Sunday July 11th, we got up early and got our bags packed, then took them to the train station and stuffed them in a locker so that we could pick up our train reservation and tickets for Prague, and then hop a train to Oscwiecim (the town where Auschwitz is) before taking the night train to Prague.

We hadn’t looked at the train schedules in advance, because we’d looked before, and there was always a train an hour to Oscwiecim. Well, for some reason there wasn’t today (maybe because it was Sunday?) so we ended up at the bus station behind the train station, to take a bus. While the bus was on the highway, we encountered a very recent traffic accident blocking the road (and “highway” is being generous–there wasn’t even a single line dividing the two halves of the road.) The bus couldn’t squeeze by, and the cops on the scene didn’t have any word as to when it’d be cleared, so the bus driver decided to backtrack and take a different route. And I discovered something. The frustrating part about having GPS is that when the bus driver is going THE WRONG WAY and he doesn’t speak English and you don’t speak Polish, there’s really nothing you can do except for sit and watch him go the wrong way. At one point we were going down a farm road in the middle of a bunch of fields and NOTHING ELSE, and the road was so narrow that branches from trees were hitting us on both sides as well as the top of the bus. The driver pulled over four different times to ask for directions (including one time on that farm road, much to the farmer’s bemusement from which the driver got directions.)

So we ended up getting to Auschwitz over an hour late. This kind of screwed our schedule up, unfortunately, as we had to leave by 6 to catch our train to Prague, and we ended up cutting our visit short, which I was kind of bummed about. But at the same time, we kind of saw enough, you know?

I took almost no pictures. Two with my phone, and maybe four or five more with my regular camera (I’ll post those later, of course.)

Auschwitz is actually three sites–Auschwitz I (the original camp that was mostly used for political prisoners), Auschwitz II (Auschwitz-Birkenau) which is the most notorious one where most of the atrocities occurred, and Auschwitz III, a labor camp that we didn’t see (and I don’t think is on display.) We actually went to Auschwitz II first, since between the hours of 10AM and 3PM the only way you can access Auschwitz I is via a guided tour, which is not only expensive, but not something either of us was interested in. Seriously, who wants to be rushed through something like that?

Auschwitz II is outside the town a couple of miles, so we had to take a free shuttle bus over there. There’s really not much left–the main building where the main gates were, a few of the barracks, and the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria (ruins because the Nazis blew them up when it became clear that the Soviets were going to come in and liberate the camps.)

I had a really hard time grasping things at Auschwitz-Birkenau. I think partly it’s because so little remains, but also partly because we’re so used to seeing everything as black-and-white pictures, and here we were in full-color on a 90+ degree summer day, with everything around us green and leafy. In my head, concentration camps are always in black and white and it’s always winter, because that seems to be how it is in the pictures I’ve seen. Heck, even in the pictures where there’s no snow, since they’re in black and white, it’s hard to get a sense of the vibrancy and reality of things.

So I decided to turn the two pictures I took into black and white shots… maybe you can see what I mean.

Remains of barracks at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

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Same picture, turned grayscale and some other tinkering done to it. This is how I picture it, ya know?

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The blue sky, puffy white clouds, and green trees just don't jive with this infamous sign over the gate at Auschwitz I.

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Yeah, this picture is about how it should look. Incidentally, did you know that some indescribably stupid people stole this sign last winter with the intention of selling it to a collector? When it was recovered, they'd cut it into three pieces, ostensibly to smuggle it out of the country. Wow. Just... yeah.

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After Auschwitz-Birkenau, it was after 3, so we headed back to Auschwitz I. That camp is MUCH better-preserved. The majority of the buildings were brick rather than wood, and they’d turned a lot of them into museums on different topics, so we wandered through them with the time we had remaining. Again, looking at the buildings themselves, I had a really hard time grasping what went on there… but looking at some of the exhibits made some things come alive. They have one room that’s full of nothing but hair the Nazis cut off of the women. It’s dusty and all looks gray and clumped and matted together, but here and there you can see braids, and that caught me. It was hard to look at the buildings and see what’d happened there, but for some reason, all I had to do was look at a braid and envision the woman braiding it for the last time. There was another room just full of shoes, including a large display of just thousands of children’s shoes. That was another really really difficult one for me. There was another one full of clothes. One full of brushes — hair brushes, toothbrushes, clothing brushes, shaving brushes. One of suitcases, suitcases plastered with the name and address label of the owner, and in many cases also covered in stickers from exotic locations to which the owner had traveled. New York City. Paris. Istanbul.

