25 Cents Short

If you ever travel to Croatia, be forewarned: there are NO public restrooms (that I found anyway). In general, you can count on a free and relatively clean restroom at McDonald's or Burger King, but neither of these exist in Croatia--okay, well, they may exist, but I didn't see any outside of Zagreb.

The bus stations have pretty clean restrooms for which they charge 3 Kuna per use--roughly 58 cents. I have no problem paying to use a restroom with toilet paper where I don't have to hold my breath the entire time I'm inside.

Near the end of my trip to Croatia I was waiting at the bus station in Dubrovnik with a 10 hour bus ride ahead of me (7 p.m. to 5 a.m.). I have to preface this dilemma....Once I was on the bus, I knew that getting off would be risky business--they don't make any announcements on the bus in English, so you don't know if they are stopping for one minute for the driver to have a smoke, or if they are stopping for 20 minutes--especially at night. After seeing a Canadian girl almost get left at a rest stop in Bosnia at 3 a.m., there was no way I was getting off of that bus until we were safely in Zagreb. Thus, I thought it would be wise for me to use the restroom before getting on the bus and being deprived of the opportunity for 10+ hours.

By the time I was at the bus station, I had amazingly spent nearly every Kuna I had...after paying to get my backpack out of the luggage storage, all I had left was 1 Kuna and 70 lipa (100 lipa is a kuna)--33 cents. Simple math shows that I was 1 Kuna and 30 lipa short of a restroom ticket (yes, they actually give you a ticket, and I'm not sure why...you give the lady your money and she gives you a ticket that you just put in your pocket and never use for anything--I guess it is a souvenir of the bus station restroom). I tried to show the restroom lady that I didn't have enough money but I needed to use the restroom, but she seemed to have lost any sympathy for my type long ago. Hmmm....my options were slim. I didn't want to use the ATM because I didn't need to buy anything else in the country and my bank charges a $5.00 fee every time you use a foreign ATM, so then the 58 cent bathroom trip would be turning into a $5.58 bathroom trip (more actually, because you can't just get 25 cents out of an ATM, so I would have gotten more, then inevitably spent it somehow) and that seemed like a bad option by principle alone. I was actually desperate enough to go around and check the return slots and underneath of all the pay phones and vending machines--nothing.

I was about to resort to the ATM, when I remembered that I had some Hungarian forint in my bag, so I went to the exchange counter at the station and told the girl I wanted to exchange 200 forint (the smallest bill--about $1.15). She looked at me like I was crazy and asked if I was sure that was all I wanted. I said that it was and she gave me 5 Kuna and 33 lipa...adding that to my 1 Kuna and 70 lipa, I had enough to use the restroom there AND at the bus station when I arrived in Zagreb!