by Kyle James
Right around the corner from the sauna was the cold tub. It looked like a large hot tub built into the cave walls, but the water was frigid. The first three seconds felt amazing to cool off our scalding bodies, but after that, it was a new type of uncomfortable. It felt like my body’s inner thermostat was on the pirate ship ride at an amusement park, quickly swinging from overheated to freezing in a matter of seconds. We brought our bodies’ circulation back to normal in the warm showers next to the tub. Ash called it quits after one cycle, and returned to the outdoor baths to relax. I repeated the cycle three or four times, expelling as many toxins as I could.
I decided to take a break from the water and meet Ash for a little while. We sat on our pool chairs and traded war stories of absurd people we had encountered in the bathhouse. While we chatted, I heard a worried murmuring around us. We turned to see some extremely menacing clouds approaching. The sky looked like a bruise after surgery.
A gust came through that flipped some of our belongings off the chairs. There was a distinct smell of oncoming rain in the air. Everyone got the memo at the same time, and began frantically packing their belongings. We ran to our locker and grabbed our stuff, but it was far too late. The rain began to hammer the streets of Budapest.
We definitely would have toughed out the rain and run home, but we were two miles away and had our iPhones, GoPro, wallets, and, most important, my journal. This trek was going to be a game of dry checkpoints. Our first leg was sprinting to the closest subway, a mere one hundred yards away. We took off running, and although the station wasn’t far, the short run soaked us as we sprinted across the steaming ground. It was like Budapest was a hot pan just out of the oven that had been placed under running water.
The closest stop to our Airbnb still left us eight blocks away. There were plenty of people huddled inside the tunnel, waiting for the rain to let up. It looked like Pearl Harbor out there, bullets of rain abusing the now flooding sidewalks and streets. I strapped my backpack onto my chest so the electronics were in front, and put my tank top on top of it to cover it the best I could.
“You ready?” I asked Ash, half hoping she would say, No, let’s just wait it out.
Silly me—not my Ash. “Let’s do it,” she said, strapping on her sandals as tightly as she could.
We bravely moved past people waiting in the tunnel as they watched us get ready to depart. The last thing I heard before entering the wall of water was an Eastern European voice shouting, “Good luck, friends!”
We were soaked in the first ten steps as we sprinted down the sidewalk, crossing intersections and passing slower people with umbrellas. Those poor fools were fighting a losing battle. Attempting to stay dry with an umbrella was impossible when the rain was blowing in sideways.
This was no routine storm. The lightning lit up the dark sky, and then almost simultaneously the clap of the thunder echoed in my eardrums. I realized mid-stride that I hadn’t sprinted like this in over a month. I felt like Forrest Gump breaking free of his leg braces as we jumped over small ponds forming on the sidewalks. It felt amazing to run through Budapest with the love of my life right behind me. I could hear her shrieking with laughter as she landed in puddles too big to jump over.
We made it home in less than ten minutes, soaked from beard to toe in my case. We scrambled to get inside our place. I checked our backpack to make sure everything had stayed dry enough. My phone was blowing up with severe storm warnings for my current area, a little late.
The remainder of our afternoon was spent snacking on chocolate and beer. These delicacies combined with my runner’s high made this one of the best days of my life. Sure, that statement was probably false, but I think the goal in life should be to have as many days like that as possible, days that make you question if you’ve ever had a better day. There is no way to quantify the quality of a day, but if there were, a day spent with your best friend, beer, chocolate, thermal baths, sunshine, lightning, thunder, and Budapest probably scored highly.
7/9/15
Budapest, Hungary
Other than our flight to Dubrovnik, we had nothing planned for Croatia. While Ash worked on booking our Airbnbs in Zagreb and the islands of Croatia, I caught up on my writing.
When we finished our work, we decided to hit one more ruin pub while in Budapest. We looked online for the weirdest one we could find. There was a ruin pub (and an Italian restaurant, which we stopped at first) near our studio. It was called Instant, and it had great reviews for weirdness. Ruin pubs are like South Park episodes. The weirder the better.