Ya know, I’ve been to the Holcaust Museums in LA and Washington DC. I’ve seen similar displays of personal artifacts, and those definitely affected me. But there was something about seeing the ones at Auschwitz and knowing that this was where they were brought originally — that they were brought there for their intended purposes, and not shipped there after the fact for the purpose of a museum exhibit… something about that hit me pretty hard.

We saw other places where horrible atrocities occurred (the camp prison, the excecution yard) but nothing came to life like room after room of personal belongings. That’s what resonated with me, and is lodged in my brain.

Like I said earlier, we had to leave an hour before the museum closed, so we didn’t have time to see everything I wanted to see… but at the same time it was enough.

***HERE ENDS THE SERIOUS PART OF THE POST. ENOUGH ALREADY.***

We hopped a (very very crowded) bus home (we got the last two seats on the bus — the 15 or so people who boarded after us ended up standing for the almost two-hour ride back.) Once we got back, we retrieved our bags from the locker and headed to the mall next to the train station so we could eat dinner and I could finish postcards. It was here that I discovered something quite amazing.

McDonald’s in Poland serves CHICKEN CURRY BURGERS.

DUDE. WHY DON’T WE HAVE THESE AT HOME. SERIOUSLY.

Ok, granted it’s not as good as actual chicken curry, but for a chicken burger, it was PRETTY GOOD. Just spicy enough without being so spicy that it’d scare people off, and that lovely curry flavor… mmmmmm. Where can I start a petition to get these at home???

Oh, and I can’t remember if I’ve talked about McDonald’s here or just on Facebook, so I’ll explain here for posterity. While I’m all about eating local food while traveling, McD’s in foreign countries are good for two reasons. First, as you saw with my previous example, it’s fun to see what the local menu contains that the American menu doesn’t. So far I’ve had a raspberry “summer shake” (quite good!) and a burger that I tried in Zagreb called a McCountry, which was like a Big Mac only with this very mustardy dijon sauce. I didn’t realize what it was before I bought it, I just wanted to try it. I like mustard, but this was too much mustard for me. I couldn’t finish it, and neither could John. Oh well. I’ve seen this same burger in Poland and in Hungary (where it was called the McFarm… I’m not sure why, but then again, I’m not sure why it’d be called the “McCountry” either.)

The second reason McDonald’s in foreign countries are great? They ALL have FREE WIFI. And they’re huge — much bigger (more seating) than pretty much any American McD’s I’ve seen. So they’ve become, for John and I on this trip, a meeting spot for when we split up to do our own thing, and also a waiting room when we’re waiting for a train. Heck, it’s a lot nicer than the train station, and you can get a soda and sit there for two hours and no one will hassle you (unlike at a cafe.)

We headed to the train about 20 minutes before it was supposed to leave and found our train car. Have I mentioned yet how night trains work in Europe? It’s really very cool! You board a car that’s going to your destination, but the other cars on the train may be going to different destinations. In the middle of the night, you make one or more stops where your car (or the other cars) is unlinked from the train and hooked to a different train that’s going where you want to go. It’s really nifty!

Anyway, so I hand the conductor our reservation, tickets, and rail passes. Let me explain how that works. We have railpasses, but for some trains (including overnight trains) you also have to purchase a reservation (fairly cheap on day trains, more expensive on night trains) so that you’re guaranteed somewhere to sit. Also, our rail passes weren’t valid for Poland, so we had to purchase tickets from Krakow to the Polish border, and then our passes would be good once we crossed into the Czech Republic. So we had four pieces of paper total — the reservation slip, two tickets, and the railpass. I hand all of this over to the conductor for our car, and he shakes his head and says no, that the reservation and tickets aren’t valid until the NEXT night.

WHAT.THE.HECK.

I looked closely at them for the first time, and sure enough, he was right — they were printed for July 12th. I thought back to that morning, and how the woman who’d printed them had JUST gotten to work — we were her first customers of the day, in fact.

