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If not, you can read it here. Barely discernible at first, the wet squeak of fingers on self-lubricating flesh filled the silent room like an uncomfortably loud fart in a quiet elevator. I wondered to myself. The seconds crept slowly by. It was Sunday and a soupy mist clogged the empty boulevards and coated the metal tram rails with dew. I trudged down the main street in the center of town and found my hostel almost as empty as the rest of the city.
Skylar was sitting on her bed when I came in, iPad in hand. A brief hello, nothing moreβI set my pack down and she kept tapping away. I went downstairs to the bar, intending to ask what was worth seeing on my brief stop in the city, and was waylaid by two local students. After a few shots of rakija , a tobacco-heavy blunt, and a beer I glided back upstairs and saw John sitting on the bed opposite Skylar.
Instead of going out to see rainy Zagreb, I spent the day inside the dorm, talking with my two new roommates. John was a vagabond electrician from Queensland, Australia and was a walking Australian backpacker stereotype. His humongous pack was covered in patches representing all the countries he had visitedβmany of them in Latin America, although despite his immersion in Mexico and Panama his Spanish seemed limited to una cerveza por favor.
He knew a fair amount about beer and had a number of stories to tell involving inebriation, and he carried a skateboardβeasy transportation in warm weather and more usefully, a great way to impress chicks. He also had a messy beard that looked like something out of a third-rate pirate movie, but he claimed that it made him resemble Tom Hardy. Skylar hailed from a rural town in Central California and had spent the past three years managing a winery tasting room, finally quitting her job in order to travel.
