We woke up early because we had to drive from Zagreb, up the coast of Croatia, through Slovenia, to Austria, and finally in Vienna. We made it to the Austrian border fine, but the bus had to go through the weigh station and inspections. Turns out the EU is kind of a stickler for functioning machinery and after about 30 minutes of inspecting our janky transportation they deemed the bus' brakes unfit for driving on EU soil. No one was quite so concerned when we were driving the falling apart bus through mountains and four different countries for the past two and a half weeks, but we're down to the final three hours of driving in the bus ever and the brakes are down for the count.
Austrian border patrol was pretty pissed but finally succumbed to giving our illegal bus a police escort back into Slovenia to the nearest train station so we could hop the next train to Vienna. Conveniently enough the next train left in about 10 minutes so we booked it through border patrol no man's land, stopped the bus and ran with all of our luggage to the train platform. My professor and our translator went in first to purchase tickets and immediately came back out with fallen faces. Apparently there was only a ticket machine, not a desk attendant, and the machine only took Euro. We all currently have four types of currency in our wallets and I could see Eleftherios inside rifling through his wallet only to find Bosnian marks, Serbian dinars, Croatian kunas, and American dollars.
Eventually he was able to negotiate something with our police escorts and purchase 23 train tickets on the fly with only moments to spare on the platform.
Finally, after a few extra hours of travel time, and a little ounce of adventure I am in my hotel in Vienna!! Meetings all day at the UN tomorrow and then soaking up the aura of Mozart's favorite city to compose in - so excited!
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