Clever Blog Title Forthcoming

Final Post

2008-06-16T23:02:00.003+02:00

This final entry has been a long time coming.

It seems like "it changed my life" is the apropriate response to "how was Croatia?" but the real answer is long.

I remember an argument I had with Ian shortly after we came to Dubrovnik, in which I asserted that people in Croatia were very different from Americans, and Ian disagreed; that people are people and on a basic level, all want the same things. In retrospect, I'd pick a completely different side. People are reflections of their environment. It's arbitrary to proclaim that Americans are this way or Croats are that way, because the way we are is influenced by an uncountable number of factors. Our language, our parents' opinions, our teachers' attitudes, our experiences, the experiences of those we encounter.

This part is hard to explain.

People being reflections of their environments and largely obvious, and something I've always known, but now I really see it. In an abstract way, it's something I've experienced.

This hightened awareness that mine is a very unique model of reality creates a larger frame through which I see the world. For example, instead of considering someone naive for their belief in god, I think about what the details of their life and their story might be that - if I had undergone, might have brought me to the same beliefs.

Mine is a negligable fraction of the human experience, but to me it is valuable.

All of my travels, culminating in 3 months in Croatia, make me realize this.

Zagreb

2008-05-22T18:42:00.002+02:00

Last Friday I got a plane with Nikola and spent the weekend in Zagreb with his sister, Ana-Marija, and her roommate, Sandra. We partied excessively on Friday night, lazed around a lot on Saturday before taking a stroll around the city to see several prominent landmarks. Saturday evening we hung about and watched a movie, and Sunday was very similar, topped off with a bus ride home. I really enjoyed Ana-Marija, who has a penchant for vampire literature.

Monday saw the end of PLC (incomplete most likely) and Tuesday, environmental science (A) and XML (C). Better than I was expecting, which is dismal, since those are not particularly stellar grades. Considering how roughly halfway through the quarter I realized how badly I had been balancing my life and didn't consider my grades at all salvageable...

Today I achieved two major accomplishments - I cleaned the bathtub and sink in my apartment and bought my mother a pair of earings.

I'm spending the evening with Nikola watching movies and in the morning helping him bring his stuff to the bus station. My plans for tomorrow include coffee with Brad, cleaning my apartment with my roommates and tracking down Ivona and Feda for hugs. Saturday morning I'll head out early to the airport. Dubrovnik -> Zagreb -> Heathrow -> JFK -> Dad! I'll get to visit with an old friend in New York, and then drive to Rochester the next day.

And then I'll spend the summer on co-op, with intermittent bouts of swing dancing and other exciting summer-in-Rochester activities.

Language Barrier

2008-05-15T23:48:00.003+02:00

This is something I've talked to a lot of people about, but I'm blogging it for the record.

Before we came here, we were told that there was no language requirement for the trip because everyone speaks English, which is pretty much true. However, it's everyone's second or third language, which means that when I'm speaking English with someone, they're working harder at speaking to me than I am to them. This seems inherently unfair, but there isn't much I can do about it, because all I can say in Croatian is "white coffee, please."

Sometimes when I ask cashiers or waitstaff if they speak English, I get a 'yes' that sounds rather resentful.

I find that when I talk with ACMT students, we never discuss anything interesting or of consequence. This may be any combination of a cultural disinterest in things other than gossip and a language barrier. I avoid talking a lot because I doubt that what I say will be a.) understood as I meant it or b.) interesting to my present company. I spend time with Nikola nearly every day, and we've had ONE conversation about science. (Elementary theoretical astrophysics mostly, and some Stephen Hawking fangirling for my part.) Contrast this with conversations I have with friends at RIT, which if not in depth and intellectual, reference xkcd comics on a fairly constant basis, the humor of which are based in science and math. I'm not articulating this well...the point is, the connections I've made here are mostly shallow and leave a lot to be desired.

This isn't just due to language. By this point in the year, even the freshmen have made comfortable circles of friends, and aren't looking to break into a huddle of nervous looking RIT students. Even if this weren't the case, it takes me longer than 3 months to make good friends. None of the RIT students that came were previously good friends of mine, so for 3 months I've felt very separated from my normal friend base. It's one thing to miss my friends, and another to miss my friends and not have much to (temporarily) replace it with. That's not to say I don't like people here - I do - but it takes me a long time to develop a close friendship.

So to wrap up the language topic: People speak English but that doesn't mean they want to or that it's easy for them. I found myself in a group of ACMT students the other day, all laughing and speaking in Croatian. Every couple minutes Nikola or Ivona would tell me what happened that was funny, but if I got the joke, it was too late to enjoy it with everyone else. For me, that's not fun.

I'm told that earlier in the quarter, since most of the RIT students were traveling as a shy pack, several of the ACMT students talked about us in a less-than-friendly manner. I don't know exactly what they said, because the sensitive student who translated didn't give details. Anyway, it all struck me as very middle school.

But! These people I think were in the minority. I have met some great people, who showed genuine interest in why I would want to come here, had I heard of Croatia before three months ago, etc. That was nice. But like I said, not enough time to develop these potential friendships.

I'm doing a stream of consciousness. Oops.

If I had a little more foresight, I could probably have mentally prepared myself to jump into life here a little more aggressively and had a better time. Alas.

