Zagreb, International Battery Charger

This one is probably going to be fairly short as Zagreb ended up being more of a ‘rest and revive’ stop than I expected.  There was really just two things I wanted to see there – The Museum of Broken Hearts and Plitvice Lakes National Park (which was actually a two hour bus trip away).

Well… at least I did one of those things.

DAY ZERO

Zagreb reminded me a bit of Bern, though not as nice.  Like Switzerland (and Australia, actually) it had a lot of space, with actual houses instead of streets lined with massive apartment blocks.  It was snowing when I arrived, and there was already a lot of snow lying around.  I sloshed through it gleefully on my way to the hostel, since even the mucky, sloshy, melted stuff still had appeal to me at that point (it doesn’t anymore).

The loud gang of students went off in another direction (thank goodness) and I was left navigating to the hostel myself.  I started off by going the wrong way, though it didn’t take too long to facepalm myself and turn around (the first thing the instructions I wrote down said was to turn right out of the train station, so what do I do?  Turn left.)

Things seemed pretty busy for a Thursday night, and I wondered if perhaps I had accidentally arrived in time for some kind of festival or something.  As far as I could tell by the time I left I didn’t.

The hostel was a nice place.  It was called The House Hostel.  Because it was a house.  The lounge area was nice and spacious because it was an actual lounge room.  The kitchen was a real, fully stocked kitchen (that I never actually made use of).

I walked in and saw a couple of people lounging around in the lounge.

“Hey,” one of them said with an American accent.

“Hey,” I replied, turning back to the reception desk.

“No, hey.  We’ve met before.”

I turned back around to get a look at her.  Now that she mentioned it, she did look familiar – and then I saw her boyfriend as well.  Now, who was she?

So, remember all the way back in Rome?  I met an American couple on my last day who were headed to Naples, but I couldn’t find so went without?  Admittedly I didn’t say that much about them then because I couldn’t remember much of what we had said, and only saw for a little while, but we left enough of an impression on each other that we were able to recognize one another (they had given me the name of the hostel in Plovdiv that I ended up staying at).

They were just off to dinner in the city.  I didn’t have any Croation kuna at that point (7.5:1 with the euro) so didn’t intend to eat.  Which, looking back, is really stupid.  Oh well, I went hungry that night, and fiddled around on the computer before going to bed early.

DAY ONE

My plan was to check out the city a bit, go to the Museum of Broken Relationships and maybe the History Museum or the Archaeological Museum.  Despite being kind of over museums of the archaeological type.

The American couple, of whom I can only remember the name of the guy because he gave me his facebook, were leaving that day, so it was to be a brief reunion.  I discovered, however, that they were going to be in Prague soon.  I flipped open my giant spreadsheet with all my dates and times and monies in it and lo and behold, we would be in Prague at the same time.

Hopefully we’ll meet up there – as it is, I’ve got a good spread of people to meet up with over the next little bit of my trip.

We also did a bit of a money exchange, since they were leaving Croatia and I had some forint left for when they got to Hungary.  Hopefully Google’s currency rates worked in my favour a little.

They went off to their bus and I went off to do the rest of the exchange I needed done.  I did it in a bank.  Cool story bro.

On my way to the Museum of Broken Relationships (which is too long to type every time so I’m going to call it the MoBR) I passed a large square with some kind of market going on.  They had sausages.  And sweet doughy things.  I decided to come back that way after the museum.

It was snowing quite heavily that day, which was cool and all, but I’m starting to understand why the Europeans all hate snow.  It’s hard to call it picturesque when it keeps going straight into your eyes.

So, what is the MoBR?  It’s a wonderfully unique museum that works in a similar fashion to the Book of Secrets.  Basically people from around the world send the museum objects related to their past (ended) relationships along with a paragraph or so that sums up the relevance of the object.  Objects ranged from photographs to video art, teddy bears to bottle openers, axes to dildos.  There was a pair of fake boobs (which had been the cause of the relationship’s end – the woman who sent them in explained that her husband had asked her to wear them, and she’d gotten mad since they were larger than her own breasts.  Maybe something got lost in translation…)

It was small, but to read everything (and I wanted to read everything) required at least two hours.  Afterwards, feeling much enlightened, I went back down to the market and bought a sausage and some balls.

The sausage was just what you’d expect – nice and thick and oily.  The balls were these little dough things that were deep fried – a bit like chewy doughnuts.  They were called Frujtles or something.  I got some covered in nutella.  It was ridiculous, they cost like 2 euro and you got a whole tray of them, piled up high.  I felt so full afterwards, but they were addictive.

Satisfied foodwise, I went to try and get my history on at the Croatian History Museum.  I found it no worries (all the museums are incredibly clearly signed in Zagreb), but the front door was closed.  No worries – there was a sign above it pointing to the left saying ‘entrance’.  So I went to the left, all the way to the end of the road, ending up basically outside some guy’s house.  Definitely no museum entrance there.

I went back and considered giving the big door a push anyway, but there was a police officer standing on the corner looking at me (probably thinking “stupid tourist, just walk in”) and a sign said the museum would be closed on holidays, and I had seen a lot of children out and about (for a Friday), making me suspect it may, in fact, be a holiday.  So I left to get my history on a the Archaeological Museum instead, which is a lot more ancient but also a lot less informative.

So how does the Zagreb Archaeological Museum rank?  Well, it’s better than the one in Sofia, but not as good as the one in Athens (duh).  It has a well-respected exhibition on Egyptian artifacts, including something called the Zagreb Mummy.  Which is a shriveled-up corpse.  I have to admit to being a little taken aback when I walked into a small room to be confronted by a blackened carcass.  Especially since it STILL HAD EYES (mummies had glass eyes put in their sockets before burial).  That was eeries.  And it was a dark, foreboding room with a long manuscript displayed nearby (with one of the most complete examples of Etruscan writing, apparently) that could easily be some kind of ancient curse.

The Greek and Roman exhibits were far less unsettling.

After that it was back to the hostel.  I had planned to stay out until nightfall and go to a traditional restaurant I had looked up, but I was still full from the frujtle and thought I might find a companion if I went back.

As it turned out, I did end up getting a companion.  Sort of.  While I was in the common room, another American guy checked in.  His name was Scott.  Unfortunately for me, he was craving American food and ended up ordering takeaway Chinese (about as American as you can get).

Scott was an avid photographer and outdoorsman, though his studies were in civil engineering.  He had been travelling for a while already, and would continue to travel for a while longer.  He was in Croatia because he only had sixteen days left in the Schengen zone, and needed to kill some time before a skiing holiday in Austria.  To be honest, this was the first time I recognized that the Schengen agreement could have been a real pain had I not had a British passport – as it is, for me, travelling in Schengen countries is so much easier than otherwise (no being woken on night trains!)

He ate his Chinese and I said I was planning to go out, though phrased it more as though I was going to go out drinking since I thought that was more likely to catch his interest than just more food.

We got a pub recommendation from the hostel (a place called Mali Medo, which also served food) and went on our way.  It was snowing really heavily at this point – in fact, it was the first time I have started walking at one location and in the time it takes to reach my destination the snow has actually started to build up on the ground.  Which was exciting, if cold. 

It didn’t take long to find the right street, as it was in the vicinity of the market I had been to that day and I had a map.  It appeared to be the main pub street since it was… well… lined with pubs.