We arrived at the renovated two-story building and entered a world of the absurd. There was a maze of rooms surrounding a courtyard area in the middle. Some rooms had bars, other rooms just couches and foosball tables. In one room, there was a stage with DJs playing funky electronic music, while in others, there were just strobe lights illuminating the walls. We walked to the main bar and ordered a large Dreher, the local Budapest beer. Directly above us was a six-foot relic of a woman’s naked body with horse hooves for feet and an owl head as the head. Maybe this was the Instant mascot?
At this point in the night my stomach was filled to capacity from dinner; in fact, I could barely get each sip of beer down. I tried to walk it off, and we continued touring around the bar. Then we came upon a room with strobe lights and a DJ going crazy in the corner like there were hundreds of people dancing with him. Ash saw the empty room and decided she wanted to dance.
This was a rare occurrence for Ash. She is not a person who usually feels comfortable dancing in public, but she had really embraced the idea of leaving her comfort zone on this trip. I applauded her for her courage, but my stomach was far too full to dance at that moment.
Maybe it was the minerals from the baths; maybe it was the Dreher. Whatever the case was, she didn’t give a single shit about the opinions of others. She looked absolutely ridiculous dancing out of control, and her giant smile was the only way I could tell she wasn’t having a seizure. Other girls started watching from the side as she did the crazy legs shake back and forth, her knees coming an inch from banging each time as she laughed at herself. More and more people gathered around, probably looking for somewhere to dance, and I could sense Ash was starting to get a bit nervous. I could see her carefreeness slipping. I had been bobbing my head in the corner, laughing with her, but now there were plenty of people congregating in the once-empty room. Ash started to slow down and walk toward me, but I couldn’t let those people put out her fire.
I belched in the corner to clear some room in my stomach, and joined in, dancing harder than I ever had before. I wasn’t doing a dance; the dance was doing me. I moved uncontrollably to the beat of the lights, not the music. Ash started laughing and jumped back in with the crazy legs. Eventually people couldn’t stand us being the only ones having fun, and everyone apprehensively joined in until the entire bar had found this one small stage to dance as ridiculously as possible.
Ash had started a dance party. She didn’t like dancing around people because she felt nervous. Here was the dilemma: dancing made Ash happy, and normally the nerves outweighed her happiness, but not tonight. Tonight Ash decided she cared more about her happiness than the judgment of others. As it turned out, she wasn’t alone. Everyone wanted to dance; they just didn’t want to be the first ones to do so. Ash was the tinder that started a dance fire, a fire that would burn all night. I also threw up when we got home. So there’s that. A small price to pay to watch my girlfriend break free from her self-conscious shell and cut a rug.
7/10/15
Budapest, Hungary
Back to the baths we went. We spent our day participating in our now ritual bath activities. Ash spent the day lying out, and I executed the roast/freeze cycle. I found myself addicted to the high of shocking my circulation system. I almost passed out in the shower at one point, and I realized I needed to get off the good stuff. We left the baths calm and dry, the complete opposite scenario from yesterday. Personally, I preferred t
he adrenaline rush of battling the storm.
We spent our last night in Budapest eating takeout Vietnamese food and drinking cheap wine. We had some transportation booking to finish before we left Budapest. It didn’t quite go as planned. Google Images and two bottles of wine convinced us to stay in Croatia for three weeks rather than our originally planned one week. We had the drunken munchies, and the buffet of Airbnbs on the Croatian islands was too appetizing for us to pass up.
7/11/15
Budapest, Hungary → Zagreb, Croatia
Before we left for Zagreb, we had to make a pit stop at a flea market to get paprika for our families. Apparently, Hungarian paprika is a highly coveted spice for chefs around the world. This was news to me. In my mind, paprika is just the red horns for deviled eggs.
