What a mistake, I think.
I was told if I would like Ljubljana, then I should go to Zagreb, Croatia. Well, my railpass covers Croatia for free when you order Slovenia as well, so I figured why not?
Comming off the train, things looked good. Instead of dropping you off in the commercial district, the train station is actually right in front of some beautiful park and town square building. Nice.
Then I walk to my hostel (the only hostel within walking range), and it is a dive. Granted, nothing can compare to the art gallery I was sleeping in in Ljubljana, this place is REALLY awful. Whatever, I'm so tired it doesn't matter. I get my room, go upstairs, and there are two smelly older German guys talking away drinking large beers and eating some odd bagged food. Great. I'm tired. I don't want to have a conversation and I certainly don't want to hear a conversation in German. This isn't going to work, and I would feel bad asking them to stop their little party, so I go downstairs to ask for a different room. That worked. Good. I got a 6-bed room all to myself. That would be nice except the bed may as well have been a pile of copper wire, and the room was consistently heated at 90 degrees F.
After waking, I got out of there as soon as I could, hoping the city would be better. According to a Zagreb magazine, "Zagreb is a clean and very well maintained city…" If this city is clean and well-maintained, I'd hate to see a city that isn't. Walking forever yields little advancement to better things. The most interesting this is the street cars which fly all over the place, but that's hardly a reason to visit, unless maybe you are a street-car fanatic.
There is a pretty cool art museum, Museum of Naive Art. The Naive art movement is that people can educate themselves on how to paint, so the only thing that the artists have in common is that they have no formal training, but it still looks good. I actually liked a lot of the pieces quite a bit, and found the information quite interesting.
It looks like the best thing in this city that I'll enjoy are this Internet Cafe and hopefully a laundromat, because I'm in dire need of clean clothes. My train out of here to Milan is at 11pm. I have 7 hours to kill. At least when you're traveling with somebody, you can go to a cafe and talk about nothing for some hours to pass time away in a bad place. Now, I'm just kind of out of ideas. There's nothing left to do but spend my remaining Kuna, because it'll be useless to me anywhere else.
Milan should be interesting. I have nowhere to stay yet, and really no ideas because it looks like everywhere is expensive. William's old roommate, Stefano, lives in/near Milan, but we hardly know each other. Maybe I'll meet another backpacker heading to Milan and we can split a double room. Something should work out. If not, I'll get a sleeper train to somewhere crazy… like Bordeaux. This sleeper train sounds exciting, but then I remember I'll be interrupted every 2 hours for my ticket and passport. Anya and I were theorizing methods of passport/ticket checking/stamping/punching without having to wake people. There's got to be a way, really.
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