We followed the street a good distance since, according to the instructions provided to us, the pub was quite a way up the street.  I checked the map and announced we had arrived at the place.  The surroundings told a different story – no ‘Mali Medo’ in sight.  That was a tad disconcerting, so we went up a little way.  Then we went down a little way.  Then we walked around the block to the parallel street, thinking that maybe the receptionist had put the dot slightly too far to the left.  It wasn’t there either, though we did find a place called The Tolkien Bar, though its only connection to Tolkien seemed to be the poster on the front with the dwarfs from the Hobbit movie.

We gave up at that point and went to find somewhere that looked decent, had a few people in it and served food.  It was more difficult than it sounds – all the popular places only served drinks.

Then we found it.  Tucked away in a little inconspicuous door with a tiny sign over it saying Mali Medo.  We’d missed it initially because the awning covered the name.  Oh, and the receptionist had marked the wrong place on the map.

Going in I could tell we’d been given a good recommendation.  The place was full of locals drinking, eating and chatting.  Unfortunately it was too full of locals drinking, eating and chatting.  There was no room.  So we went back out in the snow, cursing the receptionist’s cartographic ability, which we blamed for the fact that we had arrived too late for a seat, and went across the road to the first restaurant we could find.

It was empty when we arrived.  I was beyond caring.  I ordered a salad and a steak.  The steak was like rubber riddled with fat.  The salad had a weird smell to it, probably because they’d used too much vinegar.  It was decorated like a ‘traditional’ Croatian tavern.  So yeah, we’d walked into a tourist trap (the steak was expensive too – 80 kn for just a steak – about 11 euro).

While we were there others started arriving.  All of them were tourists.  I think they may have seen us go in and assumed it would be ok.  I feel responsible for their s****y dinner.

Ok, so then we headed for The Tolkien Bar, though by this time it was 11:30pm and we were told on arrival that they closed at midnight.  Just enough time for a pint!  Well, I had a pint of their house lager – Scott went for a high-alcohol-content Belgian beer that he liked.  Turned out he was a beer connoisseur (or snob – take your pick) who had been tasting all the beers of the various countries he visited.  Especially Belgium.  Apparently Belgian beer is the bomb.  I kind of had an inkling that that was the case already.

Once we were kicked out we went back to the hostel to sleep.  Oh, and Scott peed in the street.  Though that’s not very important.

DAY TWO

It was my intention to go to Plitvice Lakes National Park on this day.  It was a two hour bus ride.  It cost 80 kn each way, plus entry to the park.  I decided it wasn’t worth the hassle and cost for what would basically amount to four hours of trudging through snow for a couple of pretty pictures, so I stayed in the hostel.

I went out in the afternoon to grab some food – a 30cm sausage and some more frujtles, this time with cinnamon.  Feeling like a fatty, but satisfied with that feeling, I walked around a bit more, considered buying something from the market, didn’t, walked until I reached the Museum of Contemporary Arts and Crafts, marveled at the impressive building it was housed in and went back to the hostel.  So… a pretty lazy day.

That evening Scott and I fully intended to get a seat at Mali Medo.  We’d liked the look of it the day before and… heck, we wanted in.  We left at 6pm to get to the bar at 7pm.  By the time we got there it was about half full, so we gleefully took a seat.

Mali Medo is a very pub-y feeling pub, and is fairly no-nonsense in what they serve: beer and meat.  The nice thing is that the beer is homebrewed.  They offer five different tap beers costing around 2 euro for a half litre,

We went for their best one first.  I actually liked it.  Europe has won me over with the beers, I think.  Scott was also impressed – I don’t think he had expected much, but he said it was up there with the best beers he had had.

We decided the only appropriate thing to do would be to try all of the beers, so as we finished one we would order the next on the list.  I’m really starting to understand how people can have a favourite beer (as long as their favourite beer is European – Coronas still taste a bit like someone drank a lot of water and pissed in a bottle to me, and the less said about Fosters and XXXX the better).

We each ordered a mixed grill (50 kn – about 6,50 euro) which was a plate piled high with delicious, delicious meaty goodness.  And some potatoes, but mostly meaty goodness.

As Scott got a little tipsier (I didn’t go too badly since I swapped my final beer for a plate of chocolate and walnut pancakes, so only drank 2 litres in total) he revealed that he was a sociopath who enjoyed making weapons as a kid, respected countries that exerted military strength and thought everyone should have a gun.  Interestingly he identified these as sociopathic tendencies within himself, so I can’t quite decide whether that makes him a sociopath or not.

Anyway, he was a pretty nice guy for a sociopath (probably the last thought of nearly every serial killer victim) and I was happy with my beer and food, so just kind of went with it.  In fact, I think he might have been half joking.

The bartender kept trying to upsell us to the 1L steiners, but I was way too sensible to do that (1L cost the same as 2 500mL anyway, so you might as well go steady!)  We did try a shot of Croatian rajkia, various flavoured brandies.  Scott went for the hardest one, apple.  I was like: “…are there any easy ones?”  The bartender suggested strawberry.

“No, not a girly one.  Just one that won’t make me sick.  Like… a middle one.”

The bartender laughed and gave me a sour cherry shot.

I assume we were meant to shot it… though it was served in a lowball glass.  I didn’t see anyone else drinking one (I saw them being served, just never caught them being drunk) so wasn’t sure.  The bartender did look a little surprised when we downed it all in one go.

After we’d finished we went back to the hostel.  I had a 200 kn note I was trying to get rid of, so used it to pay my share and therefore received the bulk of the change.  There was a moment where Scott was looking at the bill, I had the change in my hand and the bartender was looking at us both, confused.

“Is there something wrong?”

I realized Scott, being American, was trying to figure out the tip.  I, being Australian, shoved 10kn into the bartender’s hand and called it a day (10kn was definitely way too little, but my brain wasn’t doing the math).

Then… bed bed bed bed bed.

DAY THREE

I’m not even sure why I’m calling this a day.  Basically I got up, ate breakfast (there were pancakes!) and went to the train station to catch the train to Ljubljana.  The train was late, and I had a bit of a panic when a random train was sitting at the platform my train was supposed to be at, but it had a different destination written on it and the departures board claimed my train hadn’t even arrived yet.  As it turned out, in Zagreb they sometimes have two trains at the same platform, making things stupidly confusing for everyone.

A very uneventful six hour train ride later (seriously, now I’m out of the west it seems transit is smooth sailing) and I was in Ljubljana.

(As a brief side note, I saw the first rain I have seen since Rome pretty much as soon as I crossed the border into Slovenia.  A not-so-impressive start.)

Ok, that was a quick one to knock out.  I don’t think Ljubljana will take too long either, but I guess you’ll find out depending on when this story is

TO BE CONTINUED

Budapest: Of Bathrooms and Broken Promises

So… the anticipated content warning.  Be aware this blog contains more discussions of sex than it probably really needs (especially day 5) though a lot of it is just insinuated rather than expressly detailed (that almost makes it sound exciting – don’t worry, it isn’t).  Also, lots of talk of drinking and unhealthy drinking culture, which some parents of younger readers may wish to shield their children from.

I hadn’t been in a city with much in the way of attractions since Athens, so Budapest was a good dose of touristy fun.  It’s a busy place, there’s plenty to do and, what with it being a popular party destination, plenty of like-minded young people to meet.  It was a place that could be whatever you wanted – relaxing, intense, exciting, cultural, tacky, it has it all.  So there was really no way I couldn’t enjoy Budapest, and I’d like to think that, although I came nowhere near seeing it all, I got a good dose of the range it offers.

