plain strawberry, chocolate, or caramel McFlurries in the US? I may have to go back just to try one of these. :-)

.

**********
.
Where we are now:

View Larger Map

.

Color key:
- Red: Plane
- Orange: Walking
- Yellow: Boat
- Green: Car
- Blue: Train
- Purple: Bus

View Euro Trip Summer 2010 in a larger map

This is going to be short because I’m exhausted — literally, I’m falling asleep writing this post. Today we got up at dawn and got to the bus terminal REALLY early and waited for our bus, in order to avoid yesterday’s snafu. The bus ride wasn’t long distance-wise, but we had to change buses twice, and we had a border crossing that took FOREVER. SERIOUSLY. So with that, and the fact that we, er, kind of got misdirected when trying to get from the bus to our host’s house, the whole day of travel was about 10 hours long. That’s a LONG day on a bus.

So here are some pretty pictures. :-)

Croatian coast somewhere between Orebic and Ston.

.

Somehow we took a wrong turn and ended up in Norway... ok, these are really the fjords of northern Montenegro. Breathtaking. (And no, I'm not pining for them...) (Monty Python joke...)

.

We're staying in Sveti Stefan, Montenegro with one of my coworkers, whose husband's family is there. This is the view from their front balcony. Her husband's family actually used to live ON the island -- I'll explain what happened there in my blog post for tomorrow.

.

Sunset over the Montenegrin Riviera.

.

Sveti Stefan at sunset.

.

**********
Where we are now:

View Larger Map

.

Fortunately, the hostel we stayed at (the first one) still had open rooms for tonight, so back we went. Since I was cranky about my snafu with the bus/ferry, and John was still hurting from his sunburn, we elected to hang out in the shade and read for a lot of the day. It was nice and relaxing, actually. That turned out to be the theme of the day.

Relaxing and sharing ice cream on the city wall.

.

Drinks at a bar...

.

...that's built in one of the towers of the city. So neat!

.

The company was lovely...

.

...and so was the view.

.

After drinks, we went to a nice seafood restaurant and shared a plate of... mini lobsters? They were good though...

.

...until John decided he couldn't eat them anymore because they were looking at him. Kind of like the duck in "A Christmas Story".

.

All in all, it was a lovely and relaxing day, other than our little ferry snafu. Well, I can’t think of a better place to get stuck for a day. Life’s rough. :-)

**********
Where we are now:
View Larger Map

.

I think they glow in the dark.

.
So the picture? That’s John’s feet. Pure, unadulterated color on that shot. Looks fantastic, doesn’t it? The rest of him is just as, if not even more, toasted than his feet.

Anyway, before I go into why today was so awesome, let me explain the asterisk first. No, it’s not John’s sunburn, although that’s related to both the asterisk and the awesome.

So in yesterday’s post I wrote about how it was the worst day so far of the trip — death march bike ride, sea urchin in the foot, and something I neglected to mention — our hostel owner’s son (the owner of the original place we were supposed to stay before he overbooked and bumped us up to his mom’s place) came by and told us that he and his mom had had a miscommunication, and she’d overbooked, and we needed to go back to his hostel for our last night. Given that they’d given us a discount for our last night on the original rate we’d paid, I wasn’t complaining too much, but it still is a hassle to pack up and move for only one night.

Anyway, this turned out to be a blessing in disguise. This morning, as we were packing up, I realized my camera was nowhere to be found. The reason this is a blessing is because if we hadn’t had to pack up, I likely wouldn’t have realized this until tomorrow morning, right before we left town (because I couldn’t take it on today’s activity) and I probably would have made us miss our ferry as we were looking for it.

So anyway, as you can probably guess, massive panic (and tears) ensued. I tried to retrace my steps to where I’d last had it. I knew for sure that I’d had it at the cemetery that we stopped at on our bike ride. I couldn’t remember after that, but I thought I might have had it when we went on our second ride before returning the rental bikes. But I COULDN’T REMEMBER. Yesterday was kind of a hot, painful, icky day (with the exception of the lovely swim I had shortly before impaling my foot on a sea urchin.)

We spent an hour looking for it. We went back up to the cemetery (got a ride from the hostel owner this time though.) I even went to two different police stations. Nothing. No one had seen it. I finally resigned myself to my fate — it was gone, and it was my own damn fault. Now that we’d wasted the entire morning looking for it (well, and moving hostels, which took longer than I thought it would when the hostel owner realized I knew something about computers and wanted tech help… sigh) it was almost noon and we still weren’t in a kayak, which was our original plan for today — to rent a double kayak and a couple of snorkels and go snorkeling.

So on our way to the kayak rental place, we decided to try one last place — the ice cream shop we’d stopped at at the end of our death ride yesterday, which is right on the main wharf in town. I didn’t look there before because I was POSITIVE I had my camera after this… yaay for heat-addled brain creating false memories! I also figured that since the only seating is outside on benches and it’s on a main drag, that if I’d left it there, it would be gone anyway.