Bosnia and Herzegovina

2008-05-13T19:17:00.002+02:00

Last weekend we (RIT students) rode in a couple of vans to Bosnia and Herzegovina. To quickly summarize, we left early on Friday and spend that night in Mostar, drove to Sarajevo the next day, stayed the night there, and drove back from Sarajevo to Dubrovnik on Sunday afternoon.

I was mostly lethargic, homesick and miserable. However, I'm glad I went. Bosnia was hit very hard by the war, and a lot of the damage is still very evident. I've never seen anything like it. Walking down the street in Mostar, I saw two tall buildings next to each other - one new and modern looking, and the other bombed and empty. It struck me how besides us (the tourists) people didn't seem to give these things a second glance. War is something very abstract in my mind. To see it this close, even if it was over a decade (only a decade!) ago, is rather shocking.

There's a really cool bridge in the old town of Mostar, and just like Evil Zoran told us, there were golden-brown Bosnian guys in speedos soliciting money from tourists before jumping into the river. I walked around a bit, looked at stuff in stores, had a Turkish coffee (mmmm) and then sat on some rocks in the sun and read Fahrenheit 451. Got sunburnt.

Sarajevo also has an old town. I'm starting to notice a trend in Balkan cities having old towns. It's really nothing like Dubrovnik - the streets are smaller and rockier, and the buildings are shorter. Mostar's old town was similar. I bought my little brother a football/soccer jersey from a Sarajevo club team from a guy with two teeth on a side street that smelled like pee. Good Zoran helped me, since he speaks the language. We got some lunch and then took a cab back to our hotel.

The entire time I was there, I kept thinking, "How did I end up here?" because of all the places I imagined I'd go in my life, Bosnia and Herzegovina was never on the list.

Parmesan Cheese Quotas

2008-05-08T16:56:00.002+02:00

So the day I left for my weekend excursion, my roommates bought a kilo of parmesan cheese with which to make alfredo sauce. We've gone through maybe 1/3 of it, and now we've instigated a rule that mandates parmesan cheese with every meal. Pasta? Add parmesan cheese. Sandwich? Add parmesan cheese. Rice? Add parmesan cheese.

Last night, after family dinner with extra parmesan cheese, my roommates and I went on a family outing to the old town for ice cream. It's a lively group of people I generally enjoy being with. I'll miss them.

In other news, I got my official job description for my summer co-op, doing research with Professor Stephanie Ludi, from the RIT SE Department. I'm really excited, and I think it'll be a lot of fun. I've had a lapse this quarter in my usual academic enthusiasm, which has given me a nondescript feeling of being bothered about something, but it's coming back. I find myself missing the RIT library. I also read about Imagine RIT and really wish I could have been there. Ah well, I'll be there for the second one in Spring 2009.

I have a housing offer for the summer I'll probably go with. I mentioned it to Chris yesterday.
Leah: So I'll probably live with a 28 year old undergrad SE student and a 30 something year old gay guy over the summer.
Chris: I smell a sit-com!

That'll be interesting.

Wien/Hannover

2008-05-04T14:29:00.005+02:00

So last Thursday was International Labor Day, and I went on a little excursion to celebrate Europe and a few days off of school.

I'm not sure how exactly to explain the gratuitous amounts of angst I experience around any kind of travel. I'm something of a worrier under normal circumstances, so the infinite possibilities for missing connects, losing my passport, forgetting how to speak English, sitting next to gross people on a plane/bus/train and looking stupid are almost overwhelming. Anyway. I dragged myself out of bed at the crack of dawn on Wednesday, took the bus to Gruz, got on a bus to the airport, got on a plane to Zagreb, arrived in Zagreb, got on another plane to Vienna, arrived in Vienna, found a train to the Hauptbahnhof, met up with Mittens. (I mentioned Mittens in a previous post - no, it's not his real name. Consider me to be protecting his identity. I know him from Beginning German II at RIT. [{nested parentheses!} I never took German I, for no good reason.])

Our hostel was pretty far away from the center of the city - we took one of the U-bahn lines to the end, a stop called Ottakring, and then took a bus to the hostel. On one hand, it was annoying to have to travel so much - about 40 minutes one way - but we also got to see some suburban Vienna.

Before leaving Dubrovnik, I got in touch with a girl named Veronika, who goes to Universität Wien (University of Vienna). She met us in a restaurant where we devoured a towering mound of Wiener Schnitzel, which was definitely not vegetarian. She was sweet, and showed us around the part of the city where there are a couple identical, huge museums, das Rathaus (city hall - that's right. The German word for city hall is rathaus) and the university. Later that day she had to help organize some event the socialist youth were doing - it was explained to me and I'm not sure I understood properly. There was also a parade the next day, for labor day, and I would have gone if it hadn't been at 8 o'clock in the morning.

Me and Mittens went back to the hostel for a nap, because I whined about being tired, and later went back into the city to explore the bar/pub scene. I visited a bunch of different places and consumed several varieties of beer. Some guy asked me for my number, which was flattering. We also met this really awesome deaf guy in a bar who was dancing and probably drunk. Me and Mittens both know varying amounts of ASL, and even though that's not really what Awesome Deaf Austrian Guy was using, we could communicate with him on a rudiumentary level. He (I think) told us about how he injured his hand, and thought we were a couple, and said he didn't have anyone. Also, he is young at heart, even though he is 39. Mittens bought him a beer, which he made us each have a sip of.

