lamb and pickles

ciao!

i hope everyone had a good weekend.

the transitions in croatia have been sudden and crazy. one minute i'm having a great conversation with an english traveler on the boat from hvar to split. less than 15 minutes later, drinking some strange juice, i'm having a much more awkward conversation in the home of a croatian family that i will be sleeping at for the night.

they took really good care of me there including feeding me. this normally would be a good thing. not quite so this time: boiled rack of lamb (so its kind of a dead fleshy grey color) and pickles--all moments before my overnight bus ride to trieste, italy. i'm not the best at eating meat with a high fat content (something about the texture of it)...naturally lamb has a lot of fat. i'm sorry to say, i gagged once but was able to cover it up by acting like i was choking from eating too fast.

i wasn't feeling too well on the bus. luckily i got on the wrong one, and an hour later they dropped me off in the middle of croatia and told me to wait a half an hour for my real bus to arrive. that gave me time to mellow out my mind and body (and digest the lamb and pickles). the rest of the ride went much smoother.

i enjoyed my i-can-understand-everything hour in italy, only to catch a bus back into i-don't-understand-anything slovenia to visit piran, a cool town by the sea. about the same time some wicked wind from the north brought frigid air and waves that broke all of the chairs at the restaraunts on the sea. the wind even has a slovenian name (that means it must not be good) so i'll be happy to go to portugal where they have no knowledge of this wind.

today i went to the skocjanske caves with an american girl i met at breakfast. i'm so glad i went because they were everything that i would want cool caves to be. it looked like it was straight out of indiana jones. there were massive caverns, a great path through them that gave crazy perspectives on the size of everything, and a powerful river going through one of them. re-reading this, it all sounds not that exciting, but trust me on this one. these caves, that i cannot pronounce, receive my "coolest caves in the world(that i've seen)" award even with 3 more months left of my travels. its just going to be too hard to compete.

i fly to portugal on the 15th from trieste, but the hostel is booked for a group tomorrow so i've got to go somewhere. i think i'll head to trieste on the bus and if i see a place that looks good (this usually means a sign that has the word "hostel" on it), then i'll get off and stay there.

have a good day
your friend

chad