I'll summarize.
1. Leah and Mom drive downstate to Albany a day before the flight, because the weather is bad, and stay overnight with my second mom.
2. Leah gets on coach thing to JFK. (Really cool Indian guys tells me his life story and we bond over a shared nerdy interest in cryptography and both have been to Salisbury [Which is pronounced Salzbury?? WTF Britain. {Nested useless asides, RAH.} ] .)
3. Leah attempts to check in at JFK with a ticket purchased through cheaptickets.com for an American Airlines flight. The next hour and a half made me feel like a little kid lost in the supermarket, maybe even with a bee sting. I spent a lot of time on hold with customer service, bitched at people on the phone, bitched at people in real life, and got a boarding pass.
4. JFK -> Heathrow (Spoke with a really cool kid from Kenya who got held up at customs, and then I didn't see him again. :-[ )-> Zagreb -> Dubrovnik
5. I've spend the time in between arrive at the Dubrovnik airport, which holds some semblance to a minor bus terminal, and now ambling around with several other Americans, getting in the way of kamikaze traffic and wondering how much a kuna really is worth.
It's really weird and unnerving to be in a place where I understand none of the language. Almost everywhere else I have traveled, I have learned at least enough of the language to ask how much something costs, am I allowed to take a picture, etc. Here, I have no basis for understanding people, linguistically or culturally. Thankfully the group has Zoran 1 and 2 for translation, leadership purposes, as well as to fulfill the role of the general cultural attaches for those of us who only found Croatia on the map a month or two ago.
Still, I feel I am being disrespectful by not speaking Croatian. Most people here speak my language, shouldn't I show some effort in the direction of learning theirs? I'm going to try to be patient with myself, and first deal with things like finding my way back to the supermarket.
In less angsty news, I'm sharing an apartment with Stacy and Brad. Our apartment is obviously the most awesome, because people have been coming in and out all evening. Also, we live here. <-- Trump card.
It's really hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that people live here. There's big mountains and then a lot of flat land and water and the houses all have orange roofs. The streets are at least a meter thinner than streets I'm used to, and drivers seem to operate their vehicles under the influence of heavy adrenaline produced by the thrill of steering a car around a cliff with one side sheer rock and the other a drop into the bay.
It's really, really beautiful. I can't wait to see more of it tomorrow. And the day after that. Define recursively while day <= 81.
