New Blog

Obviously I'm not posting to this one anymore, largely because I'm now in Sarajevo. check it out at scribblingsfromsarajevo.blogspot.com . I promise to post more often... plus now we have two people posting instead of one.

Pics from Istria

Here's a link to a web album with pictures from Istria. We went to Hum (the World's Smallest City), Motovun and Porec. It was gorgeous... but mostly I just rode on the bus all day.

http://picasaweb.google.com/jwhulsey/HumMotovunAndPorec

Pictures from my trip to Sarajevo

Here's a link to some pictures from Sarajevo! http://picasaweb.google.com/jwhulsey/EasterInSarajevo

I had a wonderful time and am thrilled about living there next year. I'll write more later!

Food

Food and drink has been a little bit of a challenge here in Zagreb. With the exception of not knowing yet how to get my deposit back on my bottles of water (the folks in the little grocery in the dorm are very unfriendly and threatening), things have fallen into place… finally. First of all, there’s no kitchen in the dorm. There is a place that is labeled “Kitchen”, but it has two hot plates and a sink as well as enough counter space to slaughter three cows. That would be fine except that I don’t have any way to keep things cool. I’ve periodically cooked with a friend of mine, but that’s been the extent of it. That means that I am reliant on the “Menza”… the cafeteria.

The great thing about the Menza is that the prices are already pretty cheap (filling meal for 4-5 bucks) and I get a 75% discount with my student card. It’s hard to beat paying a dollar a meal for soup, salad, meat, potato, bread, and sometimes a dessert or piece of fruit. There are, however, a few problems.

First: Figuring out what you want to eat/what you are, in fact, eating. There is almost always a line to get the food, but it is situated such that it is difficult to see what is on offer that meal or even more importantly, what is the special that day (which makes a big price difference). This information is displayed on a tiny piece of paper after the bread and before the dessert as you get in line. That means that you have about 5 seconds to read it as you are moving from grabbing the bread (just slices piled in a basket) and deciding whether you want dessert and soup (which for me depends a lot on whether it is already included in the price for the special). Of course it’s in Croatian and my food vocabulary isn’t all that great. My first trip to the Menza I had no idea what I was doing and picked up some calamari and French fries… which wasn’t the special. Only later did I have time to read the little piece of paper and figure out that the way the specials work. I’ve had some nasty surprises (like big chunks of liver and the nasty soy lasagna), but fortunately I can eat almost anything. It is also fortunate that the first problem is partially alleviated by the second:

Second: The food is basically always the same. The formula for a menza meal is meat+potatoes+bread+soup (mostly broth)+dessert/fruit+salad (mostly cabbage with oil and vinegar dressing). The meat might be chicken or wiener schnitzel or cordon bleau or mystery nuggets or liver or calamari. The potatoes are either French fries or mashed potatoes (mashed… no milk… more like boiled and crushed… sometimes with a little spinach). The bread is always the same. The soup is usually a meat broth with some unidentifiable bready things floating in it. There is some variety in dessert options, but not too much. Suffice to say, after a few days of the meat and potatoes thing, I’m dying for anything with a sauce (to be fair, they have had pasta… twice).

Third: There are just some weird things. The drink choices are usually boxed chocolate milk (ick… and kind of expensive), some kind of boxed juice drink (also ick and even more expensive) and drinkable yogurt (which is my usual choice. At least it isn’t loaded with sugar). They also have French fries every day and NO KETCHUP! It is my belief that French fries (especially mediocre ones) exist only to deliver ketchup from the plate to the mouth! I’d take my own ketchup, but that would require a refrigerator. So, I usually go for the crushed potatoes.

Fourth: Usually the greenest thing on my plate is the cabbage salad… which is white. I had hopes that eating in a cafeteria with a daily special would help me a bit to eat more healthily and control my portions. It has helped with portion control (I resist the urge to copy most people at the menza who eat two full meals and 4 or 5 boxed milk/juice drinks… all for only 3 dollars), but rarely is there something that really qualifies as a vegetable. Every time they have spinach I grab it, no matter what meat is on the plate with it.

On the plus side, if I’m careful, I can eat for a week for less than 20 dollars.

Pics from Graz

I've uploaded some pictures from my trip to Graz this weekend!

http://picasaweb.google.com/jwhulsey/GrazMarch07

Pictures a bit screwy

The picture uploads are a bit screwy, so here's a link to the web album. I think this will be the way I do it in the future.

http://picasaweb.google.com/jwhulsey/PicsFromMyZagrebWalk

Yet another picture!

Here's a picture from the Upper City down over the Lower City.

more pics

This is a shot from the Upper City down on the Kaptol including the Cathedral.

Some Pics from Zagreb!

Here are some Pics from Zagreb. The first is Taken from the train station. I think that is an art museum of some kind in the background, but it's under construction. I tried to get both the blooming tree and the statue... mostly the picture just looks slanted.

The second picture is of the main square downtown.

The third picture is a shot down the street that leads from the main square up to the Upper City.

