Europe round two started off on a good note when the Norwegian family sitting next to me on the airplane bought me a sandwich and beer and offered to let me stay in their house for the night. I politely declined the offer, as I had a connecting flight at 7am the next morning, but they wouldn’t let me refuse their gift of Norwegian currency to buy myself breakfast with. These random acts of kindness seem to happen all too often when traveling alone. I found a nice quiet corner in the airport to rest in and got myself a nice breakfast and a beer to start off the morning before boarding the flight to Dubrovnik, Croatia. Upon landing in Dubrovnik, I was greeted by friends Ryan, Tyler, Corry, and Zach, who I would travel with for the next couple weeks. Corry was traveling for the summer before starting medical school, Tyler was taking vacation from his cancer research work in Seattle, Ryan had just come from Spain where he had been teaching surf lessons for the summer, and nobody is quite sure what Zach has been doing, he just kind of showed up to have a good time. Our first stop was Sea Dance music festival in Montenegro.
Our first introduction to how ridiculously unorganized Sea Dance would be was the buses from the airport. After a couple of hours of confusion, there was no more space and we didn’t get on a bus. So we got a taxi to the border of Montenegro and hitchhiked the rest of the way to the festival, extremely lucky to find a driver who was willing to stop for 4 guys on the side of the road.


On the ferry with our driver

 

Getting into the festival was just as unorganized as the bus, which would characterize our experience with just about everything in Montenegro. Beautiful country, but not quite prepared for an influx of 20,000 foreigners coming to party. Once we got our camp set up, we took a taxi into the nearby town to stock up on groceries and booze, without knowing that there was an identical grocery store only a 10 minute walk from the festival grounds. The taxi driver repeatedly offered to sell us cocaine and weed at ungodly prices and when we refused all of his offers, he seemed pretty upset and charged us a ridiculous amount for the ride.


Traveler’s tip #1: When traveling in Montenegro, never take a taxi. Just hitchhike. It’s safer, cheaper, and more reliable.


Once we had enough food and booze for the next few days, we found another taxi back. This driver was much more friendly and reasonably priced, though upon seeing us drinking out of a 2L beer bottle in the backseat while stuck in a traffic jam, he passed his water bottle back for us to fill it with beer. He then continued to take swigs of beer and wave the bottle out the window at every girl who we passed, hiding it only when the police were nearby. Welcome to Montenegro.

The next few days went by in a blur of electronic music, beach chillin, water trampolines, 2L beers, and dubstep at the reggae stage (yeah…Montenegro). The festival took place at Jaz Beach, with beautiful views over mountains and the Mediterranean Sea. The days topped 40C (100 something F?), so there was really nothing to do during the day but lay in the water or play on the giant inflatable waterpark they had set up in the sea. The music played all night, meaning that there was only about a 1 hour period between when the music stopped and when it got too hot to sleep in a tent. So nobody got much sleep, but that was to be expected. The disorganization of the festival turned out to be nice in some ways though, as the fence around the festival grounds extended only about 10 feet into the water, making it extremely easy to bring in beer from the market just on the other side of the fence. Also, we discovered the greatest thing in the world at the supermarket there: they had a grill tent outside of the store with tables to eat at where a guy would grill any meat you bought in the store for free. After a few days of a nearly beer-only diet, warm greasy Cevapi (Balkan meat sticks) was the best thing ever.
Somehow I managed to get away without a single photo of the festival, so I’ll just leave this here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/seadancefestival/sets/72157655699858669/


And this: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7YIOS_KCv4Ie4P9xVO9tyHPb6pNn8lIC


After a crazy 4 days, we got on a bus back to Dubrovnik. The rest of our trip together was already planned out except for our accommodation in Berlin, which I had volunteered to take care of. I was intentionally waiting until the last minute to book something, because it seems that opportunities always open up when you travel without plans, and sure enough, the guy who sat next to me on the bus was from Berlin and offered us his apartment to stay in. So that was cool.

Once we got to Dubrovnik we ate and immediately fell asleep for the next 16 hours. The next day was, yet again, putridly hot, so we spent a lot of the day in the water. But first, we explored the old town a bit. Dubrovnik has a really nice old town, filled with brick buildings and red tiled roofs giving it a very Mediterranean feel, though it is so packed with tourists that it doesn’t seem Croatian at all.


Sunset from our balcony

 

Dubrovnik old city

 

The kittens loved Thizz

 

We made the best of the tourist hell by renting mopeds and went to a beach where a local guy told us there is good cliff jumping. He was right, the cliff jumping spots were amazing, including cliffs anywhere from 5 to 20+ meters high, a few of which were overhanging, making them perfect for jumping and deep water solo climbing. Unfortunately we didn’t get to try the latter, as we didn’t have shoes and I stepped on a sea urchin on my first attempt. Ouch. But the cliff jumping was amazing, into the perfectly transparent blue water of the Adriatic. And there was a water polo field set up in the sea, where Ryan and Tyler got to test their skills against the Eastern Europeans.


The new rides

 

Thizz blocks a shot from Croatia

 

he shoots….he scores!!

 

cliff jumping in Dubrovnik
After Dubrovnik we all flew to Prague together. Prague is a beautiful bohemian city with cheap beer and really good meat. On our first night, a Czech friend that I had met in Egypt organized us a bbq with about 4kg of meat ranging from seasoned pork neck to sausages. I always like to experience the traditional local food while traveling, and it was amazing to eat this delicious meat that Czech people feast on regularly. The rest of our time in Prague was spent exploring the city. After working on a pub crawl in Tel Aviv a few months earlier and seeing how much of a rip off it was, I vowed never to do another pub crawl, but in Prague we did the Drunken Monkey pub crawl and it turned out to be a ton of fun. Another highlight was the blind museum, where a blind person led us through a series of completely dark rooms where we had to use our other senses to figure out where we were. I think they have museums like that in many cities around the world, and it’s definitely a worthwhile experience if you get the chance.


The BBQ gang

 

Prague

 

Prague

 

The last stop of our trip together was Berlin. Berlin is a great city filled with young people and creative ideas. Though the atmosphere is sometimes a bit too hipster and pretentious for my liking, it’s overall a great city to visit. We watched Zug der Liebe, a techno parade in the streets, went to a day party at a beach club on the river, found our friend Matt, saw the graffiti on the Berlin wall, ate doner kebabs, and got denied from several overly-pretentious clubs.


Day party in Berlin

 

Unfortunately it was time for us to say goodbye as our trip together to come to an end, but this meant the start of a new adventure for me. I hitchhiked from Berlin to Darmstadt with little money left but with nearly two months still on my Schengen visa. This was the first time I had hitchhiked in Germany and I was amazed at how easily I was able to find rides when asking drivers in German at rest stations. I never waited more than five minutes, and the drivers who took me seemed eager to show off how fast their fancy cars can go on the German autobahn. I reached the other side of the country faster than the train, making me seriously question why I had ever paid for transportation in Germany in the past. For about a week and a half I stayed with friends in Darmstadt and Mannheim before setting off on my longest hitchhiking trip to date, travelling nearly for free to reduce the stress of thinking about money, which has turned into possibly the greatest adventure yet. More on that coming soon.