More Pictures

Hello again from Croatia.


Today is Easter Monday here so ACMT is closed as well as a lot of other places. I have a makeup class on Saturday. Right now it is raining pouring hailing on the clothes I am trying to dry... I almost lost a pair of pants off the balcony with the really crazy wind blowing my clothes around.

Here's some pictures from the park behind ACMT that we went to on Wed.

Chris and Kyle

As Chris put it, "we need to get out on that peninsula soon before I grow insane with anticipation."

There was a garden visible in this backyard which was directly below the park, and they had a pile of some sorts burning off to the right, that's where the smoke was coming from



Chris, Kyle, and Tom looking into the Sea

The view. Before I leave here I need to take a picture of the sea when the sun is right so the sea is blue.















I can watch the ocean sea (sorry, Nick) forever... It's just so beautiful...

Laundry Pt. 3

Greetings from Dubrovnik.

Me on the city walls of Ston with the salt fields (or whatever you call them) in the background.

There has been a lot going on this past week.

The saga continues... The cleaning lady did finally come this week but not on schedule. When she came to my apartment I was sleeping and Brad told me to vacate so I went to the guy's apartment next door and slept on their couch. When I came back to my apartment I remembered that because I wasn't fully awake, I had forgot to put my laundry out for her to pick up. According to other people who got their apartments cleaned on Wed she didn't pick up people's laundry anyways, yet again. Clothes were not going to last me till the next week and I didn't feel like spending all day at Axel's house doing laundry, since his machines takes 2 hours a load. Today I did bathtub laundry again. I did a huge "load" of almost everything I brought to Croatia, since last time I only washed a few things. It took forever, at least an hour and a half and rinsing the clothes out wasted so much water. I was so tired after doing that again. I have a newfound appreciation of modern washing machines. My arms hurt just thinking about it.

Initially we were promised cleaning and laundry service as part of the rent, and were told over and over again that cleaning and laundry service will be provided, so I'm not just being lazy and want someone else to do my laundry for me. If they said you have to do your own laundry from the start nobody would be angry about the laundry situation. I'm not the only one who is mad, we all are not happy.

So I have a lot more pictures to post and stories to tell but it's 3:30am and I'm tired so adio for now, and I promise to put more pictures up tomorrow.

I <3 Croatian Pizza

Greetings from Dubrovnik.
(The city walls as seen from behind ACMT)

The pizza here is amazing... way better than in The States. That will be the thing I think I'll miss most about this place when I leave.

So Monday we went to our weekly Croatian culture lecture and found out we were invited to the Dean's List dinner the next evening. Dean's List dinner was pretty fancy and the food was excellent. They introduced us study abroad students to the rest of the ACMT students at the beginning of the dinner. They seem really excited about having us at ACMT. They had the ACMT jazz band playing, too bad I didn't bring my camera to dinner.

After the dinner Leah, Chris, Tom, Zoran, Brad and I went to a bar called Cultro that was pretty close to our house. We had walked past it before on the way to ACMT but nobody knew exactly where it was. Chris thought it was closer to the old town and I thought it was closer to our house. We got on the bus and rode it all the way to old town and looked for Cultro on the way but we didn't see it, which doesn't surprise me because the bus goes a different way than we walk. So we got off the bus and started walking back the way we came, when we were maybe 1km away from home we finally found the place. We meet up with the other Zoran, the one who is our mentor and the guy who was the singer in the jazz band, and the president of student government at Cultro.

Tomorrow we are going to a town that is an hour drive away called Ston. They are having a festival there for Good Friday where they light the streets on fire. We will go there by two vans at 10:00am and leave at like 9:00pm. For some strange reason they are having the vans meet us at the Hitlon instead of our house.

Here's some pictures from the park behind ACMT from Wed.




More picture to follow later.

Laundry pt. 2

To the surprise of absolutely nobody the people who were supposted to get their laundry done yesterday didn't. Once again the landlord is in the wind about the whole situation. On top of that we found out from the locals that we are paying too much in rent. ACMT (who set up our apartment) keep trying to justify why we are paying more than locals, but one of the people I know from one of my classes answered that with a simple "Bullshit!" Sure all 14 of us are in the same building and the building is brand new and that is nice, but that isn't worth extra money when a lot of us are strapped for cash. ACMT is looking for new apartments for us to live in starting April 1st if we want to move. We will probably look at them starting next week.

Welcome Party?

Greetings from Republika Hrvatska.

My feet feel much better.

I spotted an an advertisement for our "welcome party" at ACMT. We went to said "welcome party" on Saturday night. There was nothing special about it, they just picked a random place and said it was our welcome party. The two guys who I went to their house on Thursday were our live entertainment, they were rapping. Even though rap isn't really my thing, I thought they were pretty good. The rest of it was kinda lame, there wasn't too many places to sit and the music was generally too loud for conversation. I didn't have too much to talk about anyway.

