#Travelbug: Landing in Croatia

A couple of weeks back, one of my oldest friends and I, Jen, took a jaunt to beautiful Croatia on a trip which ultimately changed the way I think about travel and how I like to spend my holidays.

To give you a bit of background, I haven’t been on a hot summer holiday for three years, as evidenced by my stark white complexion and deep jealousy of everyone I know as they return to the office with glorious olive skin. My lack of travel has been down to a combo of skintness, singleness and all-around lack of time.

So last year, Jen and I decided enough is enough and that we would get our asses on a plane this September and widen our horizons. Everyone had been raving about how spectacular Croatia is so we booked tickets and (kind of) planned a route through the islands from Split to Dubrovnik. 

So we packed our backpacks (which I would deffo recommend over a suitcase) and headed to Gatwick at 3.30am on a sleepy Tuesday morning. We decided to head early so that we left ourselves enough time – turns out we got there an hour before we could even check our bags in at the self service Easyjet bag check with our e-tickets. Besides feeling very high tech and hyper-organised, the rest of the journey to Spilt was pretty uneventful.

When we arrived in Croatia, we took the bus down to the centre of Split, which was very straightforward and super-cheap. It was then that we encountered our first problem. The only accommodation pre-booking we made was an Airbnb, which we assumed from the description was in Split itself. It was not. It was about 25 minutes taxi drive away in a completely different town called Podstrana. When our taxi driver informed us that it would cost 150 Kuna, I had a minor heart attack – as it turned out, this actually worked out at about £15 each, but at this point I hadn’t wrapped my head around the exchange rate.

The apartment was up a steep hill in a housing development, miles from Split. It was very cheap, costing about £17 for the night, so we weren’t expecting 5* luxury. However, it had a dodgy front door and didn’t feel particularly safe and had no bin in the entire flat. It’s not somewhere I would recommend and what we learned from this is that you need to be very careful when you book apartments like this.

Once we had worked out the simple and cheap bus system, we headed into Split itself. We visited into the Diocletian's Palace where traders have set up craft and jewellery stalls and wandered around the streets, Lonely Planet book in hand. 

Although there wasn’t a huge amount to do in Split, one thing I would totally recommend is finding a place to admire the view from (I do love a good view. It’s how I know I’m getting on a bit). We stumbled across a bell tower that you could pay 30KN (about £3) to climb. The exhausting trek to the top was fully worth it for the dramatic view over the whole of the city.

We then wandered around for a bit, getting momentarily discombobulated and a smidge lost, found ourselves again and rewarded ourselves with a cocktail and then dinner, our first taste of Croatian cuisine. I will be putting up a separate post all about the food lights of our trip – keep your eyes peeled!

After being accosted by a couple of brightly dressed pub-crawl reps offering a neon-themed drink fest, which sounded about as appealing as having someone stroke my foot for an hour (for those who know me, you will know just how cringe that is) we went up to Cafe Bar Vidilica on the hill on the west side of the city. This involved a lot of walking, which became an on-going theme of this trip. Again though, it was fully worth it for the view from the top.

We then headed back on the bus to our wilderness apartment, unfortunately missing the stop entirely and having to take a route back through a silent housing estate. After a disconcerting incident where a car slowed down to our speed and some men shouted at us out of the window in Croatian, we hurried back to the flat and went to bed. Apart from a loud and slightly aggressive man on the bus to the ferry the next morning, this was the only unpleasantness we experienced on the entire trip and on the whole, the locals were really friendly and welcoming.

I have to say, I should have heeded the warnings about Spilt – although it was very pretty, there wasn’t much to do and we ended up sitting around drinking cocktails for a large chunk of time. Although that’s far from a bad thing. It was a nice start, however, to what turned out to be an amazing trip... read in next week to find out where we went next!

The mid-twenties: a sliding scale.

In my experience, most people in their mid twenties tend to fall somewhere along a spectrum. At one end, you are one of those people who have met ‘the one’, have settled down and are in the process of buying a house, a marriage and babies. Towards the other end you have those who are perpetually single, get drunk a lot and find adulting to be a daily struggle. Take a butchers at which side I tend to ere on.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think there is anything wrong with sitting at either end of this life seesaw. It’s just that sometimes this divide can be painfully obvious, and as someone who has many couple friends and very few single friends (I have four quite close single friends: two are perpetual daters, one is my ex boyfriend from yesteryear and the other lives in Wiltshire – most of the other single friends I have a are either much older and maturer than me or I barely ever hang out with), I see it on a regular basis.

Sometimes it’s hilarious. For example, recently I visited home for the weekend. Now, every time I go home, I make an effort to see my friends, so on this occasion, I went to a house warming party for two of my friends who were moving in together. At this party, I met George the tiny human. His mum and dad are two of my best married friends from school, Jodi and Luke. So far, so couple. I held George and managed to make it look natural for all of the 10 seconds in which it took to take the below photo. Don’t get me wrong, he’s very cute but I spent the entire time in fear I would drop him/ get sicked on/ get pooed on/ get cried on. Much to my dad's dismay, at this point, children are not really my thing.

Later in the night we vacated to the pub, where I proceeded, in a very mature fashion, to start a competitive bout of ‘save the queen’ and drink much gin and tequila. This was the second picture taken that evening:

About an hour after as the pub closed, I jumped on this guy’s back. Rory was even drunker than me on account of it being his 20th birthday so this was always going to a flawed plan. Needless to say he didn’t catch me and instead we fell backwards, with me smacking my head on the pavement, almost knocking myself out in the process. In the words of Jess: I could have died. After almost bashing down the pub door to get back in for some ice, I was driven home. I even had to wake my parents to let them know what had happened just in case I died unexpectedly in the night. I’m totally parenting material.

There’s nothing like this decent from a civilised couple and baby filled evening to absolute carnage to really highlight how different people’s lives can be at this age.

Having been in and out relationships like a yoyo for the past forever, I’ve learned to cope over the years with what it’s like to hang out with couples, and for the most part I’ve been quite lucky. Just before third year of uni, my ex and I broke up over the summer and I moved into a house which most of the time had four couples living in it. Other than my friend Jen, with whom until recently I had a weird thing whereby we couldn’t both be in a relationship at the same time, and our friends James, Nathan, Heather, all of my childhood friends are in serious long-term relationships or married to their school sweethearts. Both of my best friends live with their bfs. I currently live and work exclusively with people who are in relationships. None of these awesome people make it their mission to rub their relationships in my face, which is nice.

However, this does present the issue of who I can go on nights out with and get my flirt on. So what I’m saying is there is a nice big wing-woman and fellow single pringle shaped hole in my life so if there is anyone out there who fancies taking on the challenge, I’m accepting CVs.

Sorry, got a little sidetracked there. The point I’m trying to make is that life would be boring if our lives were all at the same stage at the same time. Some people marry the person they lose their virginity to and some people don’t meet the love of their lives until they have been through the relationship and heartbreak ringer a few times. Some people have lots of babies in their twenties and some people leave it until their 30s or 40s and some people never have children at all. Some people are put together and are mature and some people simply cannot adult. Somehow the majority of us get to where we’re supposed to be eventually, it’s just a matter of timing.

So there, smug marrieds.