Once again, greetings from the beautiful Croatian coast.
This was in Budva, Montenegro
Last week after Social Change I meet my group partner, Petra, so we could finish up our presentation. We went to her house, she lives near where our old apartment was. Her house has a nice view and the sun was just starting to set so I took these pictures from her back patio.
This week has been fun with today being a busy day playing catch-up.
Wednesday my Windows installation died for no reason. Some files got corrupt and it wasn't repairable. I had to reformat and reinstall Windows but I don't think I lost anything that wasn't replaceable, just a bunch of TV show episodes I already watched and some homework I already turned in. Ian helped me out a lot in getting my computer back up and running and trying to save my Windows installation so I'm very grateful for that. I'm just not so happy that I keep having computer troubles in Croatia where I don't have the resources to fix them so easily. If I was home I'd have things like an extra computer, extra hard drive, Windows ISOs already burnt, extra power cable, things like that. Oh well I just hope this is the last of it.
Thursday after class I decided to get icecream in old town, when I was walking back I ran into Tom, Leah, and Katarina they were going for coffee so I decided to join. Katarina's brother was in town to take the entrance exam for ACMT (or something like that) so I meet him as well. We stayed at coffee forever and then decided to go to dinner at a vegetarian restaurant in old town called Nishta. I had a sandwich while we were eating coffee, so I wasn't really hungry but I will never pass up an opportunity to go to a vegetarian restaurant. This particular one Kara had been talking about and I wanted to go for a while. The atmosphere was really cool, they had little animals at the tables, and blankets. I got a potato salad and spring rolls and it was all good. We sat around and talked at dinner forever again, it was relaxing. When I got home I barely walked in the door and then went back out this time to Fresh. There we found out that they are now open during the day for wraps and smoothies. Excellent, I'll have to try them out.
Friday I had an advanced makeup class for XML because this coming Thursday is a national holiday in Croatia, so no classes. Friday classes are not fun. Later Don and Teo and Kyle and I watched a movie, Funny Games, and played cards at our apartment. The rest of the photo students were supposed to come over for cards but they never made it. We still had fun.
Yesterday the CS students plus Axel and Zoran (our mentor) and some other American professors at ACMT went to Montenegro, or as the Montenegrin people say it, Crna Gora. I took a whole ton of pictures there, but I won't post them all right away, you'll have to wait a bit. We took a van there and Axel took the overflow in his car. It took over 2 hours to get there, but we were standing at the border between Croatia and Montenegro forever, like 45 minutes. I was amazed to see a British car at the border, the driver's seat was on the wrong side. The very first city we went to was
Kotor which is a city on the coast a bit like Dubrovnik. There we walked around the older part of the city and looked at some stores. We sat down and had coffee and amazing, epic cakes that Zoran recommended.
It was then time to leave Kotor and continue our journey up the mountains. The van ride up the mountains was absolutely insane. We went up so so so so high and we just kept climbing higher. As Brad put it "this is starting to get a little excessive." The road was two lanes, but it was narrow so when someone else was coming the other way you had to be careful you didn't hit each other. The tops of the faraway mountains had snow on them. I started to get a bit carsick towards the top but opening the window and turning on the air helped a lot. There was also... cow on the side of the mountain road. Why? I don't know, they were just sitting there alone. It was really odd. So finally we get to a city which I don't remember the name of but I think Zoran said it was Njegusi, I'm not sure of it though. When we left we piled in the van and drove back to the coast to
Budva. There I did a whole ton of walking around and exploring the place. Took a lot of pictures of the mountains which looked like a painting. We walked up on the city walls, is there a city in this area without city walls? I think not! There was masks hanging up all over the city, but I don't know why exactly. The city was more suburban than I'm used to seeing in Europe, and one part of it looked like suburban Florida or something:
After we got back home to Dubrovnik, I was hungry. Actually I was hungry all day because the only thing I ate besides the cake was a pastry from the bakery in the morning while we were waiting for the vans. Everyone else had a slice of pizza here and there but the fastfood pizza in Montenegro seems to only come in one favor, mushrooms and ham and as you all probably know I'm a vegetarian. Oh well it wasn't a big deal really. We were all pretty hungry in general so Kyle, Chris, Ian and I wanted to go out to eat. We stood around for a while debating where we wanted to eat, and we decided to try a random new place in old town. The menu didn't have too much that was vegetarian but I opted for the "vegetarian platter" which was a very very tasty choice, even though it was just vegetables. I don't know how they made it so so so good.
I just wish it was bigger. Our waitress was really nice and she spoke at least 3 languages. After dinner we got our usual icecream in old town on the way back. I need to try the coconut flavor next, considering I've been eyeing it the last couple times I got icecream. All in all, awesome kickass day. Even the weather was perfect.
Lately I've been in a bad habit of waking up really early and staying up for a few hours and then getting really tired again and going back to sleep and getting up finally at 1-2pm. I'm sure my roommies think that I am insane for sleeping until 2pm.
Today I have to put together my part of our Environmental Science paper/presentation, write my part of the paper for Social Change, and do an XML assignment. Not really that bad at all, but I just have to force myself to concentrate, which is proving to be difficult in Dubrovnik.
I'll probably spread out my Montenegro pictures over at least a few more posts since I took an extremely large amount.
Adio for now.
Leah, Nikola and I - Group hug. <3
Stairs leading to Tabascos/Ploče gate. I'm not kidding when I say there's a lot of stairs/hills here.
Castle-like structure on the city wall
It was super insanely windy...
Kyle right before throwing stuff
Pretty sea once again
I almost fell to my doom down that hole
Zoran and our van driver
Zoron and the sea
Axel (our CS professor from RIT) and his dogs - Sammie and Heidi
Same scene, different views (this one was taken by Brad)
Same scene, different views (this one was taken by me)
Mrs. Axel and the dogs.
