alright .. more pictures

ok i dont have much to do now so i'll put some more pics up pour toi!




this is in hvar (croatia). On the first day i think it was, most people went to the beach area near the campsite but we (me, penny, hannah, anna and ri) wanted to go to the little cove place we'd seen on the bus so we went on a mission to find it, and it was so nice. There are quite alot of pics from there, i'll put them up at some point, but this picture is from when we were waiting for the bus on the way back and it was getting a bit dark ... the sea seemed to go on forever - it was so beautiful ... the pic doesnt really do it justice.

this is one of my favourite pics ... taken by yours truly (its my desktop background at work :) yea so this is the 'other boat' driven by Olly and Ralph that mainly consisted of; Rachel, Anna, Hannah, James (+ Ri). I think at this precise moment they were trying to speedily drive away because Fardon was trying to bang into them. Our boat was much more crazzzzy, driven mostly by Fardon and Gruff (who crashed it twice into a ferry and 800K yacht) with Iggy, Gunes, Golle, Penny and me. We went to some amazing little secluded islands and went swimming in clear water that was like 40ft deep and i think the others went to a beach that had sand (quite a novelty in croatia where beaches are mostly rocky or pebbley) and ralph went fishing. Renting those boats were so jokes .... i'm surprised they trusted fifteen 18 year olds with them but anyway ...

the other boat stayed out till the sunset and it looks fucking amazing. we came bk though because we were running out of petrol ... can't really comment much on this one cos i wasnt there.


ahh, allo;



here we are in our favourite restaurant in croatia, 'allo', i wish we got one of our classic waiter who thought me hannah and ri were 14! what a nice guy. this was in pakostane (great name, shame i cant pronounce it or any non-english word) - the last place we went to in cro...





u can see the menu there, pretty cool photo. i cant really say that much about it tho ...




Finally;



haha .. now i can talk about this baby for a while. OK, so this is on our journey all the way back to Budapest (from Pakostane) which we were all slightly concerned about considering the nightmare we had getting from balaton -->zagreb which was even a shorter distance. From pakostane we were going to have to get a bus to Zadar, then get a train to Zagreb and then get another train to Budapest. We had to leave Pakostane at 6:15pm and we arrived in Budapest the next day at 3 in the afternoon ... funnn! well we decided to make it fun and played a pretty cool round of the alphabet category game on the coach to zadar (bands, with 6 of us playing and for each letter, each of us had to name one). We we arrived at the train station in Zadar and I went to check the price of a ticket to Budapest we had a bit of a shock - it was gna cost like £38 each and no1 had enough croatian currency left and it was a sunday so no banks were open to change our travellers cheques .. so Ri had to use her card to get the money out and it was all highly stressful. I know it doesnt sound like that much compared to England, but for the rest of our journeys, we'd been paying like £2.50 a train ride and stuff ...
To make the unbelievably long train journey bearable we decided to play shit*head (joint first with pig for our card game of the trip)and whoever won got to be the 'birthday girl' and we basically had a party for them. Ralph had spare croatian money so went and bought loads of beer, vodka, an assortment of fruit juice and bar snacks and we played the amazing drinking game we learnt from Alex and Jenny. It was so much fun and even the ticket inspector wanted to join in (well, he asked for some beer anyway). This picture is us when one of the rules was you had to play with your arse in the air. Ralph and Gruff left at that moment and the game abruptly ended ... was jokes though ...

- sabychoo xxx

Long awaited update

allo!
so here i am, at work again occupying myself with making meaningless posts on this stupid blog that i dont even know if any1 looks at .. well for those of u that do boy do i have an exciting treat for u today! PiCTURES! it might not be exciting if youve already recieved my email that included a link to the same photo album these lil jems are from but these are higher resolution than the other ones which is always good.

so i'll talk u through them in case you werent lucky enough to be there (or in hannahs case have forgotten) ...






this is a classic (although we all look pretty dodgy). Thats the danger sign that we encoutered when we were climbing what looked like a rolling hill from the bottom but turned out to be a ridiculously steep mountain that had no paths - instead, just boulders, mosquitos and horseflies. it was pretty fun until i started stressing out and saying we were going to die but i did really wana make it to the top because the view would def. have been worth it (we were in lake balaton so you would have been able to see miles of water and green) so we kept going even though i was complaining outrageously but we lost pen, han and ann on the way so it ended up just being ralph, me and gruff 'climbing'. Eventually just got to this vertical rockface (imagine a 20ft sheet of what appeared to be granite) and we couldnt do anything but go back. It was pretty incredible aside from the close-to-death factor ...

haha gruff ... no doubt doing his low pitched 'arggggggghhhhhhhhhhhh' after drinking vino:





when we came bk down the 'mountain', we found all these amazing little vineyards where u could taste the local produce ridiculously cheaply (glass cost like 40p or sommit) and it was so tasty too. I dont really need to say much else about this pic of gruff ...

