A bit of culture shock...

I turned 20 in Venice. Isn't that great? I think so, but that might just be me. I think that my favorite part was waking up and listening to my new favorite song "La Vasca". It's all about a vacation in a bathtub and it's super great. It was also pretty great when the girls pulled out a 5 euro chocolate cake with a stencil thing of space. When you pour the powdered sugar on top you get a great view of the sky! We were amazed by how good it was.

Friday morning three of us stood and watched as our group drove away on a bus towards Rome. We weren't going with them and it was so strange. I have been with those girls for almost three months and now I'm not. It was rather strange, but we had a good time in Venice for the day. Who can complain about being left in Venice? We stayed in Venice for an extra day so that we could take a night train from Venice to Zagreb, Croatia.

Croatia - I'll be honest, being woken up at 3 in the morning to men walking through your train speaking in an extremely strange language may not be my number one choice. Actually, it was kind of scary. It kind of felt like we were prisoners during some war and we were being shipped off somewhere. My favorite line of the event - Sharlie: "What if they don't have public bathrooms?" Kimberly: (Joking, but implying that we really had no idea what we were getting ourselves into and things might just be different than we imagined) "What if they don't use the bathroom at all?" Sharlie honestly looked at me in fear for a bit too long. Everything is amplified in the morning...We got to Croatia at 4:18 in the morning, found a heater, surrounded ourselves with our luggage, and waited for it to get light outside. It was a great adventure in so many ways. The directions to our hostel were translated...we'll say badly. The only reason we found it was because a taxi driver took pity on us after watching us trying really hard for a long time trying to figure out where we were and what was going on. Our hostel was run by these granola, almost scary, really nice guys ("Have you rung the bell? Well you must!") Our walls were bright orange with blue and yellow suns and flames painted on them. We tried to go to a Croatian restaurant the first night. It turned out to be Italian. We were very excited to find the church on Sunday morning. It was at the top of this apartment complex thing and we had to just follow the noise that we were praying was actually the ward. We were greeted by a missionary at the top of the stairs who I assume was speaking Croatian. We replied with a timid "Hi" and then he spoke English. Very helpful. The ward was absolutely amazing. I've never met more friendly people than the Croatians. It was incredible. Church was a bit crazy though. Apparently there is an English Embassy or something nearby so there are a ton of English speakers in the ward As a result, it was half in English and half in Croatian. There was no organization to it though. The lesson itself was in both languages with another person translating into the opposite language, people would respond in both languages, random people would translate for them, then they would start translating for themselves, and then somebody would start speaking English when they had made their last comment in Croatian. There were always at least two people speaking. I think you had to know both languages to follow. Two people came up to us after church and offered to show us around the college on Monday. It was so great. We met them, ate lunch with them in the college food center and then walked around the different colleges. Turns out schools are the same all over the world but we had a great time with them.

Tuesday morning we got up said goodbye to Croatia. We were off to Hungary...

Hungary - We got to take a very Hogwarts Express ish train to Budapest and I loved it. We almost lost Lauren when she couldn't find her passport, but it was eventually found. We had at least three pairs of Hungarian officers check our passports. One person would look at the passport and jabber in Hungarian while the other would either translate for us or stare with no shame. One of them wished me a happy birthday and then in the same breath started asking if we had cigarettes, cocaine, ecstasy, heroine and a number of other things. It sounded like they were asking if we wanted these things...that couldn't have been right. We got here in one piece and so began another adventure. Budapest is HUGE!!! and Hungarian is super crazy. There is no way you could look at something at guess what says. The money is crazy. 200 HUF to 1 USD. Our hostel cost over 33,000 HUF. That is a big number! I pulled money out of the bank and it gave me bills that said 10,000. We try to adjust, but it's hard for the brain to comprehend it being ok to spend thousands on a simple meal for three. We learned a valuable lesson today. The Croatians are always ready to help you and when they tell you how to do something or where to go you can count on getting there. In Hungary the people are just as ready to help you out and love to give instructions, they just all give different ones. When you ask one person for directions they have to get at least four people involved. One to know where you're going, one to know about the transportation options, and one to hopefully speak English. They might throw another one in too just to direct things. Let's just say it took us a few too many hours and buses to get to the Statue park today. We did find a really great Christmas market this evening though. We got there on accident though so I couldn't actually tell you where it is. :)