Croatia - Zagreb

The Street Our Hostel Was On in Zagreb

Welcome to Croatia--the seventh circle of hell.  That's a little harsh because it's a fantastic country, but my God, it's as hot as Hades!

Our first stop was Zagreb, the capital.  I've heard it's a really nice city.  We must not have seen any nice parts of the city though.  We were only staying for a night before catching a bus, so we didn't do much exploring.  Our hostel was on a street that doesn't exist.  The Croatians had decided to tear up the entire street at the same time, even though the were only working on the 10 feet outside our hostel.  From the looks of it, the street had been closed for some time.  A general theme we've noticed in Croatia is that they're really good (and enthusiastic) about tearing things down, but once something's torn down, they seem to get bored and abandon the project so that they can find something else to tear down.

Our night in Zagreb was pretty miserable.  While we had a great dinner at a hole-in-the-wall seafood joint, the rest of the night did not go very well.  Our hostel was overrun with what seemed like hundreds of obnoxious French high school students (I know, obnoxious and French are redundant qualifiers) running around screaming in the halls for most of the night.  To make matters worse, it felt like it was 43 degrees Celcius (110 degrees Fahrenheit).  Our hostel didn't have air conditioning and we were on the fourth floor, so it was miserably hot all night.  Even better, they were still tearing down the street outside the hostel, so the construction workers finished around 10 at night and then started up again promptly at 7:00 in the morning (Although they were audibly preparing to start using their equipment from around 6:00).  Our bus for Plitivice Lakes National Park departed at 8:30.  The beds were stiff and uncomfortable.  We got very little sleep.  Oh well.