Haha

we've just got on the train going to some random station in balaton that we could supposedly get on a train to zagreb from. that travelling day was such a nightmare. we were supposed to arrive in zagreb at like 4pm to meet Gunes at the bus station who was coming from Turkey that day but we didn't end up getting to the youth hostel till 1:30am in the middle of the night! Firstly, we needed to get a boat from the town we'd been camping in but the water in the lake was apparently too choppy (?) and they'd cancelled all ferries so we had to get 2 trains and nearly ended up missing one because the platform was situated in a stupid place ... anyway, after we got to the station we were supposed to get to zagreb from, they tell us u cant buy international tickets from there (sTUPID!!) so we were gona have to run off the train when it got to a bigger station, buy the tickets and get bk on before the train left again (we were all told this in german btw, translated by Gruff who was the only one who could say anything other than ich viste nich but still he only had GCSE) ... then the train got delayed like 5hours and there was no food in this bloody station apart from 'pizza' which turned out to be bitesized puffpastries filled with tomato-flavoured paste. yum....









this is in trogir (croatia) when we arrived, also pretty late (11pm?) but followed the music and got to hear this amazing croatian band with local youths. as the policeman told me the lead singer 'plays music with much love'. we took it in turns to go in the crowd and sing along to their catchy lyrics of 'why, why, we must die? every day and every night ...' or something ...





haha ... this is the moon crater. "...if you like ....". When we finally got to 'camping rozac' - note that and never visit it - after getting lost up a hill in the black of the night, this is what we were offered to camp on. luckily we asked whether there was anything else and we managed to find something a bit less rocky ... that night ri, ralph, gunes and me had a hilarious time in the big tent playing spin the bottle (but with slapping+hitting instead of kissing) and 'eat, sleep or marry' and then we just started doing direct comparisons until the early hours of the morning when some random german yelled "GUYS!! PLEASE, ITS 5am, I NEED SLEEP" ... ooops ...


ok i'll add some more tomorrow i'm getting bored of doing this now

xxx

back and everything ....

well ... we've been back now for exactly two weeks. its really strange now i think about it because i'm sitting in an office (in my new job for ibm ... i know, i know- corporate whore and everything) looking out of the window next to me and i can see the london eye and the national theatre and just two weeks ago i was in buff cro/and hungary going swimming every single day and drinking alot....

Im not going to write an online diary of what happened just yet ... though i intend to steal hannahs lil journal thing and type some of it up when i get board but i'll post some pictures of where we went.... when i bother to scan my photos in i'll post some of the classics (i.e. hannahs underwater diving shot and my personal favourite; dancing with hungarians).

we had an amazing time in hungary (budapest ... staying in pest with some random women in our room, going swimming as soon as we arrived on the island in the middle of the danube that had an operatic fountain!, going to lake balaton and swimming with the swans/lying on the pier, having a cocktail party with dodgy 'rum', getting outrageously bitten by evil mosquitos, going to the next campsite that had 3o'clock 'quiet time', going skinny dipping, having ridiculous ambitions of swimming across the gigantic lake with a dingy, nearly dying climbing up this mountain that was infested with horseflies, eating goulash, dancing like freaks to sythesised euro-pop with hungarians, baileys and dares in the cafe when it was raining, jonti and rachel and our great german 'grandparents' and then the irritating travelling day to zagreb that took literally 22 hours)

and croatia was equally amazing in different ways (getting greated by supposedly 'french' people in our youth hostle dorm at 1am, travelling to Trogir with jose songs, that amazing croatian band that ive forgotten the name of, walking for agessss to auto camp rozac and getting stuck up a hill for ages, "if u want .... " - getting offered a moon crater for a camping pitch, going to hvar, fardon startling us by jumping on me iggy and anna while we were going for a relaxing stroll round hvar town, several people getting very drunk, renting motor boats :), the fuck u incident with iggy and penny at the pizzaria, anna generally drinking loads, going to pakostane and trying to not pay for the campsite but then just paying, going to the kornati islands and being supplied with excessive amounts of alcohol from 9am including some dodgy peach snapps, marco being a racist, and those crazy drunken polish women who loved 'vino', arriving back to the tents to find a leaving present from gunes alex and jenny, the long train ride bk to budapest which involved having a birthday party for rachel and gruff slamming a door in an annoying german's face, getting bk to budapest where we got a free mini bus to our amazing youth hostel where we stayed in the 24hr bar that night playing drinking games with drunk australians including a 6ft6 tall guy called scottie, going to the amazing baths the next day and having the all nighter with that essex guy who was weirdddd ...) ah and i didnt even wana write that much.

if u werent there none of that probably means anything to u but we'll tell u about it sometime .....
i'll post some pics in another post.

ah i best get bk to doing some work ...

