lost.

I've been in Zagreb for about 2 weeks now, and to be honest, it has most certainly not gotten any easier. Words are still just letters jumbled together, and people are not as helpful when it comes to English as we were told. Example: tried to mail a package from the post office yesterday, took about 45 minutes and took much physical activity from hand motions and re-filling out forms that i screwed up the first time. I'm all about new experiences and languages, but such a drastic difference from the Switzerland I had become so accustomed to for the last 4 months to this part of Europe is pretty jolting, especially when I've got my final research paper and presentation to focus on.

Zagreb is...for lack of a better term...pretty ugly, but I was fortunate enough to go with a friend last weekend to the island of Brac to their family house. To begin, I get a phone call from her host dad on friday night telling (not asking) me that we are going to the coast on Saturday. And that we will leave at 4. AM. I should be ready at 3:45. So 11:30 pm and it's off to bed I go. Sure enough, 3:15 rolls around and at 3:40 my poor host mother calls me downstairs to say my ride is here. She sends me on my way with 2 sandwiches, 2 Bananas, 2 apples, and a bottle of Cedevita ("juice" as they call it, more like Airborne meets Emergen-C) and I get in the car, only to find 2 complete (non-english speaking) strangers in the front seat and Jenn Sloan nowhere in sight. I'm driven to a house and thankfully see Jenn come outside, soon learning that the man in the front seat was both her and my host dads' brother. This was just the beginning of our adventure.

I don't think I've ever been so scared of dying in my entire life. Bronco (Jenn's host dad) decided to take the scenic route through the mountains (us Swiss Alps natives call them more "hills"). The road was beautiful, but I think hairpin turns are an understatement. Aaaand there were no guardrails. Meantime, we heard screeching tires as we took the curves. Lanes were no object to Bronco, and as he told us (direct quote), when the speed limit says 50 km it really means 150. It was hard to sleep from the whiplash we were incurring but we kept our eyes shut for fear of what we'd see if we looked out the window. We finally arrive in Split, the city on the mainland where we catch the ferry to Brac and head straight to the ice cream shop. It was 9 am. After eating the ice cream and walking around for a bit, we walked (and ran) up to the ferry, only to arrive just as the gate was pulling away...leaving us 2 more hours to kill before the next one. Branco had told us not to worry about finishing our final projects because we would have all the free time in the world to work and do as we pleased, but we rather quickly found out this was false. In fact, we didn't see the beach the whole weekend.

After the hour-long ferry ride, we get off the boat and stand where the cars pull off. Bronco had joked about hitchhiking from the ferry to the house earlier. This was not a joke. We stood at the ferry entrance until every car had driven off, and after watching Bronco give pleading looks to every driver, we made our way to the bus station. Upon arrival to the completely unfinished house (sans electricity, sans water), we walked in, put our bags in the sawdust, and saw a twin mattress on the floor in the middle. We said nothing. Across the street, we met Bronco's friend who was a national champion of olive oil and also made his own wine, both of which we tried. Croatian wine is certainly not like Swiss wine, that's for sure. Also, people here have a tradition of putting water in their wine (although I'm not entirely convinced it's just because of the taste...more later). Coming up from the wine cellar into the garden, we saw 3 adorable baby lambs. Then, up from another basement comes a mad scientist man-long blue labcoat, black rubber boots, little round glasses, crazy white hair, AND A KNIFE IN HIS HAND. All we hear is, "he going to kill lamb for dinner, you watch?" Jenn, being a vegetarian and myself, being a sane human being, respectfully declined and ran away to the sound of the bleating lambs. I don't think I've ever been so close to becoming vegetarian in my life (but somehow I just couldn't do it...) Next, we were told to get in a car to go to a "surprise" for us (turns out the surprise was really someone else's birthday). We drive 20 minutes up the mountain, walk 20 minutes through a field (all the while getting NO ideas as to where we were being led-no civilization in sight), and come upon a little stone house with a fire in the garden and 4 old men sitting around the table. There was a whole lamb rosting on the spit and 4 bottles of wine on the table. The rest of the afternoon (and evening, the ordeal lasted about 6.5 hours...so much for free time) consisted of more old men (the total reached 16) telling us we were not drinking enough wine (pretty sure THIS is why they add the water...they'd been going since noon) and eating the salad that was on the table and the vegetables they made especially for us. With Jenn being vegetarian, she might as well have been an alien. These men simply could not wrap their minds around the fact that she didn't eat meat. It was just unheard of. Although we couldn't understand the conversation (which was probably a good thing, since Bronco told us much of it consisted of sex and dirty jokes...), the two words we learned to pick out quite easily were 'vegetarian' and 'american.' At one point, Jenn was even led into the yard, shown the grass, and told to eat.

Finally, at about 8 that night, we left the table, and one of the brothers got the keys. To DRIVE. A CAR. Again, fearing for our lives, we got in and fastened our seat belts. Except for there were none. It really is a miracle that we made it out of this weekend alive. The 3 brothers in the car were singing at the top of their lungs, laughing, cracking jokes, all the way home. We always felt obliged to laugh along even though we didn't understand most of them, even with translation, but we later learned from my host family that no one really gets Bronco's jokes...even in Croatian. We ended up sleeping in the beautifully remodeled house of my host family that was next door, and were on our way home again with a gasoline container full of olive oil in the trunk. What a weekend.

Getting back to Zagreb, the next week was spent entirely at the SIT office finishing papers and presentations. I must say, in each of the 22 hour-long project presentations, I think I learned more about public health than I had learned the whole semester (but that's an issue to be discussed in a strongly worded evaluation for SIT next week...). Being done with such an endeavor feels oddly liberating, and we spent the last weekend, all 22 of us (even Chip and Thomas made it...eventually) at the beach in Split, home of Diocletian's palace and beautiful Adriatic coastline. Our "hostel" really ended up being a 5 bed apartment with a kitchen for a few of us, and we cooked dinner and celebrated the end of the semester with everyone. I really have come to realize how lucky we got...according to directors and host parents alike, there has NEVER been a group that has gotten along as well as we have. Quite a feat for 22.