As is often the case, it all started in a train station…

DAY ONE

I had been dropped off at the Keleti Station, which is the east station (though, when you look at them on a map, the stations only vaguely represent their indicative locations).  We’d been given a bottle of water and a bag of pizza-flavoured biscuits that I was happily munching on, though when I read that the bag contained four servings and one serving was about a third of your daily salt intake recommendations, I stopped eating them (after a couple more… they were stale and gross, but addictive).

The plan was metro it over to the hotel Dad had been in the night before and ideally be there in time to have some breakfast.  I like metros because they’re easy to use and you don’t have to deal with people since you can get a ticket at the automated machines and validate it in the machines as well.  Machines don’t roll their eyes at your pronunciation of place names.

Well, my plan didn’t quite work out because the ticket machines didn’t accept 10000HUF notes (all I had was two of these, which comes to around 80 euro – it’s like Monopoly money, it doesn’t feel real).  I had to go to the ticket booth and buy a ticket (350HUF – by the way, the ‘F’ stands for ‘forint’).  Buying tickets in eastern Europe feels awfully serious – you are met by someone behind a thick glass shield who can only communicate with you through a small microphone and speaker (making their accents even harder to understand).  In front of them is a small circular tray with two sections.  Put the money in one section, they put the ticket and change in the other, then they spin the tray around and you take the bits and they take the bits and everyone is happy.

One other idiosyncrasy of the Budapest public transport system is the fact that you have to buy a separate ticket for each leg of your journey – no transfers.  Not even on the metro (which is a huge oversight in my opinion).  You can buy a separate transfer ticket that gives you the option to make one change.  No unlimited use within 1-2 hours, once you are off the vehicle that’s it.

Budapest is also the first place I have seen people checking tickets at the entrance to the metro.  They’re unlikely to catch anyone trying to cheat the system, though, since they’re really obvious.  I guess it does work as a deterrent.

What of the metro itself?  The trains are the original soviet models (hell, if it ain’t broke…) so they are basically big metal boxes that clang and clatter their way through the tunnels.  I had a brief scare when the metro stopped moving for a moment (it was the kind of metro where I wasn’t certain that the stop was intentional) but luckily it got going again pretty quickly.  The locals seemed fairly unconcerned about it – I guess it happens with some regularity.

I ended up on the opposite side of the Danube from the hotel, and just needed a quick trip across the Chain Bridge in order to reach it.  It was on this short walk that I began to recognize just how big everything was in Budapest.  I could see Buda Castle just on the other side of the river, the Houses of Parliament nearby, the Chain Bridge (obviously) and a variety of other random buildings.

(Small aside – I just crossed the border into Slovenia and it’s raining, which is seriously the first rain I’ve seen for ages.  Damn.)

All of these structures were immense.  Hell, the Danube was pretty big too (I mean it’s no Nile or Amazon, but if it was Buda and Pest would probably still be two separate cities).  Somehow they still managed to be pretty, though, unlike with the blocky structures in Bucharest.

Anyway, enough admiring the architecture.  I had a hotel to reach (and hopefully still a breakfast to eat – though after the pizza biscuits I probably didn’t need any more food).  From the Pest side (one side of the Danube is Pest, where most of the attractions are, and the other side is Buda, with the castle and the hotel) I had seen the hotel poking over the top of some of the other buildings on the river, so I knew pretty much exactly where to go.

So – into the hotel, got sorted with a key and room number and started to make my way upstairs before I heard Dad calling my name.  He was sitting down in the foyer skyping with Mum and Katrina.  I needed to drop my bags off and suchlike, so went up to the room and came back down for breakfast.

It was a buffet breakfast so of course I ate way too much (they had a liver paste spread for the bread that I had to try).

(I’ve been in Slovenia like three minutes and the train has already gone past a bunch of deer.  I think I like it already).

When we finished up with breakfast (read: when I stopped stuffing my face) we went back up to the room so I could get cleaned up (I still smelled like cigarette smoke from my time in the bar in Brasov) and maybe do a bit of washing.  I didn’t do all my clothes since I wasn’t certain it would dry in just a day, and anyway, the sink was too small to fit everything.  By evening that day, the whole room had the fuggy, thick feeling to it due to both the moisture from my clothes and the way-too-high heaters.

Both Dad and I were keen to get out and, seeing as we were already on the Buda side we thought we’d go check out Buda Castle.  So we did.

Just down the street from the hotel was the path leading up to the castle.  At the start of the path was a brick hut with a long queue out the front.  We couldn’t quite work out what the queue was for, but assumed it must be for the castle, so Dad got in line while I went to have a look and see if I could work out what was being sold there.  Turned out it was just the ticket office for the funicular leading up the hill, so it was just selling public transport tickets.  Whoops.

We thought it more interesting to walk up the hill than ride up, so started along the path.  We hadn’t gotten far before coming across an inconspicuous gate leading to a staircase cut into the wall.  We decided that was a more exciting route than the wide road we had been following previously, so through we went, coming up the hill until we reached the main castle.

Buda Castle is only about 150-200 years old as it exists now (though to be honest I couldn’t quite figure out what was original and what wasn’t for reasons that will become clearer soon).  It’s really more of a palace than a castle, though a very impressive one that looks over the rest of Budapest from a dramatic perch.  The courtyards, which stretch across the entire hill, are filled with tall, proud, triumphant statues.  Well, except for one statue that just seemed to depict three boys catching a fish.  Maybe I somehow missed some of the triumph in that one.

Buda Castle houses two key museums – the National Art Gallery and the National History Museum.  The Hungarian for ‘history’ looks a little like ‘torte’, so we were kind of hoping for the National Cake Museum, but you take what you can.  We decided we could give the art gallery a miss and headed in to get a feel for Budapest’s history.  We only really looked at one exhibit, something about 1000 years of Budapest or something, which gave us a really thorough understanding of Budapest’s history.  Basically it would experience a period of prosperity and rapid growth before someone decided to invade and razed it to the ground, after which there would be prosperity and rapid growth, repeat ad nauseum.  It was invaded by the Byzantines, the Ottomans, the Nazis and the Soviets, just to name… four.

Apparently the occupation by the Nazis and the battle with the Soviets was extremely vicious and brought the entire city to the ground, including Buda Castle, which was a bit confusing as the exhibit was housed in Buda Castle.  As a result, I suspect that some parts of the castle were reconstructed to repair damage done in the various battles, but I’m not sure which bits, or if there even are any.  There was definitely some reconstruction work going on, though it seemed to be more about getting rid of the ruins than rebuilding them.

We were about ready for something to eat, and by something to eat we obviously meant goulash.  Because goulash is Hungarian.  And we were in Hungary.

The idea was that we shouldn’t really be spending more than maybe five or six euro (1500Ft) on a goulash, and this turned out to be far more difficult to manage than we expected.  The reason for this was, of course, that we were exploring one of the tourist hubs of Budapest, the castle, and all the restaurants had marked up their prices accordingly.  We were heading back to the hotel, having almost resigned ourselves to having to research some goulash for dinner, when we came across a small place filled with locals just down the road from our hotel.  We knew it must be good when we walked in and were told that there were no seats, though the guy was very friendly and said there would be a table free soon if we waited.  We waited.