I looked at John, and looked at the time. We had less than 15 minutes before the train was going to leave, and the international ticket counter was on the far opposite end of the station (pretty much as far opposite from where we were standing as we could get) and down and up a couple of sets of stairs (since you have to go underneath the tracks to get to the platforms.) I’m glad I chose to wear my shoes that day rather than my sandals! I left John with all of the bags and took off running, clutching the tickets and the passes.

I got to the counter, completely winded, and was shocked to see that, almost 12 hours later, it was the same woman who’d sold me the passes that morning!! I managed to gasp out our dilemma, and her response was, “Yes, I remember you. Did I really put that as the date? I know you wanted them for tonight.” No apology. She got a new reservation printed out, but handed me back cash and told me we’d need to buy the tickets on board the train. I didn’t quite understand it, but I took it and ran, literally. I sprinted back to the train and we grabbed our bags and got back in line and handed everything to the conductor outside the train door with less than five minutes to spare.

Right before the train left, the conductor came into our compartment looking for us — he wanted our rail passes, and he needed 5 more Euros, since it costs more to buy tickets on the train than in the station (which seemed really unfair to me, since the ticket woman was the one who screwed up in the first place anyway!) He said he’d take payment in Euro or Zloty (Polish currency.) We were out of both currencies — we haven’t been anywhere on the Euro since Montenegro (FIVE COUNTRIES AGO) and we’d tried to use up all of our Zloty so we didn’t have extra left. After dumping out all the small pockets of John’s and my backpacks, we located a 5 Euro bill that had somehow escaped detection. This, however, left our rail passes. The problem was that I’d already given them to him, and he insisted I hadn’t.

At this point I was TOTALLY freaking out. I’d already sprinted across the train station and back to get the reservation changed, it was hotter than hell outside and inside the station, and now he was telling me we never gave him our rail passes (which I KNOW we did, and which are NOT replaceable if we lose them.) John’s yelling at me to calm down and think about where I might have put the passes, I’m yelling back that I know I gave them to him, he’s yelling back that the conductor doesn’t have them, and our compartment companions are watching this in bewilderment.

Finally I go into the conductor’s berth and refuse to leave until he goes through the pile of tickets and railpasses. Lo and behold, there are our passes!!! AAARRRGGGGHHHHH.

I go back into our compartment and want to just curl into a little ball and cry out of sheer relief. We’re on the train, and I didn’t lose our passes. As I go to empty my pockets so that I can stretch out on the bed, I realize that the postcards are still in them. I’d meant to put them in the mailbox on the platform, and in the chaos, I TOTALLY forgot. GAH. Every time we stop for the rest of Poland, I hang my head out the train window to look at the platform and see if I see a mailbox… Nope. Sigh.

So some of you will be getting postcards from Poland when I get home and can stuff them into envelopes. Oh well, at least they have stamps on them. :-p

The other two guys in our compartment were pretty cool. They were two Swedish architecture students who were spending a couple of weeks traveling around Europe, and we talked for several hours, until the Spanish gals in the compartment next door banged on our wall for the third or fourth time (since it was around 1:30 AM and they probably wanted us to go to sleep, even though we were talking fairly quietly.)

Sonne and their traveling mascot. Apparently they put him into pictures at random. I SOOO love that idea -- I wish I'd done something similar on this trip!

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I was miserably hot, and of course at this point our train was stopped in a station waiting for another train for something like 45 minutes, so there was no airflow and no lovely white noise to put me to sleep, so I didn’t fall asleep until well after 2. Ugh. I still like night trains, though, even though it was A THOUSAND DEGREES IN THERE.

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There's a bunch of 4x4s in place as construction scaffolding (or something like that) in the international ticket office at Budapest Keleti train station. It appears to have been in place since 2007, judging from the dates on it. At some point, someone wrote their journey's stops and signed their home country, name, and that day's date. Now the scaffolding is covered, and as we waited, we enjoyed perusing the gallery of where everyone had been before they ended up in Budapest, or where they were planning to go. John added us to the historical register. I love it.

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Bags in lockers, we headed over to the Great Synagogue and Jewish Museum to see what there was to see.

This is the world's second or third largest synagogue (depending on which source you read.) It's absolutely BEAUTIFUL.

