I woke up and looked over. Rob was asleep. It was 6:15. So much for going to Zagreb. We decided to skip Zagreb and just take a late train to Ljubljana arriving at 2am. I had met a French girl named Gaelle on the pub crawl a couple nights earlier and she and I walked all over Budapest for the first half of the afternoon. We went to the Opera House, Parliament, a giant church, and the House of Horror. Budapest’s Nazi/Soviet occupation museum. The building the museum was in was first the Nazi Headquarters in Budapest, then the Soviets. The top three floors were museum space, while the bottom was an actual torture chamber complete with prisoner cells, gallows, and a tiny room where prisoners were forced to stand.
After our morning of adventures, I returned with Gaelle to the hostel to pack and check out. Rob and I nearly missed our train as we race across Budapest with about 20 minutes to catch the train. We took a tram down the road to metro, then the metro to the station and sprinted onto the train, making it with only a minute to spare.
Once on board, Rob and I met a school teacher from San Francisco named Jaime. It turns out her and I had talked back at the hostel for a couple of minutes and so we had report, or as the lady at the liquor store by my house says “child, we have relations”. The three of us had the usual backpacker talk, where are you from? How long are you traveling? Where are you going? Etc.
I went to the dining car on the train to eat a ham omelet with a side of bread, as I realized I hadn’t eaten anything all day and it was now 6pm. Rob, Jaime, and I talked all night, played shithead and ate jam crepes at midnight in the dining car together. Jaime was originally planning to travel to Zagreb on this train but decided she would rather go to Ljubljana with Rob and me.
Around 3am our train arrived in Ljubljana. It was an hour late and very cold outside. The three of us piled into a cab and rode to our hostel, only to discover that it was closed and no one would be there until 7am, four hours from now. In a cruel twist of fate, we were able to get the hostel’s wifi from outside, only to discover there weren’t any other hostels nearby and nothing was open.
As the night dragged on, the temperature dropped and soon it was 50 degrees with the three of us putting on all of our warm clothes, huddling together on the front stoop for warmth. When I woke around 5:45, it was actually colder than when I went to sleep, despite the sun being up. I was about to just start walking until I found warmth, somewhere, anywhere, when a station wagon pulled up and the cleaning lady got out. We were saved! She looked at us, clearly perplexed, then let us in.
