Hello!

Where did I leave off? Our last day in Vienna took us to the Naschmarkt in the morning. A big market where everyone sells the same food. We were given lots of tasters, the only downfall of that was everyone then wanted us to buy the food, so we perfected the look of confusion, saying "english" and walking away. The other end of the market was basically a car-boot sale. A lot of crap which I can't believe anyone would buy. There were PS1s and old-school gameboy games, in amongst chipped plates and decapitated dolls. Our next stop was to the Natural History Museum, under 19s get in free, and this time we didn't get asked for any ID at all! Although it was a good job that we didn't pay 'cause it ended up being quite dull. The first 5 rooms were full of rocks- they called them "minerals". Then there was your usual dinosaur bit and an exhibition about the insides of animals, basically showing you what an elephant and other animals would look like without its skin. After the inevitable wander around the city, we picked up our backpacks and got on a train to Belgrade, Serbia.

The night train was a bit annoying. There was no space whatsoever. You couldn't even sit up, the only option was to go to sleep, and even that gets constantly interrupted by border police and train staff! I wasn't quite sure what to expect of Serbia, but it turned out to be a fairly decent place. Once again, I got ripped off when changing money but it's such a cheap country it didn't make too much of a difference, was just incredibly annoying. After 4 hours of reading in a park, we walked around the city (a common theme) and went to the pub. We decided to splash out and buy a proper meal, and had a nice romantic dinner sitting outside under really bad electric lighting :) From there we then jumped on another night train to Skopje, Macedonia.

On this train we only had seats, but with only 3 people in the carraige, we had enough space to get a few hours decent sleep. We arrived in Macedonia with the intention of going straight to Thessaloniki in Greece. The only bus to there left at 6am, we got there at 7. So we had to walk around and find out how to get to Greece, we've now got a bus booked for 5am tomorrow morning, hopefully from there we can either go to Athens or Igoumenitsa, depending on price.
Why are we paying for buses? Don't we have railcards that'll take us all across Europe quicker and for free? Well yes, we do. But Greece, the great country that it is, has basically scrapped its entire train service. (Yes it went bankrupt and needs to get some money back somehow, but really, every train?!) We only found this out yesterday, and it was too late to take another route, so we're stuck trying to get around on buses.

Anywho, we'll spend the afternoon in Skopje, it doesn't seem too bad, not much going on though and get an early night so that we don't miss the bus!