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Something that absolutely fascinated us about the place (aside from its size) was the resemblance it bore to, well, a church. (Incidentally, the word for both church and synagogue in Hungarian is “templom”.) It had an organ and an altar and a choir and frescoes on the walls and a dome and a bunch of marble. It just seemed somewhat odd to us, but we both still were amazed by its sheer size and beauty.

A couple of things I somehow neglected to get a cameraphone picture of, but that I know I have pictures of on my big camera. First, in the courtyard area next to the synagogue, there is a mass grave where over 2000 victims of the Nazis from the Budapest ghetto during the winter of 1944-1945 are buried.  The courtyard now contains trees, ivy, and a lot of gravestones that are just leaned up against each other and against the trees, since because they’re mass graves, people aren’t sure where the gravestones need to go. Around the outside of the courtyard are pictures of the courtyard (which was supposed to be a garden originally) from the early 1900s until the 1980s, including pictures of the bodies and their burial. Very, very sad and moving.

The other thing I don’t have a picture of is the Memorial of the Hungarian Jewish Martyrs, a silver sculpture designed to look like a weeping willow tree. On the leaves are engraved the names of the 300,000+ Hungarian Jews who were victims of the Holocaust. It’s located next to the synagogue in Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Park. Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat who used his position to help Hungarian Jews emigrate to safety during the war, and was eventually taken into custody by the Soviets and “died of a heart attack” at the age of 35 while in Soviet custody in Lubyanka Prison in Moscow. What’s the old grim joke? Something about a .38mm heart attack? Not very funny, but sadly most likely true.

In any case, as part of the memorial park, they have plaques and pillars honoring him and many other Hungarian members of the Righteous Among the Nations, the designation for non-Jews who assisted Jews and helped them be saved from the Nazis during the Holocaust. I’m not quite sure why Wallenberg gets a plaque in the ground and certain names go on it (there were tons more names on three other pillars surrounding this central plaque.)

This is located in Raoul Wallenberg park behind the Great Synagogue in Budapest. The names on the stone are other Budapest members of the Righteous Among Nations, those non-Jews who helped save Jews from the Nazis during World War II. The stones are part of a Jewish custom of leaving a stone on a person's grave as a sign of respect.

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After that, we went inside the museum. The top floor of the museum housed a temporary exhibit of Jewish rugs. At this point in the day, I was already kind of tired, so I almost asked if we could skip it… I’m so glad we didn’t! John and I actually spent more time here than we did in the rest of the museum. I’m not quite sure how to explain why we both found the whole thing so fascinating, but we did. It wasn’t just rugs made by Jewish people and/or for synagogues, either.  They had Chinese-made rugs and Afghani-made rugs and even Navajo rugs.

This rug was made in Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghani conflict. It has woven into it tanks, machine guns, and grenades. Sad.

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There was one more rug that both really really caught John’s and my attention, and left us thinking afterwards… but that’s going to be its own blog post. It’s that special. Yeah, I know we’re weird.

After we got out of the rug exhibit, we ended up at a Chinese food place (don’t laugh — we had to try it!) for dinner, and then we headed over to the McDonald’s by the train station to wait for our train. Yeah, we could have waited IN the train station, but for the price of a Coke, McDonald’s is clean, has clean bathrooms and free wifi, and is free of annoying people who keep asking us if we want to give them money or if we want a taxi or accommodations. Sometimes it’s just nice to not have to deal with that. I did my usual last-minute postcard writing (why do I always wait until the last minute??) and then we headed over to find our train.

Something that  I find really cool about trains in Europe — you sit in a specific car based on your destination. A single train doesn’t always travel to a place in its entirety. Our train was at least 15 cars long, and it contained cars going  to different cities all over eastern Europe (like the car in the following picture, whose final destination was St. Petersburg.) Then, at various stations on the journey, cars detach from one train and attach to another train, and are carried to their final destinations. Our car was the only one on the train going to Krakow, for example. SO NEAT.

Am I a freak for wanting to hop this train and go to St. Petersburg? I'd LOVE TO.

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Lousy cameraphone picture of us in our triple-decker bunks on the train.

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Train next to us leaving the station. I wonder where all those train cars are headed to.

