Howdy all!
Life on the road has definitely picked up since I last wrote. I am somewhat back-dated on all of my emails, so I think I'll skim over the last few weeks (excluding this week) briefly.
From Germany Patrick and I headed east in search of cheap prices and (hopefully) sun. We only ended up spending about 6 hours in Budapest, 3 hours in a Hungarian bath house (i.e. lots of fun, different temp. pools and saunas) and 3 hours walking around and waiting for our train out of there. Although Patrick had a whole trip around Romania planned out, complete with about a week of seeing castle after castle and camping for free everywhere (sounds fun, huh?), he finally got with it and bailed that plan for Croatia. We arrived in Split to be welcomed by about 15-20 ladies holding up signs advertising their available room(s) for rent and you guessed it: rain. We were so bummed out that we simply booked a bus ticket down to Dubrovnik (in the very southern tip of Croatia), one of the sunniest places on earth. Turns out that patience was a virtue that neither of us had, and we got slapped in the face by that fact when the sun broke through the clouds the moment we hopped on the bus.
The same bunch of women (well, not literally the same women, but the same kind) greeted us once again in Dubrovnik, and we turned down one after another due to sheer poverty... and wanting to camp. Our timing was absolutely amazing, because the moment we got off the metro bus by the campsite, we found 2 other couples our age going there as well. It so turned out that situations like this are the perfect opportunities to make insta-friends ("Fresh out of the packet!"), and the six of us saw quite a bit of each other over the next five days... especially around dinner time when we were all pooling our resources to make dinner... over our coal 'stove'. The first night's dinner was a bit rocky (frozen fish sticks and sliced potatoes) but soon got better over the next few nights. One night we even finished dinner off with an apple strudel! Now that’s what I call camping.
Anyway, we left Dubrovnik with one of the couples, Nick and Pip, ending up in Venice the next day with LOTS of passport stamps (we asked at each border control stop... and made the whole bus wait. hehehe). The first night in venice will probably be one of the most memorable from the trip. You see, after taking out pizza to go and we sat around the corner with a water-front view (if you've ever been to venice, you'll know that every corner has a water-front view) and became scenery for the passing-bye gondolas, personal speed boats, and water taxis. Then we proceeded to pull an ultimate poor backpackers move, in the most ideal place for doing it. We slept on the street. It turned out that the alleyway perpendicular to the pizza place that we ate at was perfect for it. It was a dead end alley with an narrow passage way that blocked us from view of people on the other street. Only one group of people walked by us after parking their boat at the end of the alley, and we simply pretended to be asleep already to avoid confrontation. The rest of our 3 day stay in Venice was spectacular as well, and we even got to see the annual gondola races!
After Venice we popped back up to Berlin to visit the family we stayed with before. It was then that Patrick and I split ways; he went up to Stockholm again before flying home, and I went west to Brussels. Or at least with the intention of going to Brussels... after I slept through my stop and wound up in Paris... again. Never again do I want to go there. I have seen the likes of Paris' train stations WAY too much for comfort.
Long, boring story short, I am now in Dublin for the one-night-turned-five-nights stay. I have to say. If you are at all into people watching, this is the place for you. I’ll elaborate later.
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