After a lunch of goulash and Hungarian beer (I never used to like beer, but the local European beers are delicious) we went to the hotel to plan our afternoon/evening.  The plan ended up being: find an awesome restaurant for dinner, book it, walk around a bit, go to restaurant, eat, be happy, sleep.  This worked out pretty well, with us finding a place called the Bohemian Bistro (or something like that), going for a walk down the Danube to the Green Bridge and then looping around back to the hotel to get ready for dinner.

On the way down the river we noticed that the hills were peppered with random gates, holes and cave-like things.  There was even a little cave church inside the rocky walls (we had a look from the outside but didn’t go in).  I later found out that pretty much the entirety of Buda is on top of a massive cave system, created the same way the thermal baths were.

Our route also took us along the main pedestrian street, the name of which eludes me, though there wasn’t anything particularly of note along there – just shops and cafes and things.

Back at the hotel, while we were waiting for it to be worth heading out for dinner, I looked up some of the common scams in Budapest.  One in particular caught my attention in which two women, not necessarily particularly attractive, approach a traveller asking to use their map.  They say they are looking for a great bar they went to before and can’t find it.  Of course they invite you to go with them, taking you to a planned place where they immediately order drinks without getting a menu.  When the bill comes, it’s much much much more expensive than you expect (try over 100 euros for three drinks) and you are frog-marched to an ATM to get cash out to pay them.

I didn’t think I was particularly likely to get scammed like that, but it was quite entertaining reading all the stories of people who had got themselves into that situation.

Dinner was rather fantastic.  We started with a soup each – Dad went for goulash soup while I decided to have a Chicken Tripe Broth.  The goulash came in a hanging pot that was heated by a small candle, while I received a bowl containing a single, fat dumpling and another containing a huge amount of chicken broth, tripe and vegetables floating in it.  Dad had crispy duck as a main while I went for wild boar (it’s not every place where you can order wild boar).  The duck was a lot better than the boar, but both were good.

Feeling well satisfied we walked back to the hotel to get a good night’s sleep before Dad’s last day in Budapest.

DAY TWO

After breakfast (during which I discovered to my delight that they offered strudel) we checked out, put our bags in the hotel’s storage room and made our way out towards the House of Terror.

The House of Terror is a museum dedicated to the horrors of the two regimes Budapest was occupied by between the forties and the eighties – first the fascist Arrowcross party, a figurehead of the Nazi party, followed by the Soviet occupation.  It’s a somewhat harrowing experience, housed in the former headquarters of the secret police of both regimes.  Each room has a different theme, with information provided in sheets of paper that you can keep.  The exhibits are more about creating a feeling than providing particular information, using audiovisuals, interviews with surviving victims of the gulags, posters, models and a mock-up prison cell exhibit in the basement that is a very difficult place to walk through.

For the most part I was able to keep a little removed from the content of the museum, though in the basement my emotional guard was let down a little.  After seeing photos of all the people kept in the prison cells I rounded a corner into one last cell and was surprised to come across a gallows sitting in a bare stone room, empty and foreboding.  That was a bit full on (mainly because I wasn’t expecting it), and I needed a second to regain my composure.

Perhaps one day we will have a similar museum about the way the Australian government has treated refugees.  It may not be the same in terms of scale, but the use of people’s fear of difference to excuse atrocities continues.

Dad’s transfer to the airport (organized by the hotel) was to be at 3:30pm, and combined with the fact that the House of Terror took a lot more time to get through than we expected, we found that there was not much time remaining before Dad would have to leave.  There was some kind of winter market going on (as it turned out just for the weekend) so we decided to go there for some traditional Hungarian junk food (hey, junk food can be a cultural experience too!)

I actually thought the market was really cool, though admittedly small.  We went for langos (you know – the doughy pizza thing that’s deep fried and served with sour cream and cheese – at least ours was) followed up by those cylindrical doughnut things that aren’t really doughnuts but I can’t remember what they’re called so doughnuts will have to do.

We actually got to see them preparing the latter sweet food in front of us, which they did in a very cool manner.  First they take the dough and roll it out into a thin sausage.  They butter up a wooden cylinder (duh) and wrap the sausage around it before rolling it vigorously so that the dough flattens.  They coat the outside of the dough with sugar and grill it over coals, turning constantly to get an even browning across the entire chunk of deliciousness.  And delicious it was.  Trust me on that.  It’s finished off with a dusting of cinnamon sugar (or other kinds of sugary goodness, but let’s be honest – if you’re getting anything other than cinnamon sugar you’re doing it wrong).

They serve it immediately (yes they make them to order, which in a way explained the massive queue) in a plastic bag, which steams up immediately.  As soon as you open the bag you get a wafting of cinnamon, sweetness and awesome.

At that it was time for Dad to leave, so we went back to the hotel, grabbed our bags and saw each other off.  From here I was to make my way to a place called Hi-5 Hostel, which was somewhere in the seventh district on the Pest side.  Across the river I went in search of this wondrous place.

The hostel was, as is often the case, in a probably-due-to-be-condemned apartment block with a large, dirty courtyard in the centre and a series of broken doors taking you up a two-storey staircase to yet another broken door that led straight to hostel nirvana (yes I know I said that about the Brasov one when I first arrived, but that was in a facebook update before I knew THE TRUTH!)

I went to join the guys hanging around in the common room, watching one of their mates play Civilisation on the Xbox 360.  They’d all just gotten up (did I mention it was around 4pm?)  Hi-5 has an extremely friendly, comfortable atmosphere because… well… everyone there is friendly and comfortable.  It seems to be almost entirely inhabited by people who were on a world/European trip and ended up staying there forever.  This was actually how a lot of the staff members (in fact, possibly all of the staff members) ended up there. 

I got the full story from Kate, who was working there with her sister Sarah.  They had been doing a world trip, starting in Africa (where apparently getting kidnapped is more comfortable than the actual tour they were on), before heading to Europe and getting stuck in Budapest (Kate stated her intent to stay at least until Summer).

It was pretty easy to slot into the gang, and I soon found myself getting thrashed in a game of Halo 4 (the newest test of masculinity).

That night was a dinner night, which meant a big plate of Fettuccine Carbonara for 500 forints (about 1,50 euro).  It was also the night of drinking games (who am I kidding, every night was drinking game night) followed by going out (which, admittedly, was also every night).

The game of choice was King’s Cup, probably because most of the staff were Australian (as in all of the staff were Australian except for one guy who was British).  Rocking the table were a French Canadian pair (male), Kate, a staff member called Jacob (who for some reason ended up drinking the King’s Cup even when someone else got it – mainly for the girls), Trent, an Australian who didn’t work there, and many others whose names I will never remember (those I do remember I only remember because of later episodes).  Oh yeah!  There was a Belgian couple as well.

OK, so the drinking ended (I had three 500mL beers in all – 750 forints) and the announcement was made that it was time to go out.  There was a brief discussion amongst the staff about where we would be going (though I think the “where” was really for the benefit of the staff that were going out, since they almost, but not quite, outnumbered us).

While we were getting ready to go out, I noticed that the toilets in the hostel were the same as they had been at the hotel.  Some explanation is needed here.  See, toilets in Budapest (the ones that I saw anyway) have a bizarre quirk – they have a little dry platform right where you would generally aim your business, which is rather disconcerting when your drop a great dirty deuce and end up having it stare you in the face when you stand up.  It also causes two other significant problems:

1)    When you flush stains remain (they have an extra jet for the platform, but it doesn’t 100% work)

2)    The whole point of s***ting into the water at the bottom of the toilet bowl is that it prevents the smell getting up and out

As a result, every single toilet cubicle in Budapest smells like s***.

