Croatia Trip
Monday, March 27 2023, 13:45 UTC
Surprise post my dudes :^). I just got back from an unexpected Croatia trip, so I'm here to tell you about it.
4 days ago my aunt calls me, she tells me about this trip she was supposed to go on, but can't anymore 'cause 'reasons'. She already paid for it and couldn't get the money back, so she asks me to go for half the price, plus I wouldn't be alone, my mom and her boyfriend were coming too. Bus trip with a bunch of old people... half the price tho, so I said fuck it why not.
On the morning of the 25th at around 6am we drive out to the meeting place from where we were supposed to
get on the bus and start the trip. We're the first there, but in 15 minutes everyone else shows up along
with the bus itself. We load our suitcases in the luggage compartment and get on the bus. Now.. I gotta be
honest, I'm a bit of a degenerate, my sleep schedule was VERY fucked, I didn't sleep at all the night before
and I was hoping to rely on the bus ride for a bit of sleep.
How wrong I was.. I'm 6'0", tall but not a giant by any means. My dudes, there was absolutely zero leg room,
shit, negative leg room even. Sitting there my knees were jammed so hard into the seat in front, that it
started to hurt. To try to endure it,I put my headphones on and listen to Ryo Fukui - Scenery (amazing
jazz album, give it a listen), BUT NOPE! The organizer lady gets on the mic and starts shouting, damn it
man, I just wanna sleep a little. The dude beside me also starts a conversation with me, for god knows
what reason, I forget his name the moment he stops talking.
Welp I guess I'm not sleeping, so as I look around outside my window while we get ready to go, I notice this on the back of a road sign:
In italian: "The vaccines kill, the governmet knows, live free",
found another one saying: "The real virus is nazism, live free" and as we started going I saw someone wrote
"The government is lying about covid" with a spray can on an highway overpass.
As a native of this place and from what I've seen over the years, the people of this country are pretty
fucking dumb, they get baited so easily by facebook nonsense, in my opinion even more than the folks over
the pond in the U.S.
But enough with the political shit, back to the trip.
We're on the road by now and headed to the Italian-Slovenian bordern close to Trieste, I somehow managed to
get some sleep, but I get woken up by the lady again announcing the first stop a little before crossing
the border. I was annoyed at first, but it gave me the chance to see Trieste for the first time. We were on
an hill-side road overlooking the whole city, very pretty actually, you could even see all the way to the
where the port is. What stuck with me though was this massive brutalist apartment complex, I didn't manage
snap a picture of it, but here's one I pulled from the internets.
You can see it in the back towering over the city, kinda ominous, which is why the locals call it Alcatraz.
this cool article talks about it: link
We finally cross the border to Slovenia and the landscape shifts a lot very quickly, I don't really know how
to explain it but it feels different. The houses are fewer and less denstly packed and on the first bigger
town we pass there's a casino, probably for italians that pass the border to have some fun. As soon as you
leave the town, it's back to kilometers and kilometers of open country with close to no houses, in it's own
way it was very pretty. Also no slovenian femboys in sight, I guess it really was just a meme..
It didn't take much to arrive to the Croatian border and once crossed the landscape became much more
familiar, it was much alike what you'd see in northern Italy, but like Slovenia, way less houses.
I noticed an interesting thing though, a lot of the houses there didn't have plaster to cover the bricks.
I'd say between 30 and 40 % of them, I guess it's a way to save money after their conversion to using euros
as their new national currency the economy suffered quite a bit. Some other house still had bullet holes
from the war.
Eventually, we passed Rijeka or as it's better known, Fiume. In both languages it means "river". Either way
a very pretty city, rich with historic value. You could see all the influence Italy and easter european culture had on it,
it's a meeting place of traditional italian architecture and soviet-style housing complexes. Another pic from the internets:
And after 7 long hours of never ending bus travel, we arrived to our hotel a bit outside of Rastoke. A
really nice hotel I must say, 4 stars and fairly modern, the room was nice too. They served us what I
assume is a traditional lunch. I'm pescatarian so I didn't eat it, but they do seem to like goat lamb
spit-roast a LOT, almost every hotel we passed had 1 or 2 cooking in a specific made trailer outside.
I decided to skip the afternoon walk to Rastoke, between the trip there and the little sleep I had, I was
absolutely destroyed, so I went to the room and rested there. I woke up at around 2am and with nothing to
do I went and chilled in the lounge, listening to jazz and hip-hop again until people started waking up.
I had a bit of some sort of cake and apple juice for breakfast, after that we checked out and with a 30
minute ride we were in Plitvice. We arrived there at around 9:30 am and started the trekk, a very easy and
chill one at that, maybe except the occasional tourist blocking the narrow paths to stop and take pictures
of everything. I too took some, here ya go:
After that part of the trail, we got to a lake, there we would take a little boat to go across it, but first I got some really yummy fries at the
bar there :D. The boat arrived after a bit, we crossed the lake and got to where a bus-train thingy would pick us up to get to the last part of the trail.
A picture of the boat, not sure why it says SLAP :^)
The last part of the trail lasted about 30 minutes and took us back to where we started while looking the whole park from above.
We had luch with some stuff we had packed and at 2:20pm we were back on the bus ready to go back home.
Not much to say about the return trip, but just PAIN, 8 hours of torture and suffering on that damn bus. They are places worth seeing with your own eyes, but just go on your own. Group trips are lame as hecc.
P.S.: Heyy reader! I know, not my usual type of post, but I figured I should at least get something out of that experience other than the nice scenery and insanity filled trip to it. Nerdy posts will resume after this, probably with that docker networking and reverse proxy I was talking about last post. That said I do have a proper trip planned in September, it's gonna be a while but I might write about that too. It's gonna be to Amsterdam, so you know it will be interesting.