Day 7 – Budapest/Train/Zagreb

I woke up to my girlfriend cuddling me on the bottom bunk. What was the point of getting two bunks I thought, rather than how lucky I am to be travelling with ‘the one’. Then again, everything is about money when you travel. Our agenda this morning was to find a shop for lunch as we would be on a train all day, but it was Sunday, so all shops religiously closed. After at least an hour of searching, we found one shop open (not very stocked up) that would do. Just nothing was going right in Hungary! Additionally, after leaving the hostel and ready to trek to the train station, my tom’s got a little too clingy to a melting piece of chewing gum on the street… This city really hates me! It’s fine, I was over it, the train station brought with it a new start and I was happy.

We were the first on the train and instantly worked out that the seat numbers were all messed around (the seats went from 21-26 for example – but we have 27 and 29? Working out that there was a small sheet of paper below these numbers with actual seats, we were able to teach others the problem and everything was getting sorted relatively well with minimal fuss…unlike our experience in Breclav. At first, my girlfriend and I were in different cabins, but I changed one of the sheets to another cabin so we could be together.

Our cabin was multicultural at first, a Croatian engineer returning home from a small holiday (who in fact told us everything we needed to know about Croatia, some words in Croatian and his experience with the education system), 2 Koreans travelling Europe and a girl from Boston, who’s family was from Colombia. The Koreans spoke little english but were later replaced by a brother and sister, also from Boston, who had worked out where their actual seats were. Unfortunately, they had a friend who should have been with them, but it was her seat number that I moved earlier…oops.

We endured a plethora of stories about Greek hostels on fire, tinder, politics, past experiences with future plans and a local perspective of Croatia over the remaining 4 hours. They stayed in Zagreb, but we made a ‘split’ decision to travel to Split instead of Zadar overnight, we said we would remain in contact with them but who knows? The cabin had all persuaded us that Split was very nice, and whilst sitting in a McDonald’s to get Wifi in Zagreb, we also found that it was much easier to get to – one train overnight and we get there in the morning, rather than some stops and train changes when going to Zadar. We decided this was the best option.

We thought that we should make the most of the Wifi and we rang our parents to inform them of our change of plan. Both sets of parents immediately asked “What is wrong, everything OK?”… Even though parents ask you to ring them, they always automatically expect the worst when you do. Without any hassle, we got the next train to Split and would be travelling for hours in small bunk beds!