I got an opportunity to mention this to Kate.  She responded that apparently it was a German design to allow you to look at your poo.  To, you know, see if they’re the right colour (brown in case you’re wondering).  My feeling is that if you were really that concerned you could use something else.

It was a Sunday night, so there was nothing particularly special on, so they decided to take us to a place called Szimpla, which was Jacob’s third favourite bar in the world (his favourite, also in Budapest, was closed for the winter or something).  Szimpla is what is known as a ruin bar, otherwise known as my kind of bar.  The ruin bars (there are a lot of them in Budapest) used to be old apartments that went unclaimed at the fall of the Soviet regime.  Some enterprising fellows bought them up and turned them into some of the most eclectic bars I’ve seen.  I was about to say underground, and they do have an underground feel to them, but they are also some of the most popular places in the city, and I feel like being well known kind of stops you being underground.

We sat in the exterior courtyard area, near an old Beatle car (old as in rusted over and falling apart).  I found out that the French Canadians were planning to leave the next day for Zagreb, which was my next destination.  I made a drunken promise to buy them beers each day they stayed if they came with me on Thursday to Zagreb.  I managed to negotiate down to just beers on the Tuesday and Wednesday, since Kate was also trying to get them to stay longer (I later found out the reason for this when Kate accompanied one of them back to the hostel so that he could ‘skype with his sister’.  From now on I will use ‘skype with my sister’ as innuendo for having sex, because I never do either (sorry Katrina)).

I was chatting with the Belgian girl as we left Szimpla to make our way towards Insztant (noticing a trend with these names?)  She had come with her boyfriend, as I mentioned before, but the boyfriend had not come out, choosing to go to bed instead.

I couldn’t really figure out their relationship (well, ok, they’re relationship was obviously boyfriend and girlfriend – I’m talking about the subtleties) because she kept saying how she’d wanted to come to Budapest alone but he had pulled the ‘don’t you love me?’ card (which I had always assumed was the sole prerogative of the female in a relationship) and so she’d felt she had to let him come along.  And yet they were going on a month long holiday together to somewhere later in the year, which sounded romantic enough.  Sounded to me like a solid case of relationship-itis, the point where the relationship is in its death throes so both parties do their damnedest to act like it isn’t.  Or else they had a very strong relationship that I couldn’t possibly understand from just chatting with one of them for a few hours.  There’s that possibility too.

Nothing else happened that night – I basically just went back to my dorm after a short time at Insztant and (to the possible sound of French Canadian/Australian bonding, though if that was indeed the noise I heard that night they were surprisingly subtle about the whole thing) went to sleep.

DAY THREE

I woke up around 7am, got up around 8am (breakfast didn’t start until then).  For some reason being drunk when I go to sleep makes me wake up early.

I was feeling fresh but lazy, so I spent most of the morning flopping around the hostel chatting with people and blogging.  I did have big plans for that evening though: caving.  See, the Buda side is an ant hive of caves created by the combination of the area being below sea level a few million years ago and on or near a tectonic plate.  And they offered an adventure caving tour, which is pretty much my favourite thing ever (I’ve done one other in Jenolan Caves) for 20 euro.

That wasn’t until 3:45pm, though by the time I had booked myself in (or, more accurately, but the time I had gotten James, the British staff member, to book me in… hehehe…) there wasn’t really enough time to do anything else.  I was bumming around, thinking I should probably eat some lunch before the cave when Trent emerged and said he wanted to go try a buffet place that all the staff members swore by.  When he said this, all the staff kind of looked at him, stunned, and said, “What, you’ve been here _____ months and you STILL haven’t been there?”  A buffet was right up my alley (especially one that cost a little over four euro) so I agreed to go with him.

We were told that the restaurant was on one of the corners of Oktagon, which is a big roundabout that is… well, an octagon.  It wasn’t, by the way.  We walked the full loop, going, “Well, there are only eight corners in an octagon, and I’m damn sure we’ve gone past all of them,” before asking a local who sent us down one of the streets about fifty metres.  Which, admittedly, isn’t far, but is far enough that it definitely isn’t on the octagon.

I had a good feed.  I mean, it was what you’d expect – pasta, great big meatballs, goulash, fried foods, burgers, salad (hahahahahaha who’d eat that?) potatoes and soup.  And little cheesecake things.  After I’d filled myself up (did I mention four euros?) we discovered that there was a section of the restaurant where you could choose different meats and they’d be grilled in front of you.  If only I had found that before eating all the crap.  Sigh.

It was about time to do some caving by this point, so I said my goodbyes to Trent and headed for the nearby train station, which was the meeting point.  I’d been informed that I’d need some bus tickets (two transfer tickets, as two buses were required each direction) so bought these before heading for the meeting point.

The only instructions I had received were that the meeting point was at the train station, which I assumed to mean the entrance of the station.  So that’s where I waited.  Every now and then I would see people who looked like they were going to do the caving, but would then see the person they were waiting for and walk off.  I knew that it would be a pretty full tour since I’d almost not been able to get in (luckily it’s pretty easy to add one extra person into a group) so I was getting really concerned when 3:40pm arrived and there was no-one.  So I went for a walk to the side of the station and spotted a big group waiting at a bus terminal.  I approached them and asked if they were the caving group.  They were, but the guide hadn’t arrived yet.  It was 3:49pm.  Thank God he was late.

So… the buses are a bit irritating.  To validate your ticket you stick it in a slot and then pull a little handle, which punches a bunch of holes into your ticket into a set of squares (a three by three square, in fact) providing a number that must somehow be linked to the bus you catch.  It’s stupid because half the punchers don’t work and if you put the ticket in wrong you end up punching different numbers, which isn’t as difficult to do as it should be.  Fortunately no-one actually checks your ticket…

There were sixteen in the tour altogether, and we were divided up into two groups of six and one of four (why not one of six and two of five?  Don’t ask me.)  The guide made the first group, selecting an American woman and her young (11 year old) son Thomas, a Norwegian man and his young (around 10 – and she spoke fluent English) daughter, and an American guy a little older than me who had been chatting with the mother and son.

The tour guide looked around for one extra person to join that group.

Sucks to be the person who ends up with them, I thought.  They’ll be stuck doing the easy route!  No sooner had I thought this, of course, when the guide pointed at me, saying, “You, can you join them?”

And because I’m such a nice guy I said yes.

We got into our overalls, slapped on our helmet (with lamp) and shoved our belongings into the lockers.  Thomas was a bit hesitant to leave his jumper, but was assured that he wouldn’t need it (I was stuck in my thermals, though – bad idea).

Then we met our tour guide, a bubbly Hungarian man named Lockje (at least that’s what I’m going to call him, though it’s probably wrong).  He spoke English very quickly, explaining things a bit like this: “Sowe’regoingtostartbygoingdownthistunnelheremakesureyougofeetfirstunlessyouwanttohaveabitmorefunofcoursethoughthatwouldbeverydangerous,” before leaping head first into the tiny gap in the rock, leaving us going: “…hello?” and wondering if we’d lost him before, moments later, his head would pop up out of another gap elsewhere and say, “Hello!”

We got to an early part of the cave and Lockje turned to us.

“We have to make a very important decision here,” he said.  “We have two choices.  We can take an easier route, or a very hard route.”

“The hard one!” Thomas immediately shouted.

