Croatian Explorations

As you may or may not know, I had the last week off of school.  Fall break came laden with expectations, as people went off to Stockholm, Dublin, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Barcelona, Rome, Naples, Istanbul, Sicily, the Cinque Terre, Madrid, Marrakesh.  Yeah, major cities or tourist destinations.  And our plans had started off big: we were going to get Balkans EuRail passes and head into Serbia, exploring Montenegro, Macedonia, Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania before heading home in only 10 days, in the ambitious way that plans always begin.

We then had everything fall through.  The flight we'd booked home from Bucharest?  Canceled.  The EuRail pass?  Impossible to get.  A week before fall break began, we had only a bus ticket to Novi Sad, Serbia, and big expectations.

Recap

Apologies for my slowness. But now that that's out of the way, I'll tell you about the past few weeks!  Munich for Oktoberfest was fabulous, and it was great to see my friend Jori, who I hadn't seen in months.

Then the 'rents and Greg invaded Prague.  They are the luckiest weather witches I have ever met.  Currently, it's 45 degrees F outside and cloudy.  It's been raining.  But while they were here?  In the 60s and sunny practically every day.  Why they insisted on stealing such beautiful weather for me, I don't know.  But I miss sunshine and 80 degree weather - I'm glad this semester is going to end with a beach Christmas!

So, the fam was here, and we had a lovely weekend of exploring Prague (hopefully, by now, their legs have recovered from walking literally the entire city).  Now, I'm being pulled down the drain that is mid-terms week.  This past weekend was spent vaguely studying and writing papers, but mostly sleeping - was feeling sick on Thursday and promptly took that as an excuse to sleep almost the entire day on Friday.  I needed a chill weekend, if nothing else than for preparation for the next few weeks.

A Man's Mall

So, while our relatively easy weekend was relaxing and totally necessary, all of us were ready to do something by the time this afternoon rolled around. So while some decided to go to a movie (in Arabic this time, not just with subtitles), I was among the group that felt a little more restless and didn't want to just go and sit in some theater. So Zuri, Fernando and I decided to try to find this art gallery mentioned in one of the guidebooks that has been sitting on our dining room table.

After poring over the map a bit, we figured out generally where the gallery was and headed over, getting helpful tips from a random Egyptian who assumed we were clueless tourists trying to get to the Egyptian Museum and getting dragged into a store when some of us tried to just buy a few post cards. Poor Zuri and Fernando just put up with it - they can both pass for Egyptian, but I'm pretty sure I'm the one that gives them away. But we found all the right streets and saw a sign and figured out which stairs to go up and discovered that the gallery...