From Vis to Split

Monday July 16, 2007

For the past week we have been enjoying our time on Vis. I have been going to breakfast, class, the beach, then napping and dinner pretty much every day. The actual town of Komiza where we are staying is tiny, but really beautiful and worth visiting.

The program put us up in a few different private apartments, which are the nicest accommodations we have had so far. I am staying in a room with another girl, Betsy, and then Leah and Katie are in a room connected to ours by a little kitchen. It is clean and nice and we have air conditioning! Unfortunately if you turn on the air conditioning and more than one light at a time it’s pretty likely that you will blow a fuse. I have taken a few showers in the dark so far. Life on Vis is relaxed and incredible, There are tourists but not nearly as many as the other places we have been and almost everyone sits in the sun all day and there is a solid few hour block of the afternoon where nobody works or does anything but nap and relax. At night there are cafes and restaurants all along the water where everyone sits and eats and drinks.
The women who live in the apartments that I am staying in are very nice and they make us breakfast every morning and dinner every night. The food is great. There is always homemade soup and some kind of meat or seafood and vegetables. There is also a lot of homemade wine on the tables at every dinner. One night a few of us decided to go to the lobster restaurant on the island that is supposed to be famous and known for attracting celebrities when they vacation there. We didn’t see any celebrities but the meal was amazing.
During the second week our lecturer was a man named Yoshko who was basically an old fisherman and the historian on the island. He was an interesting guy and he told us all about the life of a Croatian fisherman. For one of our day trips we took a small boat to an island called Bishevo where there is a famous cave called the “Blue Grotto”. We took a tiny boat into a small opening of a cave and once we entered inside it was literally glowing blue. There are areas under the water where light comes into the cave and creates the effect that makes everything an almost neon shade of blue. We took a lot of pictures but it was hard to capture what it looked like and felt like inside. For lunch Yoshko and the other fisherman cooked up a “fisherman’s lunch” for us. They brought a big grill on the boat with us and dug a hole in the pebbly beach where they made a small fire and threw in coals. After this heated up they put the grill on top and then out about a hundred small sardines. They cooked them and turned them right there on the beach and served them to us for lunch with big loafs of bread and salad made of tomatoes, cabbage, and onions. This was a great afternoon and we ended up with way too many sardines and bowls full of the sardine skeletons with heads still attached.
Leaving Vis was sad but we were ready to move on to Split. We loaded up all of our luggage and took cabs across the island to the ferry port. The ferry to Split was about 2 and a half hours and it was extremely hot and muggy the whole time. Once we arrived our program director met us and lead us to the bus station where we waited to take the bus to our new dorms. I can honestly say this transport from the ferry on the bus to the dorms was the hottest and sweatiest I have ever been in my entire life. Everyone was literally dripping with sweat and the bus driver opened the door while we were driving to cool everyone down. We finally made it to our dorms, which are about a 15-minute walk from the main part of town. The dorms in Split are probably my least favorite of any of the accommodations and I literally took my mattress out to the balcony to sleep the first few nights because it was so unbearably hot. We also discovered that every store in the city was sold out of fans. For the first few days we explored the city and went into every shop and restaurant we could all day because it was way too hot to walk back and sit in the dorms after classes.
We all went to see the Harry Potter movie because it was in English and it is really nice to sit in an air-conditioned theater for a few hours. Split is a great city, especially because it provides easy access to a lot of nearby islands. The main part of the city itself is within Diocletian’s Palace and is built out of white stone, just as Dubrovnik is. We took a tour of the main chapel and inside the palace walls then down below in the cool cellars. The incredible heat makes it a lot harder to enjoy Split but we are doing the best we can.