Before I begin, a side note: Before coming to Italy, I never once thought about visiting Croatia. Not once. To be honest, I didn't really know that Croatia was even a beautiful destination to visit. It wasn't until I was perusing the different trips offered by the company Bus2Alps that I even considered going across, or rather around, the Adriatic Sea.
The trip began on thursday evening. Everyone met at Termini station and boarded the luxury coach bus that would be our mode of transport for the next 15 hours. Although it was nice, there's only a certain amount of luxury that can be applied to a bus. We stopped in Florence to pick up the second half of our group, and we were off to Croatia! There comes a time during a 15 hour bus ride, about 8 hours in, where you say to yourself, why in the world did I even sign up for this?? Long bus rides like that are almost never fun for more then a few hours. Anyways, by hour 10 I was at this point.
A few hours of sleep later, we were about two hours from our destination, Split, and so I watched the sun rise on the landscape that we were travelling. We finally arrived at our hostel, and let me tell you, it was one of the strangest places I have ever been to. Recently renovated, they called it a "design hostel", which means they went out of their way to make it look like they had some artistic vision. The rooms were basically long closets that had beds sunken into the wall. It was weird. They gave us an hour before I had to get back on the bus to go White Water Rafting. Great, the last thing I wanted to do was get on another bus for an hour.
We arrived at the river that we would be rafting down, and it was beautiful. The rafting itself was not too exhilarating, but the scenery was fantastic. Midway through we stopped and climbed a 20 foot tall cliff and jumped into the river. It was absolutely surreal.
After the rafting we had some time to get dinner before the pub crawl. You all know how pub crawls are, what they entail, and in order to not incriminate myself I will just leave the night up to your imagination. I will say however, that the highlight of the night was talking to a bunch of Croatian guys, all about 23 or so, for 45 minutes before they invited me to go down to the club with them. They kept trying to pair me up with a Croatian girl so that they could show me how much better Croatian girls are then American girls. Very entertaining, and I got back in the hostel around 4:30 AM. Fantastic night.
The next day, Saturday, was perhaps my favorite of the weekend. Everyone who signed up for the island hopping tour met for the boat at around 11. We boarded the boat, and the boat was serving grappa. I politely refused, as it tastes horrible, and the last thing I wanted to do was drink alcohol. We visited one island, called Brac, which was absolutely beautiful, but only stayed for about 45 minutes. This gave everyone enough time to buy a bottle of wine for the rest of the cruise.
The next island we visited we stayed for about 3 hours. It was a nice little beach where we could swim in the Adriatic Sea, and drink the wine that we had all bought. I wonder what the locals thought when they saw a bunch of American teenagers swimming in the Adriatic, each with a bottle of wine in their hand. A Croatian man, who was about 40 came swimming up to us to talk to us. I ended up talking with him for about 45 minutes, and he told me his views on Obama. I thought it was incredible how up to date they are on American politics, but I couldn't even name the president of Croatia.
After we got back on shore from the cruise, we had dinner at a forgettable restaurant. I was so tired I went back to the hostel and fell asleep around 10 PM.
The bus ride back from Croatia was incredibly long, as we got stopped in Slovenia for 2 hours because our trip leader didn't have her passport. She ended up getting stuck in Slovenia while we continued home to Italy. When I arrived in Rome it was 4:30 AM, I had been on a bus for 17 hours, it was raining harder then I've ever seen rain come down, and I had class at 9:30 the next morning. I was beat. But I had a fantastic weekend and I wouldn't give up the experience for anything.
The moral of this weekend is that busses suck. If you're gonna be on a bus for longer then 8 hours, you should fly. Simple as that.
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