Korčula

It baffles me that a week from today I will be back in South LA getting ready to start school...

Right now I'm in Korčula, which is a small island off the Dalmatian coast. It's heavenly. Marco Polo was from Korcula.  This morning my cousins and I ate breakfast quickly and staked out a spot on the beach. The beaches here are very narrow and rocky, but the water is awesome. I swam  in the Adriatic sea two days in a row!

The climate is hot with a breeze and the terrain is pretty dry (imagine Catalina). There isn't much to do here except go to the beach, eat dinner and have ice cream. It's a nice change of pace for all of us. In general all over Croatia the pace is very slow. We figured out that if we want to eat dinner around 8 we have to get a table by 6. Most people pass the time by chain smoking. We've all considered taking it up just while we're here...

It turns out that Croatia has way more in common with Italy than with any of the Slavik countries we've visited. Excluding the language, everything is mediterranean. I've had ristotto, pizza, and a calzone. The seafood is delicious too.

Today a ginormous, Wall E sized cruise shipped docked in the  Bay and 3000 British tourists poured out into row boats and descended upon the island. Prior to that most of the tourists were French and Italian.

In an hour we will take a bus to Dubrovnik, and then a plane to Vienna, and then home!

croatia

We´re killing some time at in internet cafe in Split before heading to Kortula.

Croatia has been surprisingly beautiful and textured so far. Textured, that´s a loaded word isn't it? The people are the friendliest here. Even a postal worker made small talk with me. Of all the places we've visited so far, this is the most recently war torn. Driving across the country from one tourist destination to the next we encountered the Croatian country side where there are abandoned cement bunkers every half mile or so.  The houses that people do live in are not much better. The hill sides were all dominated by the same simple brick design. The landscape is dry and rocky for the most part.  A few times I thought I was in Bakersfield or Hemet. I could have been.

The music playing on the bus was a combination of Croatian folk music, motown hits and soft rock from the late 80s and early 90s. Most notably we heard James Brown's  ˝sex machine˝ . What a crazy place.

hostels

One of the joys of traveling around on a budget is the opportunity to stay in hostels. I think hostels are great. They provide modest accommodations--bed, shower, some kind of kitchen area, and a common room--at a very reasonable price. They also foster this kind of community of travelers. You get to meet people from all over the world (usually the U.S., Ireland or Scandinavia in our experience this time) and have a place to call home for a day or two while you happen to be in that city.

The above is true for every hostel we've stayed in so far. Except for the Absolute.  The Absolute Hostel in Budapest was absolutely not a real hostel. Perhaps we should have suspected from it's alcohol namesake. Actually, Sherrie got a warning a week before the trip that this Hostel was kicked off of the reliable traveling site, hostels.com because it's owners were posting fake reviews. We were cautioned to stay there at our own risk, but it was too late to make new arrangements since everywhere else in the area was already booked. So we went for it.

This hostel is the stuff that traveling horror films are made of.

We arrived around 11am--a pretty standard time to arrive. The taxi took us from the train station to our supposed hostel site, but there was no sign on the building or door indicating that a hostel was there. Chris asked one of the people coming out of the building, and in broken English she communicated that no, there was no hostel, it was only apartments there.
Hmmm. So Sherrie calls the hostel number listed on our reservation form. "We're here, at the address, and there's no sign or anything". They tell her to hold on they'll be right out. We wait for a few minutes, send the cab driver off. Then around the corner come these two guys shuffling along. One was short with a little belly wearing a stretched out white tank top, shorts (boxers?) and some kind of slippers. His parter was taller with greasy hair and a bald spot. He had on a short sleeved button down shirt and khaki pants. They greet us and tell us oh, come in come in, (even though they were outside too). They enter a code into the building an usher us up the stairs while making small talk. "Oh, where you come from?....California....maybe I go there next year" They said that our arrival time was supposed to be 6pm so they weren't ready for us, and the cleaning lady still has to come, but they'll let us in now. They open the door to the crappiest little apartment that I've ever seen. And because the cleaning lady hasn't come, the "beds" are all ruffled  and there are wine glasses on the kitchen counter. They assure us that all the hostels in Budapest are like this--apartment style, private, it's better that way, you don't have to share. No worrying about bumping into other people in the hallways because we have the apartment all to ourselves...huh. They take the payment from Sherrie, and give us a few instructions: When we leave we're supposed to leave one set of keys on the table, and toss the other pair through the window after we look the door. That's the check out procedure. Then they leave and we never see them again.

All over the tiny space are notices in bad english "Leave no value in the apartment. No mobile, ipod, money, jewelry" "If you cause harms to the furniture your credit card will be charged". My favorite was a sign talking about leaving a deposit with the receptionist if you wanted to have a locker. Ha! Receptionist? There wasn't even a front desk.

The bedroom consisted of a television with rabbit ears, 3 beds that were really mismatched sofa sectionals and a scary wire contraption that was my bed frame. After one night on that thing I dismantled it and put my mattress on the floor. The mattress turned out to be 2 thin foam pads placed on top of each other.

A few days later we are in Slovenia in a legit hostel. As a matter of fact I¨m sitting in the lovely common room now, using their computer surrounded by other travelers eating the free breakfast. It¨s wonderful.