Mittens was rather overzealous and believed that public transportation operated 24 hours, which it DOESN'T, as we discovered around 2am. We got home somehow, and I have a very fuzzy recollection of how, and I wasn't even drunk. We did have just about the tastiest falafel from a cart on the street ever. Anyway, we got home around 3:30. Too late for Leah.

Thursday we got up early for breakfast provided by the hostel and then slept a little more. After going back to the city, we tried to get in touch with Veronika again, to find out later that she fell asleep and didn't wake up in time to call back. Most of the day was exploring, chilling out, and asking for directions. We also went to the Sigmund Freud museum in Bergasse 19, where he and his family actually lived.

I'll post photos when I steal them from Mittens.

On Friday morning we took a train back to the airport and flew to Hannover. Most people we both talked to about going to Hannover just asked "why?" but I really enjoyed the city. The Hauptbahnhof (main train station) looks almost exactly like the Bremen Hauptbahnhof, which looks exactly like a small version of the Berlin Hauptbahnhof, so I think the Germans found a design that worked and stuck with it. Our next hostel was like walking into someone's home, which was adorable. The old man who lived upstairs didn't speak any English, but was really patient with us asking him to talk slowly. He took Mittens' passport in exchange for keys to the house.

We went to a museum later with exhibits on natural history and art. They were all in German, so I learned a bunch of words by figuring out the context of what each plaque was about. It was cool, even though I didn't understand much very thoroughly. The area of the city where we found the museum is where the Rathaus (I giggle a little each time I type that) is, so we went in, and they have three models of Hannover, one in 1945 right after the war, one in the 1600s, and one in the present day. Judging by the model of 1945, Hannover was devastated by the war. I'll post photos, again, once I get them from Mittens.

I was struck by the inconsistency of a lot of the architecture in Hannover. There were several very modern looking buildings close together, oddly shaped and covered in glass, juxtaposed with very ancient buildings like the Rathaus. Walking down the street felt a little like going through time portals.

That evening we went to a Turkish restaurant, where I tried lamb for the first time. They also gave us an amazing dessert, the name of which I need to find out so I can get it again. The restaurant was family owned and small - and all the people working there seemed to be related. Our waitress was really sweet, and we asked her to sit with us and chat, and she insisted that she couldn't because she was working, but she loitered around our table and talked to us anyway. I smoked cherry-flavored hookah for the first time, and then cappuccino. The cook, who I think is also the waitress's dad, put weird Turkish hats on us and took photographs.

Mittens went out clubbing on later that night, but I wasn't feeling it, so I resisted heavily and went to bed early.

Saturday was mostly just hanging out - we were lazy in the morning, walked around, took photos, shopped, had giant pretzels, etc. We met an Australian school principle on a bench of the street and chatted with her quite a bit. She was traveling for 2 months, and she had interesting commentary on British people, of whom she is not particularly fond. When I'm middle aged, I'm going to talk to college students on benches and be cool and intellectual, too. Shortly after I met a saleswoman while I was shopping for perfume, who asked me if I needed help, we started talking, etc, and she asked where I was from, because I'm obviously not a native German speaker. I told her I was from NY but living in Croatia, etc, and she lit up and said she was Croatian, and gained 10 friendly points. She seemed really excited, even though I don't even speak Croatian. I got to say 'dragomir' which you say when you meet someone, I think. She gave me a kind of weird look, so I might be wrong about that.

I justified my excessive expenditures on clothing/makeup/perfume in Hannover by asserting that I don't shop in the US, because I don't like the styles and stuff on sale there. So if I don't shop in Germany, I'll lose my chance until the next time I'm there. It's a stretch - but somewhat believable. Also, I NEEDED the shoes, because my old ones were hurting my feet.

Saturday we smoked hookah AGAIN, because why not? The bartender was from Kurdistan, and seemed to really enjoy that I was "Americana!" I felt special. We sat outside and smoked and drank colorful cocktails and watched people going by.

Hannover is the most bike-friendly place I've ever been, and Mittens tells me Belgium is even moreso. There are special traffic lanes and lights for people on bicycles, and they ding little bells at you if you walk in the bicycle lanes. I was impressed. Hannover also has an "emissions zone" where vehicles are given classifications based on their pollution emissions, and forbidden if they are too gross. Fines are pretty hefty, so I hear. Go Hannover!

Continuing the vein of random things I noticed, people obey the little signs that light up telling you can/can't cross the street. Consider New York - where those signals are merely suggestions, and if the closest speeding cab is at least 10 meters away, there is time to cross. Hannoverians dutifully stand on the curb until the light changes, despite any complete lack of traffic. It was weird.

In general, I prefered Hannover to Wien. Wien seems to have more stuff going on, but was too large for comfort. I also find it much easier to understand German German as opposed to Austrian German, which I'm told is similar to British English versus American English. I was surprised by how much of my German came back, considering I haven't really spoken it for almost a year. It was a nice change to being in Croatia, because every time I speak to someone in English here, I feel guilty for not being able to speak Croatian. In Germany I can communicate in their language. People don't usually immediately switch to English or ask which language they should use, which makes me think that either my German is not that terrible, or they don't have any mercy for non-German speakers. Either is fine with me.

It was a great weekend. I'm glad to be back, however. Dubrovnik is my new comfort zone, and I was surprised to find myself missing it.