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Sunset as seen from the train. It was an absolutely amazing one.

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I don’t think there are words to describe how happy I was to be on that train. I know I’m odd, but honestly, that’s been one of the highlights of this trip for me–lying in my bunk, hanging my head out the window, and watching the countryside go by. So so so amazing and wonderful.

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Where we are now:

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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!

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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.

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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. :-)

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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!

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Where we are now:

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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:

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!!

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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. :-)

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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

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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?

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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.

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

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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!!

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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. :-)

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Where we are now:

View Larger Map

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Trip Day 0: Waiting for our first train of many, originally uploaded by Kari_Marie.

My goal this trip is to post a picture a day, so that I’m forced to think and write about some of this as it’s happening, rather than waiting until I get home to look at my pictures and reflect. I mean, geez, I never did blog about Costa Rica… whoops. :-)

Anyway, so right now we’re at the train station in Suisun, and yes, that is all of our stuff. Not bad considering that includes two sleeping bags and at least ten pounds of trail mix, granola bars, and dried fruit. We dropped our cars at John’s parents’ house and his sister brought us here. We’re taking the train to Emeryville, Amtrak bus to the CalTrain station, and that train to the airport, where we’re going to check in for our flight tomorrow and then catch a shuttle to a hotel for a bit of sleep before our flight in the morning.

Ok, so this was a really boring start… I’ll try to make my next entry somewhat more interesting.

Train’s here. More tomorrow. :-)

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Where we are now:

View Larger Map

I’ve seen this car on my way home from work a handful of times, but I’ve never been able to get a picture of it before. Today two fortunate events conspired to help me finally get a picture — I happened to get right behind it on a one-lane road, and the one stoplight on that road turned red just as we got there. OMG WIN.

Herbie the Love Bug

This one is tiny and grainy because (a) I took the picture in my side-view mirror after I'd already passed it, (b) I cropped the heck out of it, and (c) I flipped it so that it wasn't reversed (from being taken in the mirror.) Awesome. :-)

One of Sacramento’s more distinct landmarks is the lovely art deco Tower Bridge, which spans the Sacramento River and leads to the state Capitol building. While I’ve driven across it, I for some reason never got around to actually walking or riding over it to take pictures. Now that I’ve finally gotten that new used* wide-angle lens that I’ve wanted (it’s the same one I rented for my trip to Rome last fall) I figured it was a good excuse to go and take bridge pictures, so I played hooky from work for a couple of hours yesterday morning and rode my bike dolwn there to get some lovely morning light pictures. And then I rode down there again this evening to get some lovely nighttime shots. Now I just need to go down at sunset — the bridge really glows at sunset, and I want to get a few pictures of that. I think that this is my second favorite downtown thing to photograph, after the Capitol building.

*I’ve been looking for this lens used on Craigslist ever since I got back from Rome. While it’s fairly common in the Nikon mount, it’s darned near impossible to find in the Canon mount, AND forget trying to get it new — it’s ALWAYS backordered everywhere, unless you want to pay an exorbitant (33%!) markup. Ummm, how ’bout NO. I’ve bid on eBay auctions before, and FINALLY won one…

Anyway, well, these aren’t the pictures I took with my new lens. Those will be forthcoming though, at some point. These were taken with my cameraphone, since I like how it looks and I like being able to post pictures so easily. As you can see, I had some fun with the sketch filter in the photoediting program on my camera for one of the pics… good times. :-)

Tower Bridge glowing in the Friday morning sunlight

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Fun with the sketch filter

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Just after sunset earlier this evening

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I mean, I have:

Trains

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Planes

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Automobiles

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Subway

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Ship

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Horse and cart

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Hot air balloon

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Bicycle

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Skateboard

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Skiing (and chairlift!)

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Snowboarding

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What else am I missing? Help me out here!

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Now, if you’ve been around this blog or my Flickr for any length of time, you may realize that I love transportation. I’m not sure if this is part of my love of travel, my general restlessness and desire to always be going somewhere, or just because I played with Tonka trucks instead of Barbies in my formative years, but more or less, if it moves and can carry people, I want to observe it, study it, and take pictures of it. I especially love planes — I’ve always wanted to fly (like a bird, not just with a ticket and a window seat) and I was SORELY disappointed when I went skydiving and it wasn’t at all like flying. I really need to try hang-gliding, or parasailing, or zip-lining, or something else. Suggestions appreciated. I know I’m weird — you don’t have to remind me. And no, Mom, I *don’t* have a death wish.