With the red stuff in hand, we started the trek to find our BlaBlaCar driver, Christine. Ash had been communicating with Christine via e-mail, and it was by far the strangest line of communication we’d had thus far. This was her last e-mail to Ash twenty-four hours ago:
Hello, Ash!
Please meet me around the Népliget metro station at 11:00 a.m. on Saturday. I will be renting a Toyota car to drive us to Zagreb. If I am not there by 11:00 a.m., please wait for an hour, and if I am still not there, I apologize. Something must have gone wrong with the rental.
Thanks,
Christine
This was far from reassuring, but we had no other way to get to Zagreb without spending a few hundred dollars. This BlaBlaCar ride only cost us fifteen dollars.
Within the last twenty-four hours, Ash had e-mailed Christine numerous times, trying to get a better description of the car or a more specific pickup location. With nothing other than that last e-mail from Christine to go off of, we arrived at the station at 10:55 a.m. We had no idea what Christine looked like. Her only description in a previous e-mail was that she was a “blonde looking forty!” This was extremely ambiguous, because she could be a young-looking fifty-year-old or an old-looking thirty-year-old.
We stood at the corner, trying to look as noticeable as possible to someone looking for two travelers. After thirty minutes, we were losing hope. Ash went to try to find Wi-Fi to see if she could somehow reach Christine by e-mail, and I stood on the corner like a drug dealer, making intense eye contact with each female driver who passed by. Ash returned fifteen minutes later—no luck. It was now 11:45 a.m. Christine didn’t show up, but what had we expected? She hadn’t even responded in the last twenty-four hours.
There was little time to sulk about our situation; we had to find a way to get to the capital of Croatia. We’d already paid for our Airbnb in Croatia that night. I went to do some research on trains. Ash refused to leave the corner until 12:00 p.m., but it was 11:57 a.m. and we didn’t even know what we were looking for. Ash hates giving up on things. I walked to the corner where she had found Wi-Fi earlier and began searching for plan B transportation. We’d missed the day train an hour earlier, and our last option was an overnight train that arrived in Zagreb at 6:00 a.m for 175 dollars a person. Missing our BlaBlaCar ride, it turned out, was a costly blunder.
I began the booking process for two train tickets and was moments away from clicking “Confirm Booking” when I heard my name being yelled down the street. I turned to see Ash running at me. “Kyle, I found her! I found her!”
We excitedly hurried back up the block to the metro station where Christine was waiting for us. She eagerly shook my hand and apologized for being late. Apparently, she’d rented the car at a Romanian rental company and had had trouble with the translating.
I assured her we didn’t mind and that we were just glad we’d found her. I sat in the back of the Fiat, and Ash took BlaBla-ing duties. Christine explained to us that she did not have a cell phone, which made communication difficult. I was in complete awe that someone could succeed in the twenty-first century without one.
As we left the streets of Budapest, Christine handed Ash a piece of paper. “Here is our map to get to Zagreb,” she enthusiastically proclaimed. I looked at the map that was hand drawn with what looked like an erasable pen. You know, that obnoxious light blue that always looked like the pen was on its last drop of ink.
The two of them went over the map together in the front as I sat in the back, shaking my head, knowing failure was imminent. To say Ash is directionally challenged is a huge understatement. If Christine was relying on a handwritten map to travel the three and a half hours to Zagreb, she might be challenged, too. They agreed on the first few steps and high-fived as we pulled out. We were off to Croatia, I hoped.
Christine was an eccentric French woman currently living in Berlin. This instantly made me like her more. Berlin had a gold seal of approval in my book. She was going to Rijeka, Croatia, on holiday, traveling by herself and couch surfing to save money.
I began writing to kill some time and couldn’t keep my journal pages from flapping in the wind and bombarding me in the backseat. Christine must have heard the flapping paper and told us she didn’t use air conditioning because it was bad for the environment. She stated this proudly and smiled at us. I was both appalled and impressed. I was appalled that in the one-hundred-degree heat, and in a car with black leather seats, she was willing to sacrifice the relief of AC. I was even more impressed that she believed in saving the environment enough to put two passengers, who would be reviewing her later on a ride-sharing app, through such harsh conditions. I had to respect her dedication to the third planet.
