Day 1-1.5

This has been one crazy trip to Croatia. We left OGC at 5:30pm to go to Ancona. We had three cars, two vans of students and one punto filled with one of the families from town. We were about 20 minutes out when we got a call. One of the kids had puked. The family ended up turning back to wait for the next boat to see if he felt better (from what I understand, the mother puked the next day so they will not be coming). We continued to head to the port of Ancona.

Once there, we received our bording passes and boarded the ferry for a 9 hour, over-night, boat ride. The plan was to, basically, find a spot to put our sleeping bags down and sleep where ever that happened to be. It ended up working pretty well. We found the one place on the deck that didn't have a bunch of lights and all crashed in the same place. This was nice because it would be a whole lot harder to mess with one of us without waking other people up as well. I slept pretty well but not as well as I would have if I had been in a bed.

We arrived in Split, Croatia at around 8am and went through customs. Then, we headed into town where we met up with an archologist tour guide. The first place we stopped was right on the coast. It was the spot where there is an upwelling of “smelly” sulfuric water. The fish were going crazy around it trying to get at whatever food that was living in the water. The next stop was the old palace area, which was basically the old town. There were crazy amounts of tourists but once we got out to the side streets it was nice. The whole place was gorgeous, by the way. After a coffee and snack break, we headed to the archeology museum. There were some really nice mosaics and they had a rediculous number of old coins. They were pretty awesome.

Once the tour was done we were give 100 kuna (about $20) and were let loose on the town to find lunch. Most of us stopped at a sea food place that was really pretty cheap and was right on the water. I got seafood risotto which had fish (not sure what kind) and mussels. It was surprisingly good. We headed back to the port to grab our ferry to Hvar (pronounce ho-ar, basically). Luckly this was only a two hour ferry. Half of us still ended up sleeping but at least some of us were able to watch what was going by and do some reading.

It was about 10 minutes from the port in Hvar to our bed and breakfast that Sandro's cousin owns. It is a really nice place. There is a hammock and hammock chair by where we have breakfast, all of the rooms have balconies with incredable views and there is even a cat. The beds are some of the most comfortable and they have comforters so they are warm as well. Hard to beat that.

After getting settled in quickly, we threw on our swimsuits and walked down to the beach (about 5 minutes away). I hope you are realizing that it is October and we were swimming for over an hour. The water was warm and the air was warm. It only got better because we ended up watching the sunset over the water while in the water (Oh and there were sea urchins in the water! How cool is that?). On our way back up to the hotel to clean up for dinner we passed by a group of kids that told us that it was too cold to swim and they actually threw something at us as we passed by. It was really bizarre.

We cleaned up and headed to dinner which was beef that tasted like saurbratten and there were mashed potatoes. It was almost like I was back home (not quite as good as home's though).

Day 2 in Croatia

Today we had a different archeologist show us around the island of Hvar. We saw a museum and some excavation sites. We knew that it was a pretty relaxed day when we didn't get lunch until 3 and did'nt leave the restaurant until after 4. We headed back to our hotel and just hung around for a little while before we decided to head out and into the main part of town. We did some shopping but mostly we just walked around at soaked evertything in. There was a play going on and it was in an amazing looking theater, I was kinda jealous. Dinner consisted of pretty much all fish except for the bread and the mashed potatoes.

Well, since that is basically the end of our day today and since I am falling alseep at the computer I think I should probably go to bed. Good night!