A bizillion and one pictures from Lopud

Pozdrav iz Hrvatski!


Today we were supposed to go to Montenegro (which by the way is a country for those of you who don't know - check my map I posted!) but the trip was canceled due to crappy rainy weather. Thursday night I went to Fresh again with Kara, Don, Teo, Chris, Leah and Nikola which was fun. For lunch today Ian made the most amazingly awesome garlic bread ever, I'm a huge fan of garlic bread. There was also spaghetti involved. Leah, Tom and I went out to to a bakery and then coffee and had a nice relaxing time. Dinner was pizza with Teo, Kyle, and Chris at Tabasco's which is a place outside of Old Town we've gone to a million times before. After dinner Teo was going to Fresh and Chris and Kyle and I stopped in for a bit to say hi. Kara, Lori, Kayla, and Anna came in for a bit to say hi also so we stayed until they left, like 11:00. Awesomeness.

I'm starting to think I take too many pictures...

These were all taken from up on top of a hill (mountain?) at the end of our hike in Lopud:











Leah and AnaMarija.

Brad, Me, Leah, AnaMarija, Tom

Brad


AnaMarija




Two random people in the class that I don't know

Photo students - Kayla, Anna, Lori, Kara.

Tom




That is Ian all the way over there. He's the only one who went over there since it was kinda off the path.





This is our dog friend who followed us through the hike. :)

Staša feed him something he was eating

He was so friendly.


Staša, our environmental science professor.

These pictures were taken on our way back to civilization after reaching the top of the hill/mountain:









Leah listening to Staša's lecture

Staša lectures about stuff.

Until next time...

How many Americans does it take to order delivery pizza in Croatia??

EDIT: I want to give Brad all the credit for saying the thing about Americans ordering pizza, I stole what he said for the title.

Here's some pictures from our Environmental Science field trip to the island which was like 2 weekends ago.
This is an open market in Gruž, by the new port.

Waiting to board the boat on the docks

A random boat parked at the docks.

This is the boat that took us to Lopud and back.

Dubrovnik as seen from the sea

Sailboat

This is the island of Lokrum which is right outside of Old Town, as seen from the boat.

Lori relaxing on the boat ride to Lopud.

Lori, Kara, Brad and Tom enjoying the boat ride.

One of the hundred of small islands off the Croatian coast.

The boat stopped at this island first and let some passengers off.

Boat ride

And we made it to Lopud, here's the map on the beach

Beware, these oranges grow wild all over the place and they look really good but they are actually extremely bitter.


The coast of Lopud.

A church on Lopud

The hike

Finally, this is one of the banner ads I got today, which is humorous to me since I'm an American:
I have a lot more pictures but I'll post them later, gotta work on my XML homework now.

Back!

I got my spare laptop cable in the mail today. :) Whoooohoooo!

In other news today during Environmental Science I received my diploma. I guess I'll have to pack up and go home now.

Also thanks to Nikola we have a rare image of CS students in their native environment.

O Noes!!!!!

Hello from Don Frana Bulića 6, Dubrovnik, Croatia, by the way that is where ACMT is.

This is the map of Croatia. You can see where Dubrovnik is and its neighbors. The whole south side of the Croatian coast is called Dalmatia.

First I want to apologize for being MIA from the internetz lately. The power cable to my laptop had a small missing piece of plastic on it when I left the States, very minor, I covered it with electrical tape and forgot about it. I considered bringing my spare laptop cable but decided against it since I felt I had over packed as it was. In retrospect that was a stupid choice on my part considering that sometimes I had to position the cable a certain way in order for it to work. By last week the power cord was starting to seriously fall apart. I started to get nervous about using it so Thursday morning I had Austin mail me my spare power cord with 6 day shipping. Saturday my laptop cable split in two, useless. Nobody buy Asus laptops, they come with poor quality power cords! This is the second one I've had now, and they are not cheap. I am not a happy customer. I now have no way to charge my laptop and now I get less than an hour of battery time. I am not happy about it, I can only hope my spare gets here and soon. I can't post pictures until I get power cable. I'm at ACMT now, but it's a pain to go here all the time.

