venice / zagreb

so now we get to the ADHD portion of our trip. early AM flight to venice (cheapest way to get to croatian coast), followed by overnight train to zagreb (ONLY way to get to croatian coast) another overnighter to split (split for a few days) and then bus to dubrovnik. i'm in split now, so the last two cities will get posted when i get to zurich. anywho... let's start in venice.

i'm gonna say this, interesting, interesting place. along with the heavenly ski resort in tahoe and the entire island of aruba, venice is one of the few places where JoePS (r) doesn't work that well. but thankfully, we had our map and could kinda figure out which streets we'd walked on. so anyway, we got into the city and checked our luggage at the train station (no use in walkin around all day with it?) shortly after we bought our tickets for the midnight train to... zagreb? ok, maybe it was a 9er, but who's gonna argue with me for a lousy rounding error??

took the vaporetti from the main train station to plaza san marco. figured that's where it all goes down. once on these crowded, crowded streets we bounced around looking for lunch (at the crack of 3pm). found a good place, AND they served pizza, so we pulled in and grabbed some nourishment. after walking around for another hour, we decided it was too hot and grabbed some gelato (oddly enough it wasn't that hard to find, no really, it was so easy even a miller could do it! - ouch, sorry buddy... i take it back. it was so easy, even an MBA could do it.) after strolling through the gazillion (yea, that's a technical term. they teach us those at ross) side alleys, we managed to stumble upon the rialto bridge. got some souvenirs (azurri jerseys) and pulled into a bar to get some grappa. certain things you have to do, and i believe buying cheap soccer jerseys is one of them (the inside of the collar reads "non-conforme to specificazione" or somethin like that). turns out that the rialto has been a crossing point on the island since the 1100s... and now we're down with the educational portion of this blog.

grabbed a lite dinner cause, well, we'd just eaten lunch 4hrs prior and we're poor kids in a rich man's town. finally got on board the NIGHT TRAIN (notice a musical theme here anyone??). we made the smart move to pay the extra $20 for a sleeper cabin (just hopin that our cabin-mates wouldn't be annoying old ladies that --- sorry, that was a rant for last time i took one). turns out that our cabin mates were two young ladies from texas (don't worry, we didn't mess with them) that were back-packin through europe for 5 weeks. oddly enough we found common items to talk about. (insert shout-outs to emily and michelle here). so our train was supposed to arrive at 4.30 so what do we do??? stay up till 1 chatting it away. great way to stay refreshed for the day's walk around zagreb (the ladies were off on a 6.30 bus to the beaches). after cordially escorting these ladies to the bus station and grabbin breakfast with them at 6am, we head on out on our mission to view zagreb. turns out that we got really bored, really fast. stopped off for an OJ near the main cathedral, and walked straight to the bus station to grab a bus to split for an extra night. turns out, i think we made the right choice. not much to see in zagreb, and we dominated all the sites by 8am anyway.