I left around 11 with a few others plus our new ACMT acquaintances we meet at Fresh. We went to get some food at this place called fast food Mrvica in old town. Here's the sign outside of it:
Fast food here means sandwiches, pizza, and dough products, no burgers or fries. I got some food that was like fried dough with cheese inside, it was pretty good. We then walked around for a bit. The ACMTers went to some club but the RIT people were tired and didn't want to stay out all night so we split and caught the last bus home. The last bus home is so crowded. We were packed in there like sardines.

Yesterday was by far the laziest day I've had so far here. I didn't do anything and I didn't leave the house. Felt kinda good to not have anything to do for a change. This morning I got up bright and early (ok, 10:00...) and went to class. Between classes Kyle, Chris, Tom, and I went to the path behind ACMT to wonder around and watch the sea. I got some great pictures but I'll upload them later, don't feel like it right now.


Adio!

Laundry.

Everyday it seemed like we were losing the things in our apartment we were promised.

We were promised a cleaning lady who does our laundry. Well she never comes in and our landlord told us to do our own laundry. We talked to our representatives in the USA about the problem and so we had a meeting with a director at ACMT to discuss our issues.

Our landlord agreed to have the cleaning lady come and do our laundry starting next week. We were responsible for doing the laundry we had accumulated up until this point. Some of us went to Axel's house (Axel is our CS professor who came to Croatia with us) to do laundry. They were there for like 4 hours chilling with Axel and Mrs. Axel and they fed them dinner. Leah, Brad and I stayed home and did our laundry in the bathtub. Brad engineered an extra clothesline on our patio out of some Ethernet cables, a belt, and a laptop lock, since we only had one small clothesline that wasn't enough for all of our clothes. It was an awesome invention. So... I hate laundry, but I hate it more when I have to scrub my clothes myself in the bathtub. I didn't even do all of my laundry, I still have to do more.

They don't have dryers here. Everyone dries their clothes on a clothesline.

It's been over a week

Greetings from Croatia.


I've been in this country now for over a week.

The rest of my classes are good. My first week of classes went by very fast and they all seem like not too much work, so that is good. I ended up sleeping in very late the last few days, because when I was first here I had a lot of trouble sleeping, and only got 4 hours a night for a while. I had to catch up on my sleep this week. Makes me miss out on some of the exploring and lunches though.

Last night we went back to Fresh. They had a night where they had free drinks until someone pees. Leah Don and I got there late because we went to someone's house that Don made friends with. These two guys grew up in Kuwait, and they were super friendly. We left to go to Fresh, when we got there Fresh was really crowded but the crowd started to go away when the beer was no longer free. I had a good time. Brad, Chris, and I walked home because the bus drove by us without stopping and we assumed that it was the last bus. The others caught the next bus though, so we didn't have to walk home. Oh well.


Pile gate at night. It is pronounced pee-lay, not like the English word pile. It is the main entrance to the old town. It was more impressive in person, I couldn't get any good pictures last night.

This is what the kuna looks like. That is 10 kuna bill (the smallest) and 50 kuna bill. The back of the 50 kuna bill has the old town of Dubrovnik on it.'

We meet some locals and made some friends with some other ACMT students at Fresh. We meet them for coffee today. It was nice except I felt a bit like an outsider because half the conversation at my side of the table was in Croatian. They only spoke in English when they were speaking directly to me or Kyle. They asked if we wanted to go back to Fresh tonight for happy hour and some people are going to go but I'm going to stay here and chill for the night.

So here coffee is a 2 hour long event, and there is a coffee shop every block. All coffee shops (caffes they call them) also sell alcohol but no actual food. It's mainly just a place to sit and talk and smoke. Everyone here smokes like a chimney, and they smoke everywhere.

Tomorrow night is our welcome party at a place we've never been to before called The Living Room.

My feet are absolutely killing me. A few days ago I tripped on the sidewalk walking home. Every since then the top joint of foot has hurt every time I stepped, and it is only getting worse. I must have bruised it falling or pulled a muscle or something. On top of that, One of the blisters I had started to feel warm and painful. I soaked it last night and put some antibacterial gel on it and bandaged it. It feels better today. I also got better sneakers to walk in.

I'll leave you now with some random pics.


Dusk is my favorite time of day.

Naked children statues would never fly in the US.

The plants are more tropical than anything I'm used to in New York.

Best. Sign. Ever.

Pile gates from a distance during the day as seen from the bus stop.

I don't understand European TV. This was on an Italian channel.

In old town

View from the old port.

The old port again

The perfectly blue water.

The narrower streets of old town.