En Route to Dubrovnik

En Route to Dubrovnik
Friday, July 24, 2009
7:34 PM

Mitch and Yaron got into Munich on the 21st and have been in Split, Croatia for a little while at this point. While I'm not terribly concerned about Split I really wanted to check out Dubrovnik. Although I could do this solo after I'm finished up in Beograd I thought it'd be a great time to catch up with my boys. My trains go Turin > Milan > Venice > Zagreb > Split, where I'm planning to meet up with them, then to Dubrovnik by bus as it isn't accessible by train.

Since I slept for the bulk of the Turin to Milan ride this is making me remember how fond I am of trains. The last time I rode the rails heavily was in Japan and trains are just a wonderful way to see a country. Italy doesn't suffer from the urban sprawl that Southern California is so well known for so once you're out of a city you're really outside of the city. There are endless fields growing what looks to mostly be rice and corn, which is surprising given that I haven't seen a ton of corn based products.

Although the trains are a little crowded they're still big boy friendly which is all I ever ask for. Going to Venice I sat across from a blue eyed nette who noticed the UCLA sticker on my laptop and was fond of the Mighty Bruins as many Italians seemed to be. It ended up that she was working in Milan hopelessly slaving away for Leo Burnett whom, as far as she was concerned, had taken quite a bit of her soul already. She also let me know that the train was running extra late and got the conductor to call ahead for a stall on the train to Zagreb.

The Train from Venice to Zagreb ran from 10pm to 4am and the sleeper car was initially fairly sketchy but once conversation was started everyone was pretty jovial. Topics were fairly run of the mill and encompassed favorite travel destinations, Champions League Football prospects and transfers, and perhaps the most common European topic that tends to be unpopular in America, politics. Getting the feeling on the ground of political attitudes is always very interesting to me, and while politics are very private in the States, Europeans are far more outspoken. Distaste for Berlusconi continued the trend that I saw throughout Turin and Milan. Interestingly I heard quite a bit of support for Putin with a Croatian national that had lived/worked in the states citing the benefit of, "the return of a strong Russia".

Disaster almost struck early in Zagreb. Since the ticket office didn't open until 6 and I was in town at 4 I took an hour or so walk around the downtown. It was gorgeous, as it seems every downtown in Europia is. When I got back to the train station I found that the train had been canceled and replaced with a single bus, which was also sold out at 650am, 11am and was not open for a reservation until 3pm. As I was planning on meeting Ronnie and Mitch in Split around noon this was an absolute wrench in my plans. I paced around the station a few times, went back to another ticket window and had my initial findings confirmed yet again. I figured the only way that I could possibly get on the bus was trying to go standby. At the bus I was yet again reminded in an automatic Balkan sort of way that everything was full until 3, but as I've learned a lot of smiling goes a long way. After trading some euro for konor with another rider, I was on the bus that was 'full' and was actually anything but full.