Study < Abroad

2008-04-27T21:19:00.002+02:00

I've never had quite this unfocused a quarter since I have been at RIT (or any subset thereof). That's not strictly true, but let's consider the academic side of things.

XML and PLC have started to become much more demanding, what with multi-part assignments due each week and deadlines for a project in each class coming up. I have one more presentation to do on RSS.

I've gone back and forth between the extremes of wanting to do as well as I can in the classes I'm taking and then conceding that I'm going to fail miserably in the interest of running around Europe. I think I've reached somewhere in the middle, due in part to a few stern words from Axel on my excessive intake of Abroad and neglect of Study. This is going to make my weekdays very busy, because every weekend until I leave is now booked.

This Wednesday I'm flying to Vienna to meet a friend from RIT who is on co-op in Belgium, Nitin, fondly known as Mittens. We'll spend a couple days there, then fly to Hannover, and then I'll head back to Dubrovnik and he'll go back to Belgium. I have days off of school for International Labor Day, which I didn't know existed. At RIT one forgets that there are federal holidays, let alone international ones.

Weekend after I'll be with the RIT folks in Bosnia. Weekend after that I'll be with Nikola in Zagreb. Weekend after that I'm heading back to the states.

Now that I've just typed that, my previously mentioned "somewhere in the middle" seems like it has a distinct disinclination to Study. Hm.

I can rationalize this: I don't know when I'll be in Europe again. The cost and logistics of a flight to Vienna/Zagreb/Hannover are significantly easier to manage from Dubrovnik than from New York.

Speaking of traveling, yesterday I spent the day with the CS group in Montenegro, which was amazing. I have never seen geographical formations like there are on the Dalmation Coast and it's even more impressive in Montenegro than in the parts of Croatia that I've seen. I was expecting to find Montenegro very similar to Croatia, but as soon as we crossed the border it became evident that they're very different. The buildings seem much more run-down, but in between a lot of decrepit looking structures, there would often be some fancy looking establishment sticking out like a sore thumb. Only without the negative connotation of that expression.

Part of the trip involved a steep and zig-zagging drive up and over a mountain on the coast. Any preconceived notions I have about road safety were beaten to death as we zoomed around hairpin turns on a road with no guardrails that really should have been one-way. We saw cows sitting almost in the road. Cows. In the road. Later there were goats and chickens.

We drove through a handful of tiny little villages on the top of this mountain in landscape that reminded me of The Secret of Roan Inish. And I thought I came from a rural town. It made me wonder - how do their restaurants stay in business when people have to drive for half an hour up a scary road to get there? Where do the kids go to school? Where do the people work? Who collects the garbage?

I'll write more later, but I have to pick Brad's brain on How to Use Keys to Validate a Sudoku Solution for XML.

Discourse on Being the Newcomer and Short-Stayer

2008-04-22T00:55:00.006+02:00

If you've talked to me in the last month, you've basically already read this blog entry. It occurred to me that a lot of the conversations I've been having are probably the type of thing that the CS Department would be interested in seeing here.

It took about a month and a half for me to stop feeling like an outsider at ACMT. I've found students there to come off as rather judgmental and unfriendly, and in retrospect, I probably gave the same impression, which is why for the first half of the quarter I felt like the new kid in middle school. Now I can expect to walk outside for a cigarette with the rest of the college and find at least one person I know to talk to.

If I could do this again, I would try to change a few things.
a.) I would study Croatian before arriving. The "American" part of ACMT doesn't extend beyond the language of instruction and general teaching style (as far as I can tell). I feel pretty alien when I can't even read the graffiti on the desks I sit at. I look like an outsider as it is - I have short hair that I rarely bother to style, I don't wear makeup unless I'm feeling particularly boring, I don't wear a skirt and sexy leather jacket to class, and *gasp* I carry a bookbag to school. Not speaking the language seems like a reason to talk about me from two feet away.
b.) I would not travel in a pack of RIT students. (This one is hard to avoid, since when we got here I didn't know anybody else, and I didn't know where I was going most of the time, so I couldn't just head off by myself. On top of that, I was feeling like the new kid! I didn't want to abandon the comfort of my circle of nerds carrying laptops!) I imagine we were very difficult to approach as a group, because only a few of the more adventurous ACMT students made friends with us before we started to break down into subgroups.
c.) Be very prepared to not fit in. Going from somewhere where I feel extremely comfortable to somewhere where I don't know anyone, don't speak the language and look different was a shock. It's not that I was expecting everything to go smoothly - I wasn't really expecting anything in particular.

Outside of the RIT students I'm traveling with, I have met possibly one or two people that I will stay in contact with. Plenty that I can run into and talk with or meet for coffee, and one in particular that I see every day, but no really close friends. For a while I felt kind of disappointed by this lack of new connections, but after considering that all the people I consider really close friends took many months to years to get to that point, it doesn't seem as disappointing as at first thought. Additionally, part of me is emotionally preparing to leave, and not allowing some friendships to deepen.

I've heard it said that people who are bilingual end up being not especially proficient in either language, while people who are monolingual speak their one language better than bilingual people speak either language. I'm finding this to be true. This is going to sound really pretentious, but, when I'm with my Croatian friends who speak English as a second language, I filter my vocabulary slightly, because a couple of times I've used a word or two that my ESL friends don't know, which makes me look, well, pretentious. I've always had a general feeling of inadequacy for not speaking more than one language fluently, but now I'm starting to appreciate being monolingual. I still should have studied Croatian.

