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Published: January 10th 2009
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Me on the beach in Hawaii Croatia, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
DISCLAIMER:
THERE IS NOTHING POSITIVE IN MY TALE OF CROATIA. CROTIA WAS HELL. I HAVE NOTHING GOOD TO SAY AND YOU MAY FIND YOURSELF DEPRESSED OR EVEN ANGRY AFTER READING THIS. DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU ARE IN A GOOD MOOD, BECAUSE YOU WILL FEEL LIKE PUNCHING A PUPPY BY THE TIME YOU ARE DONE. EAT A DICK CROATIA, WE ARE NOT FRIENDS AND WON’T BE UNTIL I RETURN TO ENJOY YOUR SUMMER SPLENDOR ONE DAY. UNTIL THEN, I HATE YOU.
Croatia is not the place to visit during the winter. It’s cold, it’s rainy and it really just sucked. Every story has a downside, every flock has an ugly duckling, our European adventure had Croatia. If I could fight Croatia in a back alley behind a bar, when I was done beating it into a pulp, I would break it’s back with a metal trash can lid and then shoot it in the back of the head with a gun.
Croatia from all the pictures and blog stories looked like the most beautiful place in the world. From all the people we met and people we know who have been there,
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Nothing for miles Croatia was a warm sunny paradise. I even check the tempuratures a week in advance, as I have with all the places we go and all signs looked good. Nothing, not one blog, not one story, not one internet forum, not a damn person told us that Croatia is dead as a graveyard and cold as an ex girlfriend from December to March. Nothing’s open and the tourist lifeblood goes into a coma of non existance for 4 months.
I’ve come to learn that in Croatia, if you don’t ask, no one will tell you. For me, if someone was about to step on a pile of broken glass barefoot, I’d say, “hey man, watch out.” We were not so lucky.
We arrived after a 7 hour train ride to Zagreb around 10:30pm at night. We got there and there were no signs that tell you what station you are at. After a mad panic scramble, we finally found a lady that told us we were at the right station. Croatia is on a different money system so we had to switch over. All the exchange places were closed, so we attempted to take money out of the
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or miles ATM. We’ve grown to distrust all cab driver’s outside of Portugal so we spent about an hour trying to figure out which tram to take to our hostel. After a 20 minute tram ride our directions given to us by the hostel told us to take a 200 meter walk which is about 600 feet down this road. The walk turned out to be around 2000 meters and we almost backtracked at one point convinced we were lost. We got into the hostel and cook some shitty pasta left by some travelers long ago.
We woke up the next day and wanted to catch a bus to Plitvice Lakes. Due to the Budapest strikes we were already a day behind schedule and we weren’t able to journey to the deep south islands and Dubrovnik. Our hostel host gave us the bus times and we went to the station and bought our tickets. During this process not the hostel host, bus agent or the bus driver had the intelligence to tell us that everything in Plitvice was closed for the season. You’re probably thinking, “why didn’t you check on that yourself?” I fucking did, and everywhere we looked and went
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The boogeyman forest there was no indication or person to tell us that we were walking into a shit storm of nothingness. After a 3 hour bus ride, the bus driver stopped in the middle of nowhere on a mountain laced in thick fog and said, “this is your stop.” We got off and told him, “this is our hotel,” and showed him the name. He replied, “oh yeah, that’s 10 kilometers back that way and there are no taxis or buses. Bye bye.” And he got back on the bus and drove away. No joke, this all really happened. There we were stranded on the top of a mountain, in thick fog, slight drizzle, no clue where we were and 10km from our hotel, with 100lbs of luggage. It was like Stephen King’s the Mist, the movie, not the book. Except I actually prayed a giant flying octupus would kill me.
After walking down the tiny stone covered hill, for about an hour or a mile, and repeated failed hitchhiking attempts, a driver finally pulled up to offer us a ride. When we told him where we were going he just said no and drove away. The best and most fustrating
Beer frowns
Not even beer can cheer me up part was watching all the cars and trucks drive by and see these two miserable people lugging their luggage down the side of the road, in the unsafe fog and not a fucking single Croatian tried to help. Finally a crying Tara called our hostel and pleaded with them to come and get us and they finally agreed. Knowing how far we were from them, they didn’t really provide any help, info or comfort as to how far or how bad of a journey was ahead of us, if we decided to walk, until Tara called upset. Though they were nice to us after that, I still really haven’t gotten over it. I require vengence.
We went to the only resturant in town for dinner and returned to the hotel. We learned from our hosts that nothing is open and the fog is too thick to see the waterfalls and lakes, which basically was the only thing I wanted to see in Croatia. The next day we took a cab to the bus stop, which was a broken down hut two towns over. We took the bus back to Zagreb. The bus back would have been a nice time,
Meat Smiles
Two slabs of meat but they blarred ABBA in Croatian loudly over the speakers through out the bus. That’s right, 3 and a half hours of ABBA in another language. At this point I was seriously thinking about murder. We got to Zagreb where we had to shove our stuff into a locker and wait 11 hours for the night train to Venice. We tried to kill as much time exploring what we could, but we were low on Croatian money and didn’t want to pull more out of the ATM. We went and saw a movie in English and then sat in the freezing train station next to smelly bums for another 2 hours.
As the train for Venice pulled away I was happy to know that I was finally leaving Croatia. Little did I know Croatia wasn’t done bending me over and fucking me up the ass. The train that we got on didn’t require reservations according to the book, ticket office and internet, but once you got on you had to pay a, “suppliment.” Then after you settle in for bed, over the next hour you are not allowed to sleep because you will be woken up by Croatian Police,
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No one from Croatia will be on the next arch Border Patrol, Customs Agents, and Train Suppliment collectors. Then your next hour of sleep will be interrupted by Slovakian Police, Border Patrol, Custom Agents and you have to pay another train suppliment because you are in the mighty Slovakia now. Did I mention that these people all come in waves of 20 minute intervols never fully allowing you any form of peace and quite? After finally getting some quite time, we discovered that our heater in our sleep car was broken and we had to pry open the window and shove a juice box in it to get some cold air in before we melted. After about 2 hours of sleep, the joke that was our Croatia experience finally finished sucking the life right out of me. We had arrived in the motherland, ITALY! Good riddance Croatia, I now know why you never win at life, you’re the red headed step child of the European Union.
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Potter
non-member comment
Talk shit and that's what you get... I warned them you were coming and told them all to leave. I had someone break the heater on the train. I also control the weather.