“Yes, I hate to tell you, but that question was not really for you, Thomas, since you will be able to fit either way.”

Neither of the adults could bear to disappoint Thomas after his enthusiastic outburst, so we went the hard route.  How hard was it?  Well, I went through one (admittedly optional) gap that was about thirty centimetres long and took two minutes to get through.  The kids had gone on their stomach, the adults had declined to give it a go, and Lockje turned to me and said, “For you, I think it is better if you go on your back.”

What an asshole.

Go on my back I did, and it wasn’t long before I realized that, despite it being quite a squeeze, the shoulders and abdomen were the easy part.  Unfortunately I reached the hips at a point where my knees had found their way to a slight rise in the tunnel, and it was here I noticed that knees aren’t designed to bend backwards (“on my back” my arse, I thought).  I must have looked pretty stuck (admittedly I was, though more in the sense that I couldn’t get back) because everyone started shouting encouragement (though there isn’t really much else you can do when you’re watching some guy trying to fit through a gap that’s only slightly bigger than his head).

So I’m writing this blog entry from my position stuck in the cave.  Lockje promises me he’ll take it up to somewhere with wifi to post it once I’m done…

Kidding, I made it through.  Of course.

One of the interesting things about this cave compared to the one I did at Jenolan was that it had a very muddy floor.  The reason for this was that many of the tunnels had once been filled with clay from the time when it was underwater.  Early explorers had to dig their way through the narrow tunnels that I have been describing, only candles to light their way.  Lockje told us about one tunnel that he took over five hours to dig through (it was about two metres long or something… can’t remember the details entirely).

So who were the brave pioneers of these tunnels?  Why, a class at the local high school, of course.

Far out, Hungarians are hardcore.

As we were leaving I managed to sell the American mother & son team on Jenolan Caves adventure tours (goddamn it, Tourism Australia should be paying me a commission).  It was another couple of bus rides back to the hostel, which I reached a little after 8pm.  So the drinking was in full swing.

At some point that day a group of Brits had checked in (three girls, one boy).  Another addition was James’ Polish friend, Magdalena, who was quite quiet and was kind of just sitting there, watching everyone else playing the game.

One of the British girls had gotten stupidly, blindly, completely drunk (8:15pm by the way).  This was actually the first time I had seen her: completely off her face.  She kind of sat at the table, went to grab something, knocked something over, apologized to everyone and everything and then stumbled into the staff room, from which she had to be gingerly coaxed out of.

Kate was pretty pissed off that some drunken lout was in the staff room (“She can’t go in there, it’s off limits to guests”) but all the male staff members were just like – don’t worry, she’s drunk, it’s not a problem.  It all ended with my first game of Flip Cup (why did they only ever play games with cups? Oh yeah, they’re drinking games – duh) which I did ok at until we actually started playing.  My direct competition was an American guy who had checked in that day and was living in France, though I wasn’t entirely certain if he was studying, working or just living there.  We were about as terrible as each other.

Monday night was an extra special night that all of the staff looked forward to – Monday at Morrison’s!  Morrison’s was a bar just down the road where, on Mondays, you could pay a 500ft entrance fee and receive three free pints of beer.  Oh, and they had karaoke.  The karaoke was pretty good too – it wasn’t taken over by the professionals but was kind of creating a mosh pit of happy singers.  I was forced to sing something, so went for Boulevard of Broken Dreams, though I’m pretty sure my microphone can’t have been connected since no-one’s ears bled.

After a while Kate arrived and introduced me to two people who had just checked in – a British girl and a Norwegian guy (I squandered my opportunity to say my sister had spent the last year in Norway, though I’m not entirely sure where that would have got me).  I’m pretty sure she was just trying to get rid of them so she could go make out in a corner with her French Canadian, and had decided that I could offer them some quality conversation (though whether she chose me because I’m pretty good at conversation or whether she just left them with the first person she found and was just lucky is anyone’s guess).

They were studying in Austria, so spoke German to each other, though both spoke fluent English so most of our conversation was in English.  I mentioned that I wanted to go to the baths.  They mentioned they wanted to go to the baths.  We decided, together, that we would go to the baths the next day.  This was to be the start of one of the most excruciating sagas of my trip so far, all of which would end in bitter disappointment (oh God I’ve made it sound exciting.  It wasn’t.  Though it was disappointing.)

They left soon after finishing their free beers, but I needed to stick around because I’d promised the Belgian girl I would show her the way back to the hostel (she was drunk, not good with directions, and wasn’t sticking with anyone in particular, so I thought it would be better if she had someone to walk with, especially as I wasn’t feeling too drunk.  As a further aside, I think my alcohol tolerance is shooting up.)

She’d started dancing with a guy called Peter (another Australian, though I’m not certain his name was actually Peter but I need to give him a name as he plays a role on a later night as well).  Peter was really drunk (he was at the stage where he was slurring, “Man, I’m soooo drunk,” and trying to push people together and make them dance).  Somehow I was totally sober by this point and the whole dancing in a drunken mosh pit was not appealing, but I had made a promise so stuck it out.  Luckily Peter and Belgian Girl were over it pretty quickly too, and I led the way out.  Until they brought up pizza, so I took them to the pizza place (there was one we had been to the night before) before taking them back to the hostel.  So that was that night.

DAY FOUR

I got up at about the same time as I had the previous day (maybe the room got bright too early? I wasn’t using the curtains around my bed since I was hanging washing, so maybe that was it).  After breakfast I sat around the common room for a bit, waiting for the Brit and the Norwegian so that we could do the baths.

The Norwegian turned up first.  He greeted me and asked me what I was doing that day.

“Uh… Well I was going to do the baths.”

“We’ll be doing those too, eventually.  I think today we’re going to start by just having a walk around.”

Uh… what?

I didn’t want to press the point, though I probably should have, and I concluded that they might do it with me the next day, so I made alternative plans.  Budapest has a large central market similar to the one in Barcelona, so I thought I might use up the morning by heading there, grabbing a bit of lunch, and see what happened in the afternoon.

The market was cool, plenty of meats and breads and langos (which is what I had for lunch of course).  I also had a strudel to follow.  Good stuff.

That afternoon I wanted to go and organize a reservation for my train to Zagreb, mainly in order to avoid falling into the trap of staying in Budapest forever and missing all the potential gems along my route.  It was quite a long walk – my train was to leave from Deli station, which was on the other side of the river and then some.  When I got there I was told I didn’t need a reservation, so in order to not feel like I had wasted an entire afternoon I made my way toward the Holocaust Memorial Centre, because seeing more persecution was exactly what the doctor ordered.

On the way I found a part of Buda Castle I hadn’t seen before on my visit with Dad.  It wasn’t a building – rather, it was part of the walls.  They seemed a lot older than the palaces, and I did a quick walk along the cobbled pavement around a few defensive towers before making my way along the Danube toward the Memorial.

I had to go through a security check, assumedly because there is a threat of some kind of attack (seriously, why would you blow up a Holocaust Memorial?)  I think the security guard thought his job was a bit silly – he was very nice and didn’t do a particularly thorough check, since I was able to smuggle the bomb through in my backpack.

The memorial is a series of rooms detailing various things Jews and the Roma were denied during the Holocaust – ranging from property to dignity to life.  The walls were all black and the way was lit by a series of lines that wrapped around the room, disappearing one by one to symbolize the deaths.

