Croatia

After our two night stay in the nice hostel in Budapest we had to go to another one because the room was booked. We went to the Down Town Hostel which was quite close to ours...a nice bonus when lugging around bags. We came in and dropped our bags. The guy seemed nice and right away we were off. We spent the day at the thermal baths in Pest. It was a huge building. It has at least 12 different pools. Two big ones outside (one with a whirlpool) and bunches of ones inside with all different temperatures. There were even special "medicinal" baths. We took full advantage of the saunas they had. We would spend as long as we could stand in the sauna and then take a plunge in the 16 degree pool. After we felt as if we were detached from our bodies. Threw our temperature sensors way out of wack. This was our second day at the thermal baths...we had gone later in the evening the day before. Budapest is know for its thermal baths and has many throughout the city. Unfortunately, this was the only one which allowed men and women to enjoy the pools together. Still it was very nice to spend the day hanging out there. The night before we had had a nice dinner at a jazz club that had a live latin band playing. The food was great and the entertainment was very good as well. This night we just headed back to the hostel...got lost but made it. The next morning, looking forward to a shower, I encountered a moth on the shower head. Erik tried to flick it off but it just dropped down, suspended by a sticky white trail. This was after we found the showers to be ice cold. We said "to heck with this" went to our room and packed all our stuff up. The hostel was a dump the kitchen was disgusting and the rooms were pretty aweful themselves...the showers were the last straw. We planned to look for a last hostel for our last night in Budapest. No one in charge was anywhere to be found, nor were they the night before (they didn't give us sheets for the beds either) so we were planning a million ways to skip out. But we still had booking and stuff to do on the computer so we could organize our Croatia leg of the journey. So the computer was open just before we were going to walk out. I guess that calmed us down enough and we decided to stay for our last night to avoid further hassles.
This was the day we also changed our plans entirely. We chose to opt out of Estonia since we were having troubles figuring out how to get up there and decided that we wanted to spend some more time in London. Erik had been anxious to show me his findings from when he was in London with work and I had always wanted to see London so we were able to change our ticket with Easyjet with relatively no problems...just a $40 fee. So now, after we go camping in Slovenia, we will fly up to amsterdam for some more camping and city seeing and then off to London for about a week. It has changed our plans quite a bit but I think both of us are very excited to go (and also be somewhere where they speak English). Tomorrow we will head up to Slovenia to go to Bled. It is supposed to be a beautiful lake with an amazing camping ground and lots to do. We also cut out part of Croatia...the coast part because it takes a day to get down there and after research we decided it would be hard to do it justice with our new flight plan. Now it just means we will have to come back and do the beach thing...maybe tied in to greece or something.
Zagreb has been great these past couple of days. Our hostel is brand new (a stark change from our last) and the weather has been beautiful, excluding today. We have been walking around, going to some restaurants and watching street performer bands...we came at a good time!
Hope all is well back at home!!
Love,
Erin and Erik
we forgot the camera cable so we aren't able to put up pictures this time. Sorry!!