I looked in the RIT course catalog for a course in Croatian...and it doesn't exist. As languages go, it isn't as practical as Spanish or Chinese, but RIT has had a secret college in Croatia for over 10 years, and they don't offer the language?! Perhaps I'll raise the issue when I get back. Or next time I need to procrastinate.

Which I'm doing now. Back to work, or possibly bed.

Groovy Haskell Resource

2008-04-15T01:29:00.002+02:00

I found a (somewhat abandoned?) blog on here with some really basic Haskell lessons, which for me was a good thorough review of stuff I may or may not have already learned, but should have at any rate.

Learn Haskell.

The more I learn about Haskell, the more I like it. The more I learn about XML, the more I want to do something else.

AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH

2008-04-15T00:58:00.002+02:00

Dear Roommates,

When you leave the refrigerator door open when you drink from the milk/juice carton or just gaze at the food inside not actually searching for anything, it makes me want to stab you. Yes, this is one of my weirder idiosyncrasies, but PLEASE WHAT THE FUCK WHY IS IT SO HARD TO CLOSE THE DOOR. THE POLAR BEAR GETS OUT. AND DON'T GET ME STARTED ON WASTING ENERGY.

I can't just say this out loud because the last time I tried Ian threw a shit fit at me.

This is my only problem with you guys. I can even forgive the water all over the bathroom floor every time one of you takes a shower. But the refrigerator. I can't handle that.

Love,
Leah

Major Waffling

2008-04-13T19:04:00.002+02:00

So as is probably evident from previous blog posts, the pace of life I'm living here is pretty different than at RIT. I get up, I have coffee, I hang about, and I don't worry about stuff. At RIT, I'm always worried about deadlines, being on time, getting stuff done, etc etc and I didn't realize how unpleasant it is to live like that until I came here. It helps that here I'm taking only 12 credits and not working, but I like not having cortisol levels that are through the roof.

I don't want to go back to that life, I don't think.

I've known for a little while that although I enjoy computer science, I have no particular aptitude for it, and my perception is that I have to work harder for the same grades than many of my friends do. Does it get any easier? Will I have a magic moment where all of the sudden, something clicks, and I stop feeling stupid all the time? I should probably change my major, but I can't think of anything else I can do that I can pass off as a career. Perhaps computational math. But I'm really stubborn, and I picked CS and I want to stick with it, just to prove I can. Which is a stupid reason to stay in a major that is too much work.

Linguistics? I like learning languages, and I like understanding people, and language is so closely related to that, so it seems like maybe something I could get into. But I have heavily invested 2 years of my life and thousands of dollars in something totally different. I don't want to consider losing that investment, even as an option.

Axel has asked me several times is the reason I'm behind in class is because I party too hard, but I really just don't get the stuff he's teaching. I could spend all my time studying, but I don't want a career where so much constant effort is necessary. I like learning, but it shouldn't be something I feel frantic about all the time.

I don't know what to do. :(

Leah-In-Dubrovnik Lexicon

2008-04-04T16:00:00.006+02:00

Old town - The oldest part of Dubrovnik. Made of white rocks and orange clay rooves. You'll recognize it on the map. It's surrounded by a wall that tourists like to walk around.

Babin Kuk - A suburb, I guess. Has a lot of hotels. Literal translation: Grandma's hip.

Lapad - Another suburb.

Gruz - Another suburb, by the harbour.

Tommy - Supermarket

Revelin - Croatian bar/club

Fresh - Very chic bar, mostly filled with foreigners. Often bar-tended by an ACMT student affectionately known as Gaga, who is pretty awesome, even though I've only spoken to her a few times.

Fuego - Supposedly a Latin club, but there's no Latin music.

Dubrava - Coffee shop and restaurant. I have coffee here much too frequently.

Art Cafe - Conveniently located near ACMT, but they have Lavazza sugar packets, which is a company owned by McDonalds, which is kind of a turnoff.

Ploce Gate - one of the main entrances of the city

Pile Gate - the other main entrance to the city

Responsibility, lol.

2008-04-04T15:00:00.000+02:00

So earlier this week I had coffee with Brad, Tom, Chris and Brana, a recent ACMT graduate involved in the marketing program. Brana wanted to know if we were studying anything that could be used to benefit ACMT, and now I've gotten involved in setting up a blogging system on the ACMT website for a few professors to use. Fortunately, Tom has stolen some code from WordPress to use on his website, so he has a head start and can make me look more intelligent by association.

Last night was exciting, and consisted of a couple drinking games and a fairly large group of people at Katarina and Dina's apartment. I'm not sure exactly what happened, but a lot of people filtered out around midnight or something, and then it was just me, Kara, Teo and Katarina, and her landlords called to tell us to be quiet. She had a little emotional meltdown and we left the apartment to wander in the direction of old town, where the rest of the group may have disappeared to. Teo disappeared and this morning couldn't remember where he'd been, but the 3 of us girls may have gotten in some strange guy's car and gotten a ride to the old town, where we proceeded to stumble down ~15,000 stairs.

We went to Revelin for about 10 seconds and then left, I'm not sure why. On our way out of the Pile Gate, Teo reappeared in a swerving and unsteady manner and we made it back to my apartment and filled up all the sofas, and in Teo's case, the floor.