- love sabs xxx

'progress'

Ah i am so ridiculously stressed. i have 10 exams left. in the space of 1 week and 2 two days. i'll let you think about that for a few seconds ...


anyway progress on the adventure-of-a-lifetime. well penny hosted a trip meeting on friday which i sadly could not attend (shocking i know) due to work overloads but Anna and Ri joined her instead and that was it. i personally think its a pretty shockingly low turnout but i cant say i'm suprised. They did vaguely establish a route which is good and Penny has this amazing map of croatia that even tells you where you can get boats to and from. Inspite of this amazing map we still havent fully established where exactly we're going because its very difficult to choose.... we still have time though.

I booked another youth hostel in Zagreb 'Ravnice Youth Hostel' which looks pretty good and although it's in the suburbs it only takes 20minutes to get to the city centre by tram and its 15 euros so thats pretty cheap. Its weird we could only find 2 youth hostels in the whole of Zagreb and i read reviews about the other one 'Hostel Zagreb', and i'm glad we aren't going there.

We're only staying in Zagreb for one night, then we're heading towards the coast but not sure to where exactly. We were going to go to the 'Plitvice Lakes':



its the national park with wolves, bears and wold boar ... and loads of waterfalls. but apparently you cant swim in them so we are considering going to Krka:




which is also nice and you can swim in them but it's not as spectacular as plitvice and you cant camp there ... so i duno.

Then we're going down to Split and possibly staying there for a night but it'll have to be in another youth hostel (u cant camp in split )and i could only find one and the owner doesnt know whether they'll be availability for all of us. We'd only stay there for a night anyway cos then we're going to Bol. I'll post some pictures of that once we've got camping sorted out. I emailed all the campsites there and one wont take any reservations (which is annoying) and this other one will but it looks really quite basic and shit basically so i'm waiting till this other one emails me back which looks nice....


After Bol we dont really know but we'll probably have to go bk to split and get a train/bus towards Zadar. But i have found this resort called Trogir and there is a campsite near it (but on a tiny island just off the coast that basically just consists of a pine forest and beach.) they should email me with availabilities soon.

So anyway least there is some progress ... as it appears there are still availabilities in campsites, it doesnt really matter that we cant book the majoritiy of them until after my exams (next tuesday).

Anyways better go and do some more maths........ i hATE TRIG IDENTITES ... and drawing graphs....stupid f(x)

love, sabina xxx

lake balaclava

Lake Balaclava ..... a homage to Hannah's outrageous reference to Hungary's 'Lake Balaton', one of the destinations we're visiting in our exploration of eastern europe. When i say 'exploration of eastern europe', i really mean our exploration of a youth hostel in budapest, a hungarian lake (that has this slide that goes into the lake!) and the southern coast of Croatia... but thats just because our trip doesnt really last for that long (like 20 days or something) ... .

here's a picture of the famous lake balaton/balaclava (well its more of the campsite we're going to):





now, you're probably wondering why i chose 'balaclava4ever' as the name of this amazing blog ... well i'll explain. basically me and hannah were trying to come up with a name for the original travelling group (me, her, anna and penny) and being that there were four of us and balaclava had to be in the title (and nobody else wanted to join our exploration/adventure) , 'balaclava4ever' was understandably chosen.

i know it probably seems hard to believe but yes, nobody wanted to go with us which, was quite an emotional ... apparently eastern europe was shit (gruff), and alot of people thought they wouldn't have fun if they came with us ( alexandra) and there were the other people who just wanted drugs. but now, quite shockingly the balaclava trip has attracted double numbers! - and it promises to be pretty damn fantastical.

So the people coming are ..... (in order of joining the trip)

sabina, anna, hannah and penny
and
gruff
ralph
ri
(who make up the core 7 who are coming everywhere)
and
rachel m (prob meeting us in split)
gunes (prob meeting us in zagreb, but hasnt booked his ticket yet and really should get his mum to asap- [the istanbul->zagreb one gunes, from the thursday to the sunday])
alex and jenny (prob meeting us in split)
and probably olly, iggy and checkers (dunno wher they're meeting us)

so yea, it should be great. probably better than the other self-discovery trips that are going on at the same time (see links to view their blogs).

i dont have much else to say ... i'll put some more pictures of where we're going up in my next *revision break*. oh yea and i'll put the minutes to our "secret meeting" up when we have it to hehehehehehe.

- sabina xxx