Hello friends. I'm going to start this blog by telling you what I'm going to talk about, talk about it, and then tell you that I talked about it. All loosely following the Webb Guide for Submitted Works. Maybe.. this probably won't happen actually, I don't start school for another two weeks. Jacob has already asked why week six is labeled "A New Hope" and that's because it reminded me of episode 6 and I also couldn't think of anything original.
The workweek was around typical. Jacob was grounding a vessel on a computer to simulate a big boat deploying a smaller boat from its stern. He describes it as "solving a dynamics problem with statics". Apparently, all you need to do to compensate for this is increase the weight of the vessel by 30%. Nate has been adding structure to the passenger sailing ship which it has been lacking for quite some time. This is coming just in time for the weight study that my mentor is conducting. I don't think he likes it because he's been using me as an excuse to not do work. I'm not complaining, the attention is glorious and we're friends on Facebook now. I've been reading through DNV-GL guidelines and creating either complete documents or templates of anything that we need to submit to them.
We kept in touch with our friends from last week which is pretty hype because they're some cool people. It was very tragic that Nina and George (from Slovenia and Romania) were leaving this week after we just got to know them. Nina disappeared into the night or afternoon. Ok, it might not have been a disappearance but more of a planned departure but we didn't get to say goodbye. We did get to say goodbye to George though. We ate in the local University's canteen which our friend Jeetu (from India) was able to let us into. It was cold enough outside that we all failed the temperature check and had to wait to warm up.
On the way there, however, we heard some large commotion on the street in the form of a party bus. Jacob captured this video and it only begins to depict the scene we saw that day.
After this bus, there were about 50 other cars all leaning on their horns and wearing interesting garb. There were fiats with ambulance decals, subwoofers tied to rooves, and some monks who I'm pretty sure weren't real monks but one can never be certain on such matters. There was also a clown car with actual clowns in it! you're gonna see a picture of it here because we really have no other photos to share.
Upon questioning, the only answer we got as to why this was happening was that it was the last day of "the festival" so it's a complete mystery for now.
The food in the canteen was pretty good and afterward, we went on a quest to find the game Settlers of Catan. We went mystery gang style on this one because there was a lot of ground to cover. We split up to look for clues of this board game existing anywhere in the city center. Nobody in our multinational group actually speaks Croatian so there were some language barriers while searching for the elusive Catan. We got a lot of fingers pointed in directions to walk and sent on our way, kinda like pin-balls, across the main part of the city. Finally, Prady (from India) and Jacob (from Florida (we knew that one though hehe)) were led to a small box with German writing. They were told it was exactly like the full game and it was also only 60 kuna so we went with it. Let me tell you something, if someone who speaks English as a second language, tells another person who also speaks English as a second language what a game is like even though the game is written in a language neither of them know, do not trust this information. (I am so sorry to any of my humanities professors who may read that sentence. Most certainly not Webb Guide)
We wound up making our own board from paper which was really fun! After this, Prady, George, and the three of us watched The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Turns out Nate and Prady were the only two in the group who watched it and Prady is actually a big western fan (and a fan of most American films and tv shows).
We also got a chance to whip around the city on Bolt Scooters.
The ride started out slow, but that's because there are GPS-tracked speed zones in the city. We were moving at a brisk walking pace for a while and getting kind of bored when Nate all of a sudden took off. The other scooter's GPS caught up and we went light speed through the city. I was whizzing, hopping curbs, doing sick tricks. I did the most extreme and death-defying little hop, it was quite the rush and I feel Tony Hawk would be proud.
So, this website is telling me the blog will only take 3 minutes to read so I need to fill it with some more observations we've made through our journies. A big one is that tipping is not as big here. We were told that it's typically just leave whatever spare change you have. For us, that would be handing it to the delivery person. It's also uncommon here to say anything after someone sneezes and I learned that there are a decent number of places that don't really have a phrase for that. It's still odd for me to sit in an office and have nobody say anything after someone is sneezing uncontrollably. There's also this cool system in some grocery stores where you weigh your own produce, type in an id number, and it prints a sticker. It definitely makes checkouts quicker but I can't even begin to describe the monkey see monkey do debacle of the first time we had to use this system. My mental capacity is not large enough to remember more than like three produce id numbers at a time so it's a lot of back and forth for me. OK, I JUST REMEMBERED THE WINDOWS! They make me incredibly excited for no good reason but any place with new windows, like our office or apartment, have windows that open in two fashions. I'm adding a video because I feel that America really needs to step up its window game.
Just imagine how glorious it is to have windows like that. You need to open the window a crack? Crank that handle 180 degrees. Boom! Perfect ventilation. What's that? You need to sing out into the streets in a very dramatic fashion? Give it a good ol' 90 degree turn and belt your heart out!
Oh and here's an important update, our infamous "Day without daughter" picture was actually an expert photoshop. George noticed it and it has honestly changed my worldviews...
So yeah, you're probably thinking "well Luke that's so obvious. Why didn't you see that?" but let me remind you, you are receiving a zoomed-in photo after being told there are very subtle traces of evidence that this may have at one time said "laughter" but this makes me realize that my days have not been wasted and no drastic measures need to be taken to no longer waste my days.
That concludes our week. It's almost time to go back to Webb. We're hoping that our flight back goes smoother than the way here and we're starting to get our last assignments at work. We may try to get more exciting Croatian content for here but we've seen most places that are a reasonable distance from Rijeka. Anyway, goodbye friends. I hope this was an enjoyable blog to read because I enjoyed writing whatever popped into my head :).