Going home and not being able to legally drink is going to be some serious culture shock.

The CS Department emailed to get permission to publish a link to my blog on their website. I guess that's okay, as long as I'm not expected to censor myself more than I already do. My mother reads this, after all.

Later today I'm meeting Nikola at the Mediterranski Sajam, a festival with lots of people showing off their fancy Mediterranean food. He helped organize it, because he works for the Croatian Chamber of Economy, which obviously has a lot to do with food being given away in Babin Kuk.

One of these days I will post a list of names of the people I have met and summarize them, as well as a map with labels and stuff.

Exploration and Inquisition, but not of the Spanish Variety

2008-03-31T22:36:00.007+02:00

As of today, I live on Bourbon Street with Ian, Stacy, Chris and Kyle. Much better situation than our previous place - awesome landlords, washing machine, legitimate internet. Best part? PIANO.

I tried to explain to a friend from home what the pace of life is like here. He asked me "but we get coffee here too..." which means I was obviously not communicating well. I go to class now and then, and afterwards I meet someone for coffee. We sit outside, smoke, sip lukewarm instant coffee (which is all frothy and not what I expected from instant coffee) and talk and smoke. I mentioned smoking twice because there are two parts of that for every other thing in the list.

I'm mildly concerned that when I go back to RIT, I'll have no work ethic left to speak of. I'm spending money like I can't believe, considering my current source of income in student loans. In our new apartment I plan to buy food separate from the group to force myself to be aware of how much I'm spending on food. That way I can ensure I am spending the least possible amount to still be eating healthily, thereby justifying a greater expenditure on essentials like vodka. I mean what.

On Saturday night I went out to Revelin, a club near the Ploce gate, with Nikola, Ian and two of Nikola's friends, Ana and Maja (pronounced Maya). It was completely packed, and somehow we ended up with a table on the second story loft thing, which had much fewer people, leaving room for crazy drunken dancing. To make a long story short, I took the bus back from old town at 6:30 in the morning, and at 9 met half my Environmental Science class to climb that little hill overlooking Dubrovnik. Napoleon's army built a zig-zagging road up the front of it, and our professor, Stasa, led the expedition straight to the top. Most of the Croatian students were wimps, having gotten a head start on destroying their cardiovascular systems. The point of the trip was to see the damage that was done last summer by a fire, and the reforesting effort underway, which Stasa believes has a very low chance of working, what with the planting of trees before building up an ecological support structure other than rocks.

I had another little field trip to Axel and Carol's house with Stacy, where we were fed soup and lectured on why functional programming is the way of the future. It's still a lot to wrap my head around, but I can see why it's up there with xkcd and Mohandas Ghandhi in terms of Awesome.

I have some questions without answers, and I'm going to start keeping track of them, because they occur to me at random times, never around people who could tell me.

1. Why can't I buy sliced bread? I want my bread sliced and plastic bagged, not fresh baked and tasty, damn it.

2. Why have I not seen a homeless person here? Does Croatia not have homeless people?

3. Someone get me some peanut butter. Nutella is awesome, but it's not an adequate replacement.

4. Does the National Bureau of Ugly Clothing stop shipments of Crocs before they enter the country, or did all of Croatia get together and decide no one, ever, in the history of the Balkans, is allowed to wear them.. ?

I'll add to this list in future posts.

Poor Neglected Blog. pet

2008-03-21T22:36:00.008+01:00

I haven't updated for a while, obviously, which means I have no reference besides my own brain or a recap of what's happening in my life, and that's no very reliable, so bear with me as I try to figure out what's been going on.

1. We all went to the Dean's List Dinner, which is only for students who have achieved a 3.4 in the previous quarter, which I definitely did not manage to do, but by virtue of showing up and looking and behaving foreign, I was invited. It was fun - the food was free and good, and I tried calamari, even though I generally don't eat seafood. We, the computer science entourage, stood around in a pack and contemplated how difficult we most likely are to approach as a group. I keep imagining a well-meaning native approaching us, overhearing some snippet of conversation about hash tables, and turning to flee.

There was an interesting conversation regarding our status as a separate class of ACMT students, and the problem is that they don't understand that we're public, and as Brad pointed out, "You can access our methods!" Further discussion ended with a change in visibility, and Kyle proclaiming, "It's okay guys! We're protected!"

2. Today we went to Ston, which is pronounced like Stone, which confused me, because in my head stone = rock, which is a string, which is obviously immutable. Every time I try to readjust my understand of stone to a town, I get a core dump, and then I forget what I'm doing.

Anyway, the town has a lot of walls and salt flats. We spent the entire day there, which was too much time for me, but because it's Good Friday, the church had a special mass and then all along the main streets of the town were little piles of sawdust doused in petrol, which were set on fire as a procession descended from the church into the town at the end of mass. We had an interesting discussion about how that practice of lighting stuff on fire in the street would not fly anywhere in the US.

On this trip, I was finally forced to admit just how impractically I packed while trying desperately to pack practically. (I need to buy a coat, because it's colder than I expected, and it'll cost twice what it would at home.) I spent a lot of time huddling on part of the wall with Stacy, Ian, Chris, Axel, Mrs. Axel, and Brad while waiting for everything to go up in flames.