SFO is a particularly neat place to plane-watch because of the way the jets land RIGHT over the water. Oh, this also makes it a really cool place to take off or land when you’re ON the plane, especially when the weather is good and it’s daytime and you get an awesome view.

Anyway, so I drove up Bayshore Drive to find a free hotel parking lot to park in so that I could walk out to the seawall and find myself a good seat. I popped on my telephoto lens, turned on my camera, and…

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I’M SORRY DAVE, I’M AFRAID I CAN’T DO THAT.

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AKA Canon’s dreaded Err99 message.

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You know the old cliche about someone’s gut dropping? Yeah, it ain’t a cliche, it’s a quite physical feeling. Kind of like, “Oh please don’t let me barf. Please don’t let me barf.” Not only is this my camera we’re talking about, but I’m leaving for Costa Rica on Saturday–not enough time to get it fixed, and I REALLY don’t want to fork out almost $300 for a rental. No no no no no.

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Ran back to my car, tried switching lenses. No dice. Tried switching batteries. No dice. Tried switching CF cards. No dice. I could take somewhere between 3 and 8 pictures before the damn thing would give me the error message and I’d have to turn the camera off, pull the battery, pop it back in, and turn it back on again. SO NOT OK.

I had no autofocus, no display either through the eyepiece or on the back (it would go into picture review mode, though) and I had no idea what my settings were. So I spun dials and prayed for the best.

Have I ever mentioned that I’m horrible at manual focusing? I’ve tried, I really have. I’ve come to the conclusion that I just don’t see well enough, or my eyes don’t adjust well enough, or something, because pretty much everything comes out just soft enough to really tick me off.

So there I was, standing behind the seawall, trying not to cry when I realized this was not going to work. After I quit wanting to alternately cradle my poor ailing camera and pat it gently, and huck it in the bay while yelling obscenities, I figured I needed to make the best of a bad situation. I mean, I’d driven all the way out there to take pictures, right?

I quickly discovered that planes are fairly easy to manual focus on — easier than animals at the zoo, actually, and MUCH easier than birds in flight. First of all, they move fairly slow when they’re coming in for a landing. Second, they have a logo and writing on them, which gives me something to look at while focusing. VERY helpful.

Despite these two things, I still managed to ruin a fair amount of shots, but I got some neat ones.

San Francisco skyline.

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I love 747s. Sorry Joel!, 777s are pretty neat too, but these are just wicked cool.

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I'd love to take credit for planning this fun shot, but I didn't realize until I pulled these images up on my computer that I'd caught a bird in there. Nice. :-)

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Now here's something I don't see every day! Why?

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What's so special about this? It's a plane AND a bird -- a Cathay Pacific plane with a bird on the tail, to be exact. Hmmm... wonder who I know who flies for them...

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Oh yeah!! JOEL!!

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A bit of backstory -- at some point in the past, I promised my college buddy-travel buddy-good friend-pilot Joel! that if he ever landed in San Francisco, that I'd go take a picture of him landing. So here you go, man -- your new desktop wallpaper. :-D Let me know what your captain thinks!!

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As far as my camera goes, I still have no idea what’s going on. I can get it to work, but between the battery pulls, the total lack of auto-anything, and having no idea what it’s set on, I just can’t take it and rely on it. Sigh. So I’m borrowing a Rebel XT from work — it’s a model down from mine (8MP instead of 10, and some other small differences) but at least it’s free and in fantastic shape (I’m pretty sure it’s been used for fewer than 100 pictures.) I’m just glad I have that option — while this would have been a good excuse to get that 50D I’m dying for (ok, so I *really* want the 7D, but that’s NEVER EVER going to happen) truth is that I just can’t spend that kind of money right now. I have trips to take, darn it!! GRRRR. I have a feeling though that a camera body purchase is going to be in my not too-distant future… so much for that wide-angle lens I wanted. Sigh.

Oh yeah, and thanks Joel! for giving me an excuse to finally go plane-watching. :-)

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