My nemesis

And here's my Nemesis, the night club across the street. There is something lound going on there 5 nights a week until 3:30 A.M. I have a suspicion that it is a sport complex with a couple of clubs. I also can't explain why there is a constant stream of people heading over there... knowing these people it is to buy cigs.

Thank goodness for earplugs!

My Room

Here's my room... or at least the half of it that is mine. As you can see, there's room for the bed and a desk. The part of bed and desk you can see at the bottom belongs to my roomie, Jean.

Still here

Hey there! I’m finally posting a few pictures… although nothing too attractive. Just my room, etc. I made my trip to the foreigner police to get my visa. It’s a frustrating experience in any country. I spent much of the day navigating a building with no signs and wondering whether I was supposed to take a number (I wasn’t) or shove my way up to a counter and shove my documents in front of someone (That’s what worked). I’m pretty sure it only worked because I had a letter from a government ministry. It’s the first foreigner police office I’ve every been to where most of the workers were women. In Austria and Switzerland they were always fat, surly bureaucrats. Mine were women who scowled until you started speaking Croatian to them.

Yesterday I took an impromptu road trip down to a small town closer to the border with Bosnia. One of the girls in my class is from Sweden but has a lot of family here. It’s one of the areas damaged by the war. Her grandfather was shot before they burned the house down. It’s clear that they area still hasn’t recovered economically, as many of the houses haven’t been repaired.

Sick

I had a great day on Saturday wandering around Zagreb with Josh, a fellow American from IU. We wandered around the usual tourist locations, ate some local fare as well as some pizza and hung out at his place for a bit. He’s subletting a small apartment that is much, much nicer than where I live. He even has a television!!!! After meeting an Australian girl for dinner, we were planning on going out to a club…. They went… but I went home. I felt really awful and pretty much felt that way until Monday morning. I was violently ill on Saturday night and slept almost straight through from Saturday night until Monday morning. Now I feel better though.

I figure that it was something that I ate because I was so so sick and then felt better within a day or so. Josh thinks it was the Burek we ate while sitting in front of the church on top of the hill in Zagreb, taking in the city. Burek is a kind of flaky pastry filled with layers of pastry and cheese. I hope that’s not true, because they taste great. I also don’t think the Burek was it, because Josh ate it too, and my stomach is usually pretty resilient. My vote is on the pizza we ate for lunch. Mine had a bizarre sauce on it as well as sour cream. Strange stuff.

Great news!

I tried out my earplugs last night and they worked like a charm. I expect to be wearing them almost every night. I went to sleep at 10 (on a Friday night!) and didn’t wake at all until 7. I can’t tell you how much of a relief it is.

I have other great news! I found out yesterday that IREX has offered me a fellowship to do my dissertation research in Bosnia next year. That means that I’ll be back overseas next year! I don’t have to give up on graduate school!!!

It should say something about how tired I was that the earplugs went before the news about the fellowship!

My trip so far

My flight from Kansas City on Tuesday began with a child screaming… which pretty much sums up the entire trip. First there was the tantrum thrown by the kid made to give up his window seat because his brother’s car seat had to ride there. The tantrum hit a crescendo when his mother had to physically remove him from the window seat and continued until he was distracted by the possibility of banging his fists against the tray table attached to the back of my seat.

When I sat down in my aisle seat for the flight from Detroit to Amsterdam, I had the row to myself and no one was sitting in front of me. Unfortunately, they delayed the flight so that 65 people would board from a late flight. Among the late arrivals were half a dozen Indian women taking their newborn and infant children back to India to show the grandparents. If someone told me that there was some bizarre migration of Indian women and their children back to India every Febraury I would absolutely believe it. I learned a valuable lesson. When picking your seats for an intercontinental flight, do not pick the seats near the bulkheads that separate sections of the plane, because that’s where the basinets are located (and therefore the kids). For all of the babies, the flight was very pleasant. Northwest has an on-demand video system for every seat on the plane, so I was able to plug in my heavy duty headphones to block out the screaming. I watched two complete movies, including The Departed, both of which I wanted to see. It was a breeze.

Since arriving in Zagreb I’ve spent my time unpacking and taking care of all of the bureaucratic messes that always go with these trips: getting a visa, getting a student ID, finding classes, getting a bus pass. Despite feeling woefully unprepared, the process has gone very smoothly.

What has not gone smoothly is sleeping in my dorm. The dorm is massive and “students” clearly enjoy the entertainment options available to them. There has been some kind of event in the common area every night so far. That’s no problem. The problem is that there are also two night clubs across the street from my bedroom window. Between jet lag and the loud music until 3am, I have slept a total of 9 hours since leaving Kansas City on Tuesday (it is now Friday night). Last night I slept for an hour or so before the music started, then I was awake until 5:45, forty-five minutes before my alarm went off. Needless to say, today I invested in a pair of earplugs. Hopefully they succeed in keeping out the noise from tonight’s “Jagermeister party” and fail to get stuck in my ears.