Travel is very exciting. I’ve been sitting on a bus at the Hungary/Croatia border for the last approximately year of my life (aka at least 45 minutes) and I’m bored out of my mind and annoyed that it takes them so goddamned long to check our passports. I’m heading to Zagreb on an impulse trip – my friend who I spent Christmas in Budapest with is spending a few days there and then going back to Budapest for New Year’s (because if you’re going to party on New Year’s, Budapest is definitely the place to do it). Anyway, I decided to tag along except not really tag along because she has a rail pass and I’m taking the bus. Either way, I get to go to Croatia for a few days so it’s a win-win.
I’m 100% glad I decided to go back to Budapest to celebrate Christmas. After sleeping in to recover from the last night, we left at around 2 for an all you can eat/all you can drink extravaganza at a restaurant. We were in this huge back room with people from all of the sister hostels; we took up three huge long tables, and we are all friends so it was just a lot of loud assholes put together. The event lasted two hours: We ate for the first half hour or so, and then spent the remainder of our time downing champagne, and by approximately 4pm we were all PRETTY DRUNK. And full. Because we ate a lot. Of desserts. What? Just me?
After several drink spillages, more emptied bottles of champagne than I can count, and several champagne glass casualties, it was time to head to a bar to – you guessed it! – drink more. There was general merriment and definitely a lot of mistletoe as we hung out there for a few hours. And then it was off to the Rave Cave – a bar inside one of our sister hostels. Also it was BYOB which sounds counterintuitive for a bar, except that it’s not an actual bar, just for the hostels. I think it was so everyone could be having fun and nobody had to work. We stopped in a convenience store and I picked out a bottle of wine to accompany me for the rest of the night.
As I’m learning is a pretty consistent pattern in the Rave Cave, I don’t remember all of the details of the evening. However, by the end of the night THINGS GOT WEIRD AT ONE OF THE HOSTELS I ENDED UP AT. I’m not going to go into too much detail because I have no idea how events connected, but feel free to use your imagination and it will probably be something like that. But honestly, the most important part of it is that I will have a very interesting story about Christmas 2017 to tell my grandchildren. When they turn 16. Maybe 18.
The next morning, everyone was as close to dead as you can get while actually still being alive. I was mostly fine as usual, but I was definitely tired and spent most of the day doing absolutely nothing along with everyone else. I drank as much water as I could, ate Burger King, and watched The Incredibles with the group of girls that I’ll be spending New Year’s with in an AirBnB. Sometimes it feels good to have absolutely nothing to do. I mean, until evening, when it was time to start drinking again.
After a couple slices of pizza (including an amazing truffle mushroom pizza that was so good it shouldn’t be legal) and losing Kings AGAIN, we headed out to a couple bars, finishing the evening at an open mic night that was just people from our hostel. It was a chilled out night; I spent most of the evening with my roommate I’ve been hanging out with the last couple of days. We went home together early and I was so tired that I fell asleep before anything too exciting could happen. I mean it was a little exciting but you know.
This all worked out well because I had to wake up at 6:30 for this bus that I’m STILL ON and oh by the way is STILL AT THE BORDER. It’s been probably 1.5 hours by this point. This is getting ridiculous. They already made us leave the bus, collected all our passports, redistributed the passports back on the bus, and now they are “checking our faces alongside our passports.” WHY DIDN’T THEY DO THAT IN THE FIRST PLACE WHEN THEY COLLECTED THEM.
So uh, yeah. That was my very strange Christmas and Boxing Day. Can’t wait to (finally) get to Zagreb and see what’s next!