Not a very interesting day, mostly just travel. I finally was forced to retire my faithful Tesco shopping bag that I bought in the UK after a bunch of carrots rotted in it. I could've cleaned it, but the giant holes it was developing pretty significantly limited its utility anyway. I saw annoying American guy this morning and he immediately started complaining that his night wasn't crazy enough. I offered him my most insincere condolences and excused myself. My train wasn't until the afternoon, but I found myself lacking the motivation to get out and explore since it would've meant lugging my bags into storage and then coming back to pull them back out again. Not a huge deal but I'd seen most of what I wanted to in Budapest anyway. I took a tram over to the central train station in Buda, and unlike the old subway line's cars, I think this tram system is genuinely old. At one point the conductor stopped, took a bar out with her, and used it as a lever to manually swap the route of the tracks. I don't think I've ever seen that before.

The train wasn't very nice, though it turned out that I was actually in a the wrong car when I had my ticket checked - apparently most of the train was to be swapped out and only a few of the cars were going to Croatia, so I relocated to a much nicer car. We wasted an incredible amount of time sitting in train stations, presumably while this swapping occurred, and then again at the border. I'm not sure what the point of this was since nobody came through the cabins at all, but it cost us probably 30 minutes. Once we crossed the border a guy came through informing everyone that we'd have to get off and switch over to a shuttle bus a few minutes later for reasons that went unexplained. He spoke very little English and was really just showing us the Google translate result directly off his phone. It had been dark for a while by this point, so we relocated to a bus in dense fog that rendered the streetlights into nearly solid looking cones of light. The bus drove through rural Croatia for half an hour or so until we got to some other train station and boarded a shockingly modern commuter rail train of some sort. 45 minutes later, around half an hour late at 10:30, we were in Zagreb. At no point in the entire journey did we move at over 60 MPH.

I checked into my hostel which was mercifully close to the train station. It doesn't seem especially nice, though it was pretty cheap. I ran out to get something to eat (I'd had very little all day) and found the city to be almost totally dead despite it being a Friday night. I managed to get a hamburger that was very obviously a frozen patty and went to bed a few minutes later. I didn't see any of the city, really, so I'll leave that for tomorrow.

Balkan travel seems... Character building, to put it charitably, and this is probably the easiest part. As such, my upcoming route is unclear. I'm currently leaning toward a route of Interrail down to Split, which looks like a standard tourist trap resort city but I've heard some good things about, and then bussing up to Mostar or Sarajevo from there, and then bussing to Belgrade from there and getting a little more out of my rail pass by taking one of the few train routes south from there. One of the routes (I don't remember to which city to be honest) was over 10 hours, but it's overnight and a reservation for a bed is only €6 with my pass, so it will probably be the best option. Ideally I meet someone who's doing this as a road trip and I can ride with them, but I'm not getting my hopes up.