This weekend I went to the movies again in Dubrovnik and saw Charlie Wilson's War. Excellent movie. I liked when they were speaking Russian they subtitled it both in English and Croatian, I appreciate they had the English speakers in mind. Saturday I went to an event at Fresh called Air Fresh. Basically they sold "boarding passes" for 70 kuna ($15) and closed the bar to people who didn't have a boarding pass for an hour and a half. They they proceeded to pretend that the bar was an airplane. They seated us, gave us a mock "safety demonstration" (which was really really funny) and served us free drinks and airplane peanuts. Since there's a lot of foreigners that go to Fresh they did everything in English. They played video footage of an airplane flight during it and when there was "turbulence" (someone shaking the camera) they passed out tequila shots. After the flight they put up karaoke for whoever wanted to sing. It was really a ton of fun, I had a great time.

I've been forgetting I'm away from home lately. I don't know if that is a good thing or a bad thing. When I went to get pizza with Ian, Chris, and Kyle on Friday and we were on our way out I was thinking about where I parked my car, then I realized I was in Croatia and I didn't bring my car on the airplane with me. Last night I couldn't sleep and I was hearing a loud noise when I was laying awake in my bed, sounded like they were picking up the garbage from the dumpsters. I just kept visualizing them picking up the garbage at my apartment in Henrietta and I felt like I was back there at that point. It was really strange, I couldn't really feel like I was away from home. I guess I'm just getting more and more used to this place.

Today there was a lot of people speaking English running around. It was strange walking by like 7 groups of people and understanding what they are saying. Just not something I'm used to. Between Croatian Culture lecture and my Social Change class I picked up a slice of pizza in Old Town and went to the old port to look at the sea and eat. On the way I ran into this friendly guy who said "Dobar dan" (Good day) to me. I said "Dobar dan" back to him and my stupid American accent gave me away as a foreigner because right after that he switched over to English. "You don't speak Croatian?" "No." "Oh really, because you look Croatian." Ok...

The old port was very different today than it was when I first visited it back in March. First of all the sea was very calm today, almost no waves. There was a lot of people out there speaking a lot of different languages, tourists. The sun was shining and people were out boating and sailing. The tourists were taking pictures. It was just a different feel from the first time I was there in the rain. I'm not saying it was better or worse, just different.

I noticed while looking at the class list for my Social Change class that the only people in the class with middle names are the Americans. I guess Croatians don't typically have middle names.

The days leading up to this weekend were pretty insane. I stayed up until dawn 3 days working on school assignments, I clearly need to manage my time better. The problem is I feel like I'm on vacation so it's hard to get stuff done while I'm on vacation.

This weekend, Saturday I believe, is our trip to Montenegro! Yay. I'm excited. I'm sure it will be awesome.

Much love for my peeps at home. Miss you guys a lot, obviously. Adio!

Exciting Weekend Adventures pt. 2

Hello again from Croatia. Today is the start of week 5 of classes and week 6 in Croatia. Insane. It's going by way too fast.

Sometimes my internet shows up in Croatian. Some sites select my default language as Croatian when they see I have a Croatian IP. IMDB shows release dates for Croatia by default. Examples:


Just one of those little things you notice are different.

Anyways, I had another exciting weekend and another Environmental Science field trip. Zoran our mentor warned us that Staša (Env. Science prof) takes us hiking in the woods where no man has gone before. Now I know it is true.

Thursday a large group of us (including some Croatians) went to Katarina's house. Katarina is a really cool local person we meet at Fresh some time ago. We played some drinking games and chilled, it was a really fun time.