It became apparent that we were lost when we saw signs for Graz, a city in Austria. The highway was packed with traffic, and we came to a standstill on the road. Christine came up with the bright idea to ask someone for directions. (Finally, I thought, a great idea from the Blond Brigade.)
“Yeah, that sounds good!” I said, thinking we would pull over to a gas station. Christine, on the other hand, had other plans. She parked the car in the middle of the highway exit and left the vehicle. Meanwhile, Ash and I felt like the two young kids in Jurassic Park when the tour guide runs from the green jeep. Christine ran to the car behind us, leaving us perplexed in the roasting Fiat. After fifteen seconds of deliberation, she returned, running into the car, and excitedly told us, “I figured it out!” We exited the next ramp and took the highway back the way we came. A short time later, we arrived at the Croatian border.
Croatia was the first country we had entered with certified border control. There were signs advising drivers to slow down and get their documents ready. As we rolled into what resembled a tollbooth in the US, I imagined Christine just speeding through and blowing through the barrier, confessing that she was actually a drug smuggler. My daydream zapped back to reality as the stern Croatian guard asked for our passports. Christine handed him all three and smiled enthusiastically. I thought about how odd it must look to have a French woman driving two Americans in a Romanian rental car. The Croatian guard must have felt the same way, and after careful analysis, he told us to pull over.
Christine pulled to the side of the border station, where the vans full of drugs probably parked. They told us to stay put until told otherwise. We sat in a small patch of shade and waited, leaning against the trunk of the car. I couldn’t help but feel like we were doing something illegal.
The border officer returned and handed us our documents.
“So we are free to go?” I asked.
He nodded and looked disappointed that they had not found anything suspicious.
Although safely in Croatia, we still had an hour and a half of driving to go before we reached the capital city of Zagreb. I finished my writing to the sound of Ash’s snores.
I woke Ash up to give her the news of our arrival, but somewhere in the celebration, we missed the exit to the city center and had to turn around. Christine dropped us off at the train station, hugging us both, and then sped off to Rijeka to surf on couches. We wished Christine Godspeed.
As Christine pulled away, Ash and I looked at each other, exhaled, and started laughi
ng. There was never a dull day when taking BlaBlaCars across countries, but this one might have taken the cake for the strangest yet.
Our next Airbnb host, Natalija, drove us the short distance to her place. As she explained her loft, she was distressed that someone had once given her a four-star rating due to the pillows because they were “too hard.” We assured her she would be getting five stars from us. We give everyone five stars. She gave us recommendations for food and things to do with our time here, and then left us to enjoy Zagreb.
We drank a bottle of wine to assist in the sleep we were looking forward to getting, and headed home, buzzing through the streets. I had been anticipating this moment all day. We were more than ready for rest at this point.
7/12/15
Zagreb, Croatia
Today was a boring day by design. Our month-long journey through Central Europe had diminished our energy levels. There wasn’t too much to do in Zagreb on a Sunday (there wasn’t too much to do in Zagreb on any day) because all the stores were closed, so we took the opportunity to relax.
We ate an odd but cost-effective brunch of cereal and baguettes. These two foods brought me back to happy places. The cereal reminded me of nights at home with my brother, watching SportsCenter; the baguettes, on the other hand, reminded me of the sunny mornings on the streets of Paris. Even though one memory was years ago and the other only weeks, both felt like the distant past.
After a day of lounging, writing, cooking, and eating, we spent the evening binge-watching TV. It felt good to immerse ourselves in our back-home comforts while experiencing our new European lifestyle. Grey’s Anatomy had a marathon running on the only channel in English. We laughed and cried at the plotlines before heading to our brick-pillowed bed at an early hour. Today was exactly what we needed to reset our bodies, minds, and souls.
7/13/15
