Exciting Weekend Adventures!!

Hello from the Dalmatian Coast.


Two seasons have started, first it is now Spring, the weather this weekend has been amazing. The second season that has started in Dubrovnik is tourist season. I've been seeing a lot of tourist around and cruise ships around where I live. Old town is absolutely packed now.

So on Thursday Leah got very excited that the movie Sweeney Todd was playing at the theater in Dubrovnik, she was looking for people to go see it. Brad, Tom, Leah, Ian, Nikola (a local who has been hanging around with us a lot) and I went. The movie was very bizarre but I enjoyed it once I started to understand what was going on, though I would have preferred if there was less singing. I had a difficult time following it at first, maybe it was the movie or maybe it was me or maybe the subtitles were distracting. So the American movies (and TV) here are in English with Croatian subtitles. One of the locals (forgot who exactly) said the subtitles do a bad job of translating. The movies themselves were free, because ACMT gave us culture cards that lets us do some things around the city for free or reduced cost, but the regular admission charge was 20 kuna, or about $4.30, much cheaper than in the US. The theater only had four movies playing a day and one room to play them in, and it wasn't that crowded when we went. There was no movie previews.

On Saturday Leah went to Axel's (our professor from RIT we brought with us) house to get so some help with Programming Language Concepts because she missed a class. I'm not taking PLC but I went for something to do, and for Mrs. Axel's soup. It really was the best soup, ever and I usually hate lentil soup. We sat on Axel's balcony in the sun and breeze from the sea and talked about PLC. Axel's balcony has an awesome view


The view from Axel's balcony. The island there is called Lokrum and it is right across from Old Town. It is supposed to be really pretty there, hopefully we'll be able to ride a boat over there eventually. After we came inside we drank some coffee and ate some incredible prepackaged cherry strudel bars, which looked just like cherry fig newtons but tasted way way way better. Next time we go to Kerum (our local grocery store) I'm going to have to find them. Leah left Axel's to go home and I left to go to ACMT to study for a few hours then go to a makeup class, since we didn't have class on Monday.

This is the only road going to ACMT. It is extremely narrow but it is a two way road and a walkway. Sometimes I get nervous just walking on it, I couldn't image driving.

This is just a random guy sitting out in front of ACMT.

At ACMT before class I meet up with Chris and Kyle (who are the other two RIT students in my class) and we studied for the quiz. The class was divided into two group to take the quiz because cheating is an accepted cultural norm around these parts. The professor also told us where to sit and made different versions of the quiz to minimize the possibility of cheating. I kicked ass on the quiz.

After class Chris wanted to go watch the sunset in the park behind ACMT. Kyle and I followed.








We also went down some stairs to be right next to the water. It was at that point I realized I've been living on the sea for a month, but I've never put my feet in. I took off my shoes and socks and rolled up my pants and stood on the rocks where the waves were crashing. The water came up to my shins. It was awesome!!!










The night view is always nice as well, these were taken on the way back home.



So today (Sunday) Daylight Savings Time finally hit the rest of the world that isn't the United States. We are now back to being 6 hours ahead of Eastern Time. The people whose names are at the beginning of the alphabet (Tom, Brad, Leah, and I) were scheduled to take a field trip for Environmental Science (which is listed as Special Topics in my schedule) at 9am. At 6:00am Brad and Leah were awake making a ton of noise. I kept rechecking the time and wondering why they were up so early. At 6:30am from my bed I overheard them talking about daylight savings time and I realized that was today, it was actually 7:30 and I was now running late. I hurried out the door by 8 so we could catch a bus we never took before to meet the class in front of a post office in a part of Dubrovnik none of us have ever been to before. We got there 40 minutes early, but we made it to the right place. The rest of the class eventually showed up and we started walking up stairs, and then uphill.

We climbed to the top of Mount Srđ, which is the mountain in the background of this picture. I took this picture from the balcony of our apartment. The trail we walked to get up there is called Napoleon's Road which was built by Napoleon (obviously) in the 1800's to move soldiers to the fort at the top of the mountain, which you can see to the far right in this picture. As I walked there I couldn't imagine soldiers marching up this path, it was too serene. The view from the top was absolutely breathtaking, words and pictures can not describe it. I felt like I was on top of the world. You could see almost all of Dubrovnik, our apartment, islands, the Old Town, and perfect blue sea as far as you could see. The sad part is I brought my camera but left the memory card in my computer so I wasn't able to take any pictures. You can see some pictures that Lori took from the day before here.