I exercised the creative part of my brain today by identifying cloud formations, and I saw a corpus callosum, a tetrahedron, and a human heart. Ian and Stacy saw dragons, and somehow this sparked a conversation about raptors and xkcd.

3. I've been hanging out with some pretty productive people. Aside from the excessive output of photos they produce, there is a new cooking show online, Cooking with Teo, which is sure to be just as a successful as the original Drawing with Teo. I have taken it upon myself to assist Teo in developing more recipes. He's working on a tagline, perhaps something along the line of "reinventing simple food." Suggestions?

I'm going to add links on the side menu thing to more photo galleries and blogs.

In further praise of the people I'm living with, there is laughter almost all the time, except for times like now, when we're all sitting still, with the whir of laptops filling the otherwise silent room.

4. As a personal goal, I've decided to lighten up just a little bit. Things like "coffee" here entail sitting for at least an hour whilst consuming lukewarm beverages and chain smoking have been very difficult for me, because I am slightly frenetic at the best of times, and spending an entire hour, yes, an hour in one place doing nothing but conversation has been somewhat stressful. Also, in the soon-to-be-mentioned rush of meeting new people, I'm afraid the impression I give is not what I'd like to be impressing. If I were meeting me for the first time, I'd probably think I was some sort of asocial, uninteresting weirdo, possibly due to my ridiculously dry sense of humor, inability to not relate everything to math (inclusive) or (see what I mean! I distinguish inclusive and exclusive or) programming and my overarching belief that the foreigners I meet are so much cooler than me that if I opened my mouth, they'd realize how little they wanted to talk to me. I've spotted several flaws in this pattern of my behavior, so I'm working on modifying my model of making friends.

Speaking of making friends, I have met so many people in bars and dinners and classes that the hash table in my mind that connects names to faces is broken, also due in part to the unusualness of these names, relative to my understanding and experience. Earlier this week, I was in ACMT and two girls on the stairs gave me a really warm hello and asked who I was, and I had NO IDEA who they were. I returned the warmth and enthusiasm, and then started worrying about how I was going to eventually have to ask them how I knew them.

As a final note, I sincerely apologize to the people who read this and aren't programmers. I promise a lot of it is funny.

Innovation, CS Style

2008-03-15T00:52:00.001+01:00

So because we've had a weird laundry situation, Brad, Stacy and I all did our laundry in the bathtub, and then had to hang it out to dry.

Brad rigged up this clothes line out of a laptop lock, an ethernet cable, and coaxial from the television.

Did anyone doubt that Brad was the shit? Because there you are.

Making Friends

2008-03-15T00:10:00.006+01:00

I'm normally not very shy, but here I've felt so out of my element that it's taken until now to actually meet people. I think once other ACMT students started seeing us at bars and stuff, they realized we were cool, and spoke to us. (Cool is a relative term.)

I bought a pair of jeans today with 130 dollars. This was kind of traumatizing, since, as Teo articulated, "I'm not used to seeing prices on my clothing in triple digits." Zoran has explained to me that people will go hungry here so they can afford the clothing they want, so it makes sense that stores charge so much, because apparently people are willing to pay high prices.

The going hungry to buy clothes thing probably contributes to the overwhelming tend of being skinny. (That and chain-smoking.) When I was shopping for jeans, I asked the sales woman to help me with sizing, because I can't even understand the system in the US, so I'm not about to take on a new one, and she handed me a pair of pants that I might have been able to squeeze into when I was 12. I had to explain that I am American-sized.

It's not just clothes, either. I went to a perfumerie (??), and the mascara I normally buy at home, which is about 15 dollars, was 185 kn, about 40 dollars. I fled from the store in distress under the disapproving glare of the two sales associates.

Let's not even mention the cost of text messaging.

On an unrelated subject, I immediately noticed that when along with the other RIT students here, I am one of the only people bringing a bag to class. (I don't bring a lot, just my laptop.) Katarina, one of the first locals to speak to us, explained that nobody takes notes, so there's no need to bring student-y things like notebooks/laptops or god forbid backpacks to class. I keep thinking about RIT where it seems that everyone is at all times either toting a computer or a giant portfolio.

Programming Jokes = teh funny

2008-03-13T09:53:00.002+01:00

Waiting for class to start.

Brad: I love that the floors in this building are indexed at zero. It makes me feel like I'm in a...

Tom: An array!

Leah: This isn't a building, it's a data structure.

XML and PLC

2008-03-12T00:10:00.001+01:00

Also, I need to mention that following and understand Axel's lectures is probably a lot like clinging to the outside of a speeding train.

Emo Post Number 1

2008-03-11T23:32:00.003+01:00

I really wish I was more prepared for this trip. It's not like I had the time or energy for it last quarter, but I should have studied Croatian. I should have facebooked some people ahead of time to make friends. I should have found out that I was supposed to bring pants that weren't bootcut.

/ded

2008-03-10T21:03:00.004+01:00

All this walking might be something that wouldn't make me feel like napping on the sidewalk if it was less like hiking.

Not hiking in the traditional sense of climbing through a natural, peaceful landscape with wildlife and birdcalls, but with buses that try to kill pedestrians and hoards (possibly a hyperbole) of stray cats instead of the occasional squirrel or chipmunk.

Today Zoran told me that my name in Croatian means fox. This gives my entire life a greater sense of meaning, and my everyday actions purpose. Perhaps I will devise a clever blog title using this knowledge.