Friday was movie night. Ian, Leah, Kyle, Chris, Tom, Brad, and I plus two locals Nikola and Miya went back to the free theaters (yay!) to see There Will Be Blood. The movie was long and moved pretty slow. Some people couldn't sit through the whole thing. I did, it was a good movie I thought just could have moved faster. If you've seen the movie check out this Pokemon parody of the end Kyle showed me. It's really funny.

Saturday was the Environment Science field trip to an island off the coast called Lopud. We took an hour long boat ride to get there. I was so excited about taking a boat, I've been wanting to since I saw the Adriatic Sea. Once we got off the boat we walked around for a couple of hours up a hill through the woods and finally to the end of the path to a place with a spectacular view. I think all walks in this country end with amazing views I could only dream about a few months ago. We stopped 3 times for Staša to lecture about the Mediterranean ecosystem, how this island is unique, how there are neurotoxins in the water, and how it is better to poop in the woods than in the toilet. I got some awesome pictures but I'll post them another day, don't have time to post them today, I have a presentation tomorrow I still have to prepare for.

On the way back to the boat I thought we would go back the way we came. Nope, Staša took us through a path that hasn't been used in quite a while. There was trees and prickly bushes growing over the path that we had to avoid. I tripped and fell on a rock into one of those prickly bushes and got some slivers and a stick in my arm. The stick wasn't in deep or anything but it was pretty scary seeing it stick out of my arm. The funny thing is there was a really nice dog that followed us the entire way. When we stopped so Staša could lecture, he stopped too. He followed us from the boat, through the woods, and back. This isn't the first time I've been followed by a nice dog, one followed our group home when walking back from Fresh weeks ago.

When we got back to civilization we had almost an hour to kill before the boat came, so there was coffee. I think I'm going to miss the coffee shop culture when I leave Croatia, since its really relaxing to sit around and drink coffee and talk. The other thing I'm going to miss is the icecream, it's sooooo good here, especially the hazelnut flavor. I meet a few more local ACMT students on the trip, so that was awesome.

On the way back from the port to my apartment Leah and I stopped to look at purses for her. I ended up getting a much needed umbrella. Yay! The day was very nice and enjoyable. When I got back I was tired and I tried to fight the urge to fall asleep but I couldn't help it. I was sleeping while some people came over and played poker, which is ok, because I don't remember how to play poker, or any card game for that matter. I don't know why, but I learn card games and like a few days later I don't remember how to play. Anyways... When I woke up everyone had gone to Fresh so I walked down there and meet up with everyone. Fun times.

So today in Croatian culture we have decided on our trips. We are doing a 1 day trip to a bunch of cities in Montenegro on 4/19 and a 3 day trip 5/9-5/11 to some cities in Bosnia and Herzegovina including the capital Sarajevo. I'm really psyched. The border to Bosnia is like 40 km from Dubrovnik and the border to Montenegro is 20 km from Dubrovnik. It might also be the other way around, I don't remember exactly. Zoran also told us about the closest national park to Dubrovnik, Mljet which is another boat ride away.

That's all for now, picture to follow soon.

New Apartment FTW!

Greetings from Croatia.

Quick update, we all moved on Monday. It was the most painless move ever since all we had was 1-2 suitcases each and some random food. Axel and Zoran moved 5 people and 5 people's stuff in their small European cars in only one trip, I was really impressed. We also moved in the 2 hour break between classes.

I pretty much love our new apartment, and I love that my rent went down 836 kuna. I'm so happy with it. It is super close to ACMT, a 15 minute walk. We have 3 bedrooms and 5 people living here, myself, Leah, Ian, Chris, and Kyle. This time I'm the one who has the room to herself. Here's some pictures of my room




The living room has a piano.

Everyone's favorite household appliance is in our bathroom!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It exists!

I think it is odd that the hot water tank is in the shower, therefore it gets in the way when you shower.

We have a balcony like last apartment but the view isn't as amazing, oh well. I'm probably going to post some more apartment pictures at a later date. It's 2:30 am Central European Time so I'm going to head off to bed.

Until next time, Adio!