Budapest to Zagreb (10/08/19)
(This is crabby Jake reporting in)
Yo I’m just going to lay it down, today was a complete disaster. Adventure and buffered failure is all well and good but today was an unmitigated disaster. The plan was to catch an early train at 8:30am to a small station in Slovenia and then transfer to another train 10 minutes later which would take me to Zagreb, Croatia…This is not what happened however.
I packed up early, gave Ria a hug and started out on a brisk walk towards the station that is about 45 minutes away. But 10 minutes into my trek I get a call from Ria that I forgot my electric razor. Too late to turn around at this point without risking my train leaving without me so I had to leave it behind. Whatever, there are worse things than forgetting a $30 tool that I can just buy a replacement for. I found the train station and navigated to the correct train using paper timetables since Google and EURail don’t have train info about stuff here.
The train had seating rooms straight out of the Hogwarts Express that were all full of sleeping people except for one that I sat down in. I was joined by an 18-year-old from Sweden who won a rail pass through his school and is on the first day of traveling. We talked for a few minutes but his body language was telling me he was uncomfortable so I let the conversation die and engaged in Netflix and naptime for the next 7 hours, during which I ate all the food I brought along for the 10 hour trip.
I arrived at my transfer platform in the middle of nowhere Slovenia and my next train just didn’t show up. I waited an hour and a half and there was just no train. I investigated and found out from an awkward Irish guy also on his way to Zagreb that it had been delayed by 3 hours according to the service desk. Ok, so it sucks that I have to wait for a while to get my train, and I’m cold even with my sweater, but shit happens and I have a book to pass the time. Well 3 hours later I am still cold, still have no phone service, the Irish guy’s constant whining is getting on my nerves, and there’s still no train.
At this point its getting dark and the service desk is closed. There are no employees anywhere to be found actually and I have no clue what to do except wait and ask literally every train that stops if it goes to Zagreb. Which was social agony for me and yielded no results. And I’m trapped with this damn guy that keeps coming over to talk at me about his opinion on the situation which amounts to “man this sucks you got any idea if the train is coming at this point?” over and over again. And every time I try to start an actual conversation, he immediately kills it and walks away.
At this point, I am hungry, losing my damn mind, and the train is 5 hours late. But I finally got some info from a ticket master that there will be an evening train in ANOTHER 2 hours. And I can’t afford to miss that one because it’s the last train out of the station apparently. I thanked him for the info and grabbed my stuff to hike 15 minutes up the hill to the only restaurant in 30 miles. And what do you know, Mr. insufferable grabs his bags and follows me, unprompted, to the restaurant and sits down next to me when the other 2 tables are completely empty. At this point I don’t care at all and make it my mission to get him to pay for my dinner, so that at least I’m getting paid to listen to his bullshit. Which had morphed into him venting about how boring his life as a middle-aged software engineer that lives with his parents is.
After I lamented about traveling on a budget, he did in fact offer to pay for my mediocre and overpriced pizza. So I’ll give him one point for that. After scarfing down my food, we returned to the platform and a train arrived at Platform 3, where the paper timetable claimed it would. We get underway and the ticket lady is so kind to inform us that we were on THE WRONG GODDAMN TRAIN AHHHH!!!!!! And that in fact, the correct train was the one just before this one, which happened to have no label, marker, or indicator of this fact. But there is a sliver of hope, the other train got stopped at the next station for customs, so it is possible that we might be able to catch it before they finish.
We arrive at the next station and are lucky enough to find the correct train that is stopped and are prevented from boarding because the customs officer just finished inspecting it and refused to admit anyone else who was not on the train when it arrived. While the Irish guy lost his head and was yelling at the ticket officer, I found the timetable and was just incredibly thankful that there was exactly one more train from this station to Zagreb in one hour. So I settled down to wait on a hard, cold stone block since all the chairs were locked inside the station building and Mr. angry went off to get a drink. I caught the last train and made it back to Zagreb at midnight, 8 hours later than I had expected. But by god I made it, even through this absolute disaster of a day and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t proud of that.
Found my hostel and passed out. I need to catch a bus to Zadar in about 7 hours.