There were a number of audiovisual displays that detailed the lives of actual families at the time through each of the room themes, as well as a fifteen minute video called The Origins of Anti-Semitism, which seemed to conclude that it was all the Christians’ faults really.

The museum closed at 6pm, and I had arrived there fairly late as it was, so I had to rush through the final couple of rooms detailing the horrors of Auschwitz and listing the people who had helped Jews escape the horror.

I followed the signs to the exit and suddenly found myself in a synagogue.  It was empty, and I really needed to leave before they locked me in, but in all honesty I had no idea where I was or where I was going.  I found a corridor and followed it.  Coming the opposite way was an employee turning off the lights as he went.

“Exit?” he asked me.

“Yes please,” I said.

“Follow, I’ll show you faster way.”

He showed me out a side entrance and I was soon out, past the bored-looking security guard and back in the direction of the hostel.

Back in the common room, the Norwegian came over to me.

“Looks like we missed our opportunity for the baths.  Monday and Tuesday are the only days they let women in.”  (He was referring to his British companion, not to me – Norwegians are too polite to make those kinds of calls.)

Well… that sucked.  You’re probably wondering why I didn’t just go to the baths anyway.  Well… because anywhere requiring me to be in a situation where I was surrounded by strangers wearing only bathing suits was a place I needed to visit with others.  You need someone with whom to joke about all the skin and how silly you feel etc etc.  Suffice it to say I was not going to the baths without an entourage.

That night was Peter’s last night, and he had been persuaded by the American staying in France to get 50000ft out from an ATM (“50000 is hardly anything, right?  This s*** is Monopoly money.”)  So Peter had a lot of money left over, and he totally intended on spending it on getting drunk.

After the drinking games we went across to Insztant.  I had been chatting with Magdalena, discovering she live in Krakow (“Hey, I’m going to be in Krakow soon!”) and suchlike.  Jacob didn’t come with us that night as he had taken two kings cups and was not doing so well (actually, if memory serves, I think he joined us later, but these nights tended to be a bit of a blur). 

We got our first round at an upstairs bar before heading downstairs to find a table.  Somehow we lost Peter and Magdalena (Peter had been in the drunken process of buying her a drink).  I ended up chatting with an Australian girl who I’m pretty sure must have only stayed one night since I can’t remember seeing her at any other point in my stay, though she worked at a Hoyts cinema so we had a decent conversation (well, it was about films at least.  It was let down by the fact that she unironically claimed that Hoyts was a non-mainstream cinema because they had the occasional Spanish film festival or something.)

It was around this point that I discovered the most irritating thing I have come across in all my travels.  I went to use the bathroom and found a small woman behind a desk in front of it.  I went to go use one of the urinals and she spoke up in Hungarian.  I looked over and saw a small saucer with 100ft coins on it.

So… 100ft to use the urinal?  I really, really wanted to just unzip there and then and piss all over her little desk… but I didn’t.  Because that would have been gross.

I paid up and used the toilet, fuming a bit.  Public toilets… yeah, it’s irritating, but I can understand.  But in a bar?  Where you’re paying for drinks?  That’s quite simply ridiculous.

When I returned Peter and Magdalena had found us. Both were looking a little worse for wear (Peter more so) as they had gatecrashed a birthday party and been bought drinks.  Peter had made friends with the toilet guard upstairs, so he dragged me up there when I next needed the loo.

It didn’t help much, though this lady was much nicer and kind of apologetically asked for 100ft.  I just said I didn’t have any change, she went, “Really?  Oh,” and that was that.  But still… wtf?  Are they trying to turn their bar into a giant sewer?

Back at the hostel (which was just across the street), we caught up with some South Americans in the common room.  Peter was kind of dragging Magdalena around at this point, and they went out with one of the South Americans for a cigarette (may not have been a cigarette – I’m not 100% certain).  As I was heading out to go to bed, I saw Peter leading Magdalena downstairs toward the dorms.

The South American turned and winked at me.

“He’s going to have a very good night tonight,” he said.

DAY FIVE

My last full day in Budapest started off in an extremely… unmotivated manner.  I just couldn’t be bothered to do anything.  I had had a vague hope that the baths may still happen, but didn’t see the Norwegian or Brit all morning.  Instead I sat around with the staff watching Cam (one of the staff) play Fallout 3 and, later, episodes of Archer.  Which is an admittedly funny show, but… yeah.  In a foreign city and all.

At around 3pm (yes I bummed around for six hours – go ahead, judge away) I went, “S***, I’ve got to do something today, otherwise everyone’ll read my blog and be like, what a lazy bastard,” so I went out to do the free communist walking tour.  Unfortunately the tour was about twenty minutes away, and by the time I actually decided I was going it was 3:15pm, so I didn’t have time to put on proper shoes.  Instead I wore my thin cloth slipper-like shoes, the ones I only wear indoors and in Australian weather.  Budapest hadn’t been terribly cold, so I theorized that I would be alright.

Well, it snowed.  Considerably.  My feet got wet and cold.  And I had to trudge around the city for two hours.  Most of the tour was stuff I already knew from the House of Terror, though there was the occasional extra tidbit (in Hungary medical staff aren’t paid very well so in order to get decent service you have to tip them a lot in advance, bananas used to be strictly controlled and the guide’s friends once had to eat 10kg of bananas at the border of Austria and Hungary because they didn’t know they couldn’t import them etc etc) that made it worth getting out of the hostel.

Luckily we finished at Insztant (seriously, how did I keep managing to end up there?) so the hostel was very close once the tour was over.  I rushed in to warm my feet.

It was another cheap dinner night, followed of course by drinking games and a ruin bar pub crawl.  This time we were joined by a new face, Bryony (she told us to remember it as Brian-y, though I never thought of Bryony as an uncommon name…)  We played a new game this time, Bulls***.  To play you all get cards, turn the rest up one by one and then give people drinks if you have those cards, or if you don’t.  If you think someone is giving you drinks but doesn’t have the right card, call bulls***, at which point they either have to drink twice as much or show you the card in which case you drink twice as much.

Anyway, then we went on the bar crawl.

I like the ruin bars, so a crawl through them was not unappealing.  We started at Szimpla, which I think was definitely my favourite of the lot.  We were being led that night by Jacob.

I bought the French Canadians the drink I had promised them – they were kind of surprised, partly because they thought I was drunk when I made the promise (I was, but not enough to not be aware of what I was doing) and partly because it was fairly obvious they had been staying due to the hookup between one of them and Kate.  Still, they appreciated it, and I thought it was money well spent if it meant I had companions on the trip to Zagreb – and possibly within Zagreb itself!

We took up the whole table, so I had to grab a seat from another table and ended up seated next to Bryony, who was sitting on a stool.  She said that sitting on a stool made her legs uncomfortable and that she needed to rest them on something.  That something was my lap.  With the benefit of hindsight I can see that the obvious question I should have asked was: WHY DIDN’T SHE JUST ASK IF WE COULD SWAP SEATS?

So we had a nice conversation with her legs on my lap about her travels.  She had been to Istanbul and had some seedy stories to tell about taxi drivers who assumed that all Western women were up for it, and basically tried to molest her in the cabs.  She was later informed that, in Turkey, a woman getting into the front of a taxi is basically asking for it.  So ladies – if you ever go to Turkey, don’t take a cab alone!  (I should mention here that I suspect she was not being 100% truthful, or at least exaggerating a bit.  You’ll probably figure out why I suspect this as I continue my explanation of the night.  By the way – this is the last bit of retrospective commentary I’m giving about the night.  From now on I will only be describing the events and what I thought at the time, and leaving you to come to the conclusions.)