Today I trekked around the old city with Ian and Zoran, and we strayed off the Stradun into more residential areas. (And up a lot of steps, and we wonder why Europeans are thin.) It keeps occurring to me that to live within the walls must be very similar to living in a museum. I said this as two natives were passing, and Zoran told me they repeated what I said. /n00b

Stacy and I discussed this evening how much being here feels like vacation. It's coming to an end of sorts, with the start of classes, and I feel like I should be getting back to RIT.

Cultural Differences

2008-03-10T12:29:00.006+01:00

I'm at the ACMT now with Brad, chilling in a little student area, where we are the only students. I've been meaning to blog for a day or two now, and blog tidbits have been floating around in my head.

I've noticed a lot of things that are different here than what I'm accustomed to in the United States. We have all been told several times to leave our American standards behind, and I'm doing my best, but I think it's worth keeping them in mind for the purpose of cross-cultural examination.

1. Liability doesn't seem to be a problem here. I went for a walk yesterday with Photo Zoran, Stacy, Brad, Tom and Anna along a path that skirts the water, starting at the beach, and then looping back close to our apartments. It was at points very close to the water, and at other points several meters above the water with nothing between us and wet rocks other than a nasty fall. Did we see railings? No, because Europeans aren't stupid enough to blame everyone else for their mistakes. I asked Zoran if he'd ever heard of a non-American suing McDonald's for giving them hot coffee, and he said no.

Similarly, Ian, Brad, Stacy and I walked around the dock in the old part of the city, and if I were to slip in the rain, I'd go right into the bay. I don't even know if I'd be allowed to sue the pants off Croatia, but it would be expected at home.

2. Restaurants are not flexible and waitstaff do not behave subserviently. Two days ago I was trying to order a side dish of pasta to share with Don, we experience an exchange like this:

Leah-Don: Side order of Gnocchi please. Do you have pesto sauce?

Waiter: If you want sauce, you can order the main dish.

Leah-Don: We want a side order. Can we get sauce?

Waiter: If you want sauce, you can order the main dish.

Leah-Don: No sauce?

Waiter: Main dish.

In the US, the conversation would have gone like this:

Leah-Don: Side order of Gnocchi please. Do you have pesto sauce?

Waiter: Yes! Of course! We don't normally serve side dishes with a sauce, but we're willing to bend over backwards to meet your needs! In addition to pesto, we also have [option A], [option B] and [option C]! Which would you like?

Leah-Don: *overwhelmed by possibilities*

3. Hot chocolate != Hot cocoa. Hot cocoa is what I am used to (hot chocolate milk) and hot chocolate is hot pudding.

4. People get coffee in slow motion. When I grab coffee, it takes 15 minutes, including conversation, and then I have a cup to go. When locals grab coffee, it takes an hour, despite the two tablespoons of coffee that are served.

5. Sweatshirts DO NOT exist in Croatia. Everyone wears fancy clothes and has fancy hair and struts around in fancy boots. I feel like a n00b everywhere I go.

Our apartment looks out onto water and a pretty bridge and mountains. SRSLY.

2008-03-06T21:14:00.000+01:00

Today was eventful. By today, I mean the sequence of hours I have been awake, because I've lost track of actual days in the time zones I've crossed.

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.

We need a group name, guys.

2008-03-03T00:19:00.000+01:00

So my schedule for this coming quarter is pretty sweet.

In short: School -> Cherry Hill, NJ -> home (upstate NY). I was in NJ because my dad's sister has liver cancer, but I haven't heard anyone say the word "cancer" all week. Death remains more ubiquitous than even the iPod these days, which is in my estimation on almost the same level as cancer. Given the obvious relationship between my family members' deaths and cancer, I have a hard time wrapping my head around why everyone is so shell shocked by her prognosis. I said goodbye yesterday, which my mom was significant. I think the time my aunt took 67923948753 cousins shopping and out for pizza during one of our more catastrophic family reunions was far more significant.

There was a lot of fuss earlier this winter about whether I should leave the country while waiting for this death, and I think the conclusion was reached that since I'm not dying, and I've had the chance to say goodbye, it's reasonable to expect that I won't be flying home for her funeral. Funerals make death seem tragic, but given the current circumstances, it's the continuation of her life that's tragic.

So, the last two paragraphs were pretty dreadful. Sorry about that. In trip-related news, I've been obsessively checking everyone else's blogs for updates, but most of them are looking rather neglected.

I also think we should think of a group name for the 7 CS people, to distinguish ourselves from the photo people. Yes, we could stick with "the 7 CS people" but it's too many syllables, and this is our chance to make our own acronym! Ideas?

Preparation for Departure

2008-02-19T07:16:00.000+01:00

So this is my assignment for studying in Dubrovnik with the computer science department at RIT. I have to keep a blog. Being assigned a blog is exciting in a very hip cyberculture kind of way.

I'm not clear on what I'm supposed to put here, so I'll include pretty much everything, and then edit it and take out the questionable content for the next generation of Croatia-bound CS students.

I leave on March 5. It's currently week 10, and I'm scrabbling to get all the necessary riff-raff out of the way so I can leave AND not fail all my classes in a prolonged fit of giggling, excitement and insanity induced by the promise of traveling in a living blob of people making C++ jokes and taking Axel classes and jumping off of stuff.