Passport stamps, passport stamps.

I am monopolizing the computer at my Budapest hostel, waiting for my photos to load from my camera memory card to my new jumpdrive (I had to buy another one in Croatia; 4 GB was not enough). It...is...slow. But there are two computers and no one is using the other, so I guess I'll wait it out until someone needs both. And since I am waiting, and slightly bored, I'll update this thingie.

Brittany and I discovered we had an extra day because we did this bus tour to Plitvice Park in Croatia. This meant instead of spending a whole day traveling to Plitvice and then spending the night there, we took a bus from Krk, spent 3 hours at the park, and came back that night. So since we had an extra rail day and an extra travel day, we went back to Ljubljana. We just love it?

This didn't make our connecting train to Budapest any better, though; it was still at 2 am, and we still couldn't reserve a couchette (they fill up so dang fast, man), so we were still crammed into a crowded train for 8 hours and got a blinking-in-and-out-of-iPod-songs-and-passport-checks night's sleep.

Croatia is not part of the open borders agreement, which means that, YES, YES, THEY STAMP YOUR PASSPORT. Yes! Yes! So now we have...4 Croatia passport stamps, 2 Slovenia ones, and a Hungarian one! Not including my new Morocco, Spain, and Italy ones. I am so happy. These British girls sitting next to us were so jealous when we got passport stamps from Slovenia and they didn't, since they're part of the EU. Yeah!

I'm going to backtrack now, as I tend to do, and say that we definitely got to see a ton of Croatia. Not only did we end up off the "beaten path" by staying at an oh-so-small town on Krk, an island no one in the US has even heard of, but by doing that bus tour, we pretty much drove across the whole country. There are no signs of war in Krk or Rijeka, but once you swirl over the mountains (at lightning fast speed with crazy curves and gusts of wind; yes, Mom, you would have loooved it), you see bombed out buildings and bullet holes and yes, those fields all guide books tell you not to frolic through lest you hit a landmine.

Despite that, Croatia is gorgeous. Such surreal scenery. Plitvice is like something off a green screen or something; it's impossible to believe that this park is ALL natural. I'll post pictures later.

Brittany and I really wanted to hit up Bosnia since Plitvice is only 5 kilometers or so from the border, but it just wasn't feasible. I think we're going to take a sidetrip to Bratislava when we head to Prague, though, if we can afford it. Yes!

OK, my typing is loud and people are trying to watch a movie so ssssshhhh bye.