Maia's (Mis)adventures

I go out to the balcony around midnight to hang some clothes and the salty smell of the sea engulfs me. The cool breeze of an ocean town. No matter how hot it gets in the daytime, the nights in Zadar are redeeming. I sit down, content to stare at the half moon, high above me, for a while. Slowly my eyes adjust and stars reveal themselves to me. Shy, but proud. My eyes search automatically for constellations I might know, and it's not until this moment that I realize... every single thing in my current world is foreign to me. Is new. Is different. Not even the sky is the same. My bus to Zadar is crowded, every seat full. I ask to sit next to someone and they welcome me. "Crap," I mumble, "It's so busy..." "Yup, it's season now," he responds. Wow. Having started my travels in the winter, I didn't really consider how much things would change in high season. This is the first full bus I've been on this whole trip. I make a men

"Yeah, I mean that's not how we do it at my bar, but-" "Your bar?" He cuts me off. "You know you quit that job right? It's not your bar anymore. You live in Europe now." Shit, guys. I live in Europe now... What is this life? According to Passenger "If you can't get what you love, you learn to love the things you've got. If you can't be what you want, you learn to be the things you're not. And if you can't get what you need... You learn to need the things that stop your dreaming." And I did... I stopped my dreaming for a long time. But I'm over that. Bring on the dreams. Bring on the adventure. Bring on the love, the pain, the success, failure, heartache. All the things that let me know I'm alive. If I fail, I'm gonna fail big, leaping and bounding towards what I want. Not sitting still, too scared to try. So let's see what this week holds... It's not the partying that keeps me around. No. I ca

Well...I made it more than halfway through my 23rd year without ever going on a pub crawl, which honestly...considering the number of party cities I've traveled to, I think is pretty alright. But that's changed now...I was right in my assumption, ladies and gentlemen...partying is literally part of the job description here at Whole Wide World Hostel. Working in a hostel is the opposite of everything I have spent the majority of my trip doing. After mostly refraining from drinking for the past 10 weeks (with few exceptions, such as my escapades in Rome), I suddenly find myself pulled into a game of beer pong (in which we actually pulled gin instead of beer with each cup lost) on my first night in the hostel, and going on a 50 person pub crawl by my third. On which, the cops showed up because one of our group decided it was a good idea to climb the giant statue of  Ban Jelacic in the town square...and then was unable to get down. He'll be internet famous by the morning, I&#