So we walk into the ice cream place, and I go up to the girl behind the counter and tell her in English that I think I might have left a camera there yesterday. She looked at John, and it was like a light went on in her face. She started talking really fast in Croatian, and rushed around the counter to the back corner of the shop. When I caught “kamara” in her monologue, I literally ran after her, and saw it sitting on the shelf in the back. I’m not embarrassed to say that I totally burst into tears, and then she picked it up, and when she turned around, I hugged her. I tried to give her money as a thank-you, but she wouldn’t take it, darn it!!! I really wish she would have… I sooooooo owe her, and whoever turned it into her!!! When I took a breath from thanking her, she explained in broken English that the reason she knew I was there for my camera was that she recognized John, because she’d looked through the pictures to see if she could get an idea of who it belonged to… WOW. I am SO SO SO SO SO SO SO LUCKY.

So I’m not counting losing my camera as part of today’s “best day so far”. Neither is having to switch hostels. As far as I’m concerned, both of those events *happened* yesterday, but their resolutions were today. That’s fine with me.

Anyway, so now that I had my camera, we went off to the kayak rental place to rent ourselves a kayak. Thankfully they have a storage area for people’s purses and other valuables that they didn’t want to take with them on kayaks, so I was able to leave my camera there (because it’s a 15-minute walk from town to our new hostel and we were already running behind and I didn’t want to walk all the way back.) I do have to admit that I was a bit nervous handing over my camera, though… Understandably so!

By the time we got on the water, it was almost noon. I SWEAR we both slathered ourselves with 30SPF sunblock. SLATHERED, I tell you. Oh, and that stuff was supposed to be waterproof. HA!

We paddled for over an hour to get to where we were going, which was a series of little islands off the coast of Korcula. They weren’t all that far, but the current was going north, and we were going south, so it was slow going to say the least. (This was nice for the paddle home though, as that took us only 30 minutes!) By the time we got to a nice beach where we decided to stop, John was already starting to get burned.

Oh, because of the camera incident, I didn’t bring my $25 eBay wonder camera on the kayak like I’d planned. I figured that if my DSLR was gone, then that and my cameraphone were going to be my only cameras for the rest of the trip, so I didn’t want to risk anything happening to it. Probably a good decision, but it meant that I don’t have a single picture of the absolutely gorgeous place we went snorkeling. :-( If I did, then I’d have something a bit more scenic than John’s sunburnt feet for the picture of the day. :-p

We spent almost four hours where we beached the kayaks. We snorkeled, had lunch, dozed in the sun for a bit to warm up (the water’s still a bit cool this time of year) and snorkeled again (well, John didn’t snorkel again since it was too cold for him, so he followed me in the kayak while I snorkeled over to another tiny island.)

I think I know what it is I love about snorkeling. I’ve always wanted to be able to fly (hey, what kid doesn’t? I think I just never grew out of it) and snorkeling is like flying right underneath the surface of the sky. I love it so so much.

I have to admit, the snorkeling here doesn’t hold a candle to Hawaii. There’s no comparison. There’s really not a whole lot in the way of underwater flora and fauna, much less that of the colorful variety. But the water is just SO FREAKING BLUE AND CLEAR. I still can’t get over it. And there was still a ton of cool stuff to look at (well, as much as I can see anyway without my contacts in… although really, I could see a heck of a lot better underwater than I’d thought I’d be able to!) It was so wonderful… I didn’t want it to end!

Anyway, you’d think that given how much time I spent in the water, I would have been the one to end up roasted (or at least my back, as I was face down in the water most of the time.) But nope… poor John, who was good about reapplying his sunblock (me? reapply mine? ummmm…) and who was only in the water for a bit… the guy’s toast. Crispy critter. Gonna be hurting tomorrow. Doesn’t even want the sheets to touch him as he’s lying in bed. I feel so so so bad for him. His back and chest are only somewhat pink, but his shoulders, face, legs, and feet are fried. Whoops.

Despite alternately freezing and frying, John proclaimed it an awesome day and a good way to wrap up our stay on Korcula, and I wholehartedly concur. Asterisk or no asterisk, this has definitely been my favorite day of the trip so far.