Jacob joined our conversation at this point with a story about a drunken night in Russia during which he was held at knife point by a biker who had, for some reason, been begging for rubles in a fast food outlet.  It was a pretty impressive story.

At some point I brought up the fact that I hadn’t been to the baths, and I had really wanted to but was leaving the next day and didn’t want to go alone.  Bryony frowned.

“What time do the baths open?” she asked.

“Dunno.  Jacob, what time do the baths open?”

“Six.”

“Six.”

“Six?”

“Six.”

“We could do six.”

I grinned, seeing an opportunity.  “You want to get up and go to the baths at six?”

“Yeah, why not?  I’ll set an alarm now.”

Awesome.  Things were looking up – I wouldn’t have to miss out because of my lame phobia of going to baths without a friend.

She set her alarm in her phone.

“Or we could just stay up all night.”

“I’d be up for that.”

I was feeling pretty comfortable here, in a hazy beer-induced fuzz with a lady’s legs on my lap (oh come on, you didn’t think I wasn’t being a tipsy, lusty bastard when I let her put her legs on me, did you?) so it didn’t come as much surprise when Jacob announced it was time to move on.  We lost a few people on the way, and it ended up being just Bryony, Jacob, myself, the American and two of the Brits from the group of four that had arrived a couple of days ago – one, the male, the other one of the females.

On the walk to the next bar, Bryony detailed her experience with boys.  She was over, she told me, having boys tell her that, yes, it was just about sex, when actually, a few months later, they would say they were in love with her.  All she wanted was sex, she said.

Um… ok.

My typical response when a girl is complaining about not getting boys is to rationalize the boys’ behavior in terms that don’t contradict what they are saying, but in a way that doesn’t make boys seem complex or, God forbid, different from one another (except for me, of course, as the external overseer who is somehow able to explain the relationship approach of three billion individuals in a single sweeping generalization).  Because men are simple.

I’ve had the exact opposite conversation with someone before, and my approach was the same – agree and explain.  Somehow, though, I don’t think my conclusions were contradictory, despite rationalizing contradictory behavior.  Interesting.

Anyway, my explanation for her was that boys are at heart hopeless romantics that tend to try and pretend for as long as possible that they’re just in it for the sex so that they don’t get hurt.  To which her response was, yes, but if the girl (her) is just in it for the sex, then it can get terribly confusing.  To which I replied that most guys assume that everything a girl says is doublespeak since we have persuaded ourselves we don’t understand them, so when a girl says she’s just in it for the sex, we don’t really take that as gospel (in fact, I suspect a lot of men don’t really think women enjoy sex).

Anyway, I hadn’t quite worked out how we’d ended up talking so deeply about sex and relationships (haha, deeply – we were drunk, so it was only superficial surface stuff we were saying to impress each other with our analytical ability).  We arrived at the next bar and went as a troupe to the toilet.  They had a lady there collecting money, but we kind of just walked straight past – it seemed she was just selling toilet paper and paper towels.  I asked Jacob about the paying for toilets thing later, and he said it was optional as long as you bought a drink.  So, basically it was a tourist trap for people who didn’t speak Hungarian, with the door person not explaining the optional part.

We had a shot of Hungarian rakia here (they had some different flavours – I did plum.  Tasted like brandy.)  I was still chatting with Bryony as we made our way off to Insztant (again).  Before going in, we went to drop our coats off inside the hostel to avoid the 200ft coatroom fee.  Bryony and I were in the same dorm, so we showed each other our beds so that when one of us woke up we could wake the other one.

We went to Insztant, had a beer, had a chat, and I ended up needing the toilet.  The same lady was there, but this time I just walked straight past her.  She yelled at me but I was like, hell, I know the drill now lady.  While I was using the urinal, I noticed a mop being thrust aggressively at the floor beside me.  She was MOPPING right next to me.  What a **** (sorry, I can’t even give you a letter to help you with that word – it’s a real bad one).  As I left she thrust a finger into my chest, but I just pushed straight past.  I assumed if she didn’t go get a security guard, or at least explain what she was saying in English (she could have found someone to translate) then she didn’t have a leg to stand on.  And it seems like she didn’t, because she didn’t bother with me after that.  I guess 100ft isn’t really a very big deal IF YOU’RE A BAR AND HAVE SOLD ALL THESE PEOPLE DRINKS.

When I got back I was dragged downstairs by Bryony (when I’m drunk I’m aggressive in conversation – as in I talk a lot – but passive in all other regards) where there was a dance floor with kinda-sorta techno music (I say techno – it probably wasn’t, but I can’t even remember what it sounded like, let alone know what genre it was).  We danced with everyone in a group for a bit (a local had found and joined us as well) before heading back upstairs.

I lost the group for a bit upon getting back up, so had a quick scan of the place.  I eventually found them all at the bar.  Jacob and Bryony were sucking each others’ faces off.  I thought I should probably leave them to it – I had been enjoying talking with Bryony, but the night had clearly gone beyond the conversation segment.  I went back and joined the American, who was thinking about leaving, and the two Brits.  The guy was shaking his head, and the girl asked him what was up.

“He’s going to get three for three with that girl,” he said referring to Bryony.

“What’s that mean?”

“Well, we’ve both got with a bird the last two nights.  He’s going to make it three for three.”

I had to leave at that point.  I was not going to stick around for a discussion that treated such things so flippantly.

I set my alarm for 6am the next morning – I wanted to make sure I was up in case Bryony slept through her alarm.  The more the better, right?

DAY SIX

I awoke to my alarm at 6am.  I rose and looked at Bryony’s bed.  It was empty.  It had remained empty all night.

I went back to sleep.

When I woke up for real I waited around a bit for the French Canadians.  I don’t know why, but I didn’t see them at all the entire day.  So I was let down again (that’s probably a bit of a harsh way of putting it, but I had bought them a beer, and it was how it felt at the time) and was looking at a six hour train ride alone.

The rest of the day was uneventful – I checked out, went to the train station, had a panic attack when I saw the seats were numbered, tried to ask the conductor if I needed a reservation, found out he spoke no English, found out “no English,” just meant, “Not very good English,” found out I would be fine and that I didn’t need a reservation, got on the train and headed for Zagreb.  A group of students played some kind of drinking game in a cabin further down from me.  They were very noisy.

Oh, there was one interesting thing on the train.  The passport control came in, checked my passport, all was good for the Schengen one.

Then came the Croatian passport control.  Now, I had done no real research, just looking to see that a British passport could get me into every country I was going to.  I had assumed that the deal was ‘freedom of movement’ anywhere in Europe.

The Croatian border control looked at my passport, then at me.  Then at my passport.

“Do you have some other ID?”

“Uh…”  I thought about giving her my Australian passport, but decided that might confuse things.

“Like a driver’s licence, or student card…”

“Oh, I have a driver’s licence.”

Derp derp, it was my Australian licence.  Ah well, she didn’t notice.

Then she took out a stamp and put the first stamp I have received so far into my UK passport.  Then she handed it back and went on her way.  I stared at the stamp for a bit, not entirely sure what it was doing there.  I later looked it up and discovered that the deal is 90 days, not freedom of movement as I had originally believed.  Whoops.

So that got me to Zagreb.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go skype with my sister, so this story is

TO BE CONTINUED