The whole reason we went to the top of mount Srđ was because there was a huge forest fire there last summer, which burned all the trees off the top. It was a forest and suddenly turned to just rocks, you can even see that in the picture. We (as a class) talked about the current reforestation efforts that were visible from the mountain, and the downfalls of what they were doing, and better methods they can be doing.

At the top we visited the fort and went inside. The inside of the fort was in disrepair, and I'm surprised there wasn't a sign telling us not to enter. Next to the fort there used to be a cable car up to the mountains but it was all bombed from the war in the 1990's. Staša (who is our Environmental Science professor) says they will eventually build a new cable car system. I'm really happy we went on that hike.

So tomorrow (Monday) we are officially moving. My things are packed, and we are all ready to put bathtub laundry behind us. The new apartment I haven't been to yet, but ACMT picked them out for us. I'll be living with Leah, Kyle, Chris, and Ian and sharing a room with Leah again. The photo students will be in a different apartment building with two apartments. The other CS students Tom and Brad will share another apartment. All the apartments are closer to ACMT/Old Town. I hope we have a nice view again.

This is The Last Supper (in this apartment) with messy hair.

I will leave you with these two random bus ride pictures.



Ciao!!

Ston

Greetings from Croatia again.


Finally, a week after it happened, I'll write about our little trip to Ston. View full image to read about Ston.


Waiting for the van to pick us up.

Ston is a small town 60km north of Dubrovnik, also on the Croatian coast. They are known for their oysters, and salt production and city walls.

You can see the salt fields in the background. This was taken from on top of the city walls.

This is the salt fields. Reminds me of a Donkey Kong Country level - Mine Cart Madness!

Or something...

Salt fields again

Lets talk about the city walls. They are pretty huge, biggest in Europe from what I hear. They were built when Dubrovnik was an independent country, The Dubrovnik Republic. Ston was part of Dubrovnik and the walls were built to protect the salt production. The Dubrovnik Republic remained until it was conquered by Napoleon in 1808. There's your history lesson for today.


The part to the right was damaged by an earthquake in the 90's, so you can't walk on them. We walked on the wall part to the left though. It was almost like climbing a mountain. Most exercise I've gotten in a long time. It was just a big incline...

The wall offered a wonderful view though!

Stairs on the wall.

At the top of the wall Ian, Leah and I decided to lay down and look at cloud formations for like an hour. It was so relaxing, I felt really calm, I didn't have a care in the world. It was interesting what sort of things people see in clouds, I kept seeing Europe.


After our wall adventures we meet up with most of the rest of the crew drinking coffee outside. Since we got to Ston really early and it was a small town, there wasn't too much else to do until dark than sit around and drink coffee. Zoran tells us that sitting around at a cafe is an important part of Croatian culture.

So basically the day was exploring, coffee, exploring, coffee.


The Adriatic sea as seen from Ston.

Axel's dogs taking a dip.

The floor of the church.


Some misc. pictures from the day.

Ever since I got to Croatia I've been trying to get a good picture of the Croatian flag flying. This is the best I got out of like 10 tries. *sigh* Stupid wind.

The whole reason we came to Ston was so the photo students could take pictures of the Good Friday festival which took place around 8pm. They had a precession with what seemed like everyone in the town where on the way they lit bags full of gas and sawdust so the streets on fire. They also went up on the city walls and lit that on fire. The precession was pretty amazing, It seemed like it went on forever, I didn't even think that many people lived in the town. The batteries in my camera ran out at about dark, so I didn't get any pictures of the fire. Chris took some good video though so here it is, I hope he doesn't mind me linking to to it.

The Big Shot

I found this on ACMT's website. Thought it was interesting.

"The Big Shot is an annual night-time "painting with light" photography project sponsored by the School of Photographic Arts & Sciences at the Rochester Institute of Technology Rochester, New York, USA. The Big Shot 2007 was taken on April 12th 2007 in Dubrovnik, at the Pile Gate, and more than 500 volunteers made this event a great success."

View the larger image.

City views + Apartment

This is the building next to ACMT.
Here's some pictures I took of old town as well as the area around it from afar. The old town is the part inside the city walls.








These were taken from a moving van on the way to Ston. (I'll write about my time in Ston eventually...) Where we live is shown!

The update on the apartment situation is Zoran (our mentor, not the student) looked at some apartments and the rent will be half the cost of what we are paying now but does not contain utilities.

About the apartments we are looking at, Zoran said "all of the apartments Ive seen so far are quite nice, in nice locations and the landlords seem muchmore sincere than the current one; also, all of them have a washing machine (I checked it and double checked it, no stories about magical machine in the basement any more)"

We'll probably start looking at them ourselves soon, and we'll decide if we want to move and where.