Tomorrow we’re heading off to Sveti Stefan via ferry to Dubrovnik, bus to Budva (Montenegro! our third country this trip!) and then… well, I’m not sure how we’re going to get from Budva to Sveti Stefan, but given that it’s only 10km, we’ll figure something out. In Sveti Stefan, we’re staying with one of my coworkers, whose family lives there and who just got there yesterday from Sacramento. It’s another coastal town, so I’m hoping for more snorkeling and sightseeing. I can’t wait. :-D

Oh, one final note. Wonder of wonders, we’re UNDER BUDGET right now. Not by much, but given that our budget is $50/day/person, and that includes lodging and all of our transportation (well, minus plane tickets and 10 days of train travel, which is all our pass covers) that’s pretty darn good, in my opinion!! And given that we won’t have to pay for lodging for at least the next week (staying with my coworker and then with a friend’s sister’s friend in Sarajevo) that will either put us more ahead, or give us more money to do some fun stuff in the places we’re going. We’ll see. Eventually I think I’m going to do a post about money, because even though I know a lot of people feel like it’s a taboo subject, when I was planning this trip, I found precious little about realistically budgeting for a trip like this, and I figure it’d be nice to have something that maybe other people can use as a reference if they want to plan their own cheap trip around Europe. Besides, with the way I’ve been obsessively tracking every penny spent on this trip (ummm, I might have both a spreadsheet and an expenses program… just maybe…) I have to do SOMETHING with all of that data! Ok, you can now point and laugh at me. I can’t help it — I just like data. :-)

I’m having so much fun. Normally I’d be dreading having to go home right about now (or would already be back home, given most of my trips seem to be a week to ten days) but I have six more weeks to look forward to — SWEET!!! :-)

**********
Where we are now:

View Larger Map

.

We slept in a bit today, had a leisurely breakfast, and then decided to rent bikes and head out to explore the island a bit. However, we somehow took a wrong turn, and ended riding 3 kilometers up a REALLY BIG HILL. I know, only 3 km — cry me a river, right? Well, it was 90F+ and humid as heck, and there was NO SHADE the whole way up, and because we have more good intentions than brains apparently, we went smack dab in the middle of the day.

3 km into the ride, we realized we were in the wrong place, and headed back down, stopping by an interesting-looking cemetery that dates back to the mid-1800s. Something I thought was neat — the graves from the Communist period still had crosses on them.Huh!

Old crypts.

.

Anyway, we wandered around a bit, but it was so hot with the sun reflecting off of the crypts that we ended up just sitting in the shade and panting for a bit before riding back downhill. We were both fairly miserable by the end of the ride — let me tell you. Ugh.

Once we got back to our hostel, we decided a swim was in order, and headed down to the beach. It was PERFECT. OMG.

.

This guy tried to get us to share our lunch with him. Ha.

.

Me, right before my day took kind of a crappy turn.

.

Shortly after the above picture was taken, I stepped on a sea urchin and ended up with a whole bunch of spines in my foot. It was, to say the least, less than fun. I didn’t realize quite the extent of the damage until I got out of the water and looked at my foot… it was ugly.

After hanging out a bit more, my foot really started to hurt, so we walked (well, John walked — I limped) back to our hostel (which was really really close, thankfully) and I spent almost TWO HOURS pulling spines out of my foot. Ok, it didn’t take all two hours — I kept having to take breaks since it hurt, and the way I had to sit with my neck bent to get them out gave me a big crick in my neck and back, and my foot kept falling asleep. Bleh. After that time, I’d gotten most of them, but there were a few stubborn straight-in, deep ones that I just couldn’t get to. So I hit Google for a solution, and found an old diver’s trick — soak the foot in vinegar and they’ll dissolve. Apparently it’s the same process by which you make a turkey wishbone rubbery (ever done that?) Something about the acetic acid in the vinegar reacting to the calcium in the bones, or in the sea urchin spines.

Well, we didn’t have any regular vinegar, so I decided to use some basalmic vinegar (which we’ve been eating with our bread and cheese for lunch) on gauze and taped to my foot to soak it that way. We only had an hour left on our bike rental at this point, and I didn’t want to waste it! So I taped up my foot, shoved it into a shoe, and away we went, sticking to the coast this time. All things considered, it was a lovely ride.

Flowers outside a convent.

.

We had to return the rental bikes, so we did, then came back to our hostel and showered and did laundry (whee!) before going to eat dinner. The hostel we’re staying in is pretty empty right now (high season doesn’t really start for another couple of weeks) so the owner offered us a discount on a fourth night… Heck yeah!! So we’re here through Thursday.

Oh, the vinegar managed to dissolve all but one or two of the deepest spines–it’s hard to tell, since it kind of stained my foot. :-p So it still hurts, but at least I got most of them out. Depending on how it feels tomorrow, I may give it another vinegar soak tomorrow evening.

During the day tomorrow we’re going to rent a kayak and go cruise around… hopefully it’ll be a nice day, and not the comedy of errors that today was. Sigh. :-)

**********
Where we are now:

View Larger Map

.

That's one big freaking swimming pool.

.

Slept in, went to the beach, went to the grocery store, ate lunch, went back to the beach. Read, napped, swam, sunned.

It’s a brutal life.

Sorry for the boring post… it was a boring day, but so so so heavenly to have that boring day.

(It was a beach day because we’re saving up for something fun, like a kayak trip… and because sometimes it’s just nice to lie on a beach and read. Ya know?) :-)

**********
Where we are now:

View Larger Map

.