BOO.

We had Halloween here in Croatia! To be honest, though, the next day, All Saint's Day (Svih Svetih) which is celebrated here as the Day of the Dead, was more exciting because no one here really celebrates Halloween. I got so many stares in my costume when I was on the bus. But for Svih Svetih we visited the huge cemetery in the middle of Zagreb called Mirogoj which is absolutely beautiful and enormous. I think its something like over a square mile and has a whole bunch of celebrities buried there. Anyway, it's quite a walk to get to your family tomb but your'e helped out by the little kiosks which are like dead-relative databases. You just put in a name and like Google maps it puts a little point on the map where they're buried. Also like Google Maps, it wasn't always reliable. Or easy to read. Anyway on Day of the Dead people go and light candles for people they care about. It looked like a fairyland at night, but it was totally also a sort of a popularity contest. It's really easy to see who still has family and friends alive or who was famous because their graves were completely covered. I think the winners were Jesus, (it was just a really big cross), the first president of Croatia Dr. Franjo Tuđman, and the veterans of the war. My friends and I went around putting lanterns on the old graves that didn't have any so they could feel the love too. And I snuck a lantern home because they're cool.

Guess what? 
The map of Croatia totally looks like a flying dragon. 
I have now been to 2 plays here: Cyrano which was hilarious and Crime and Punishment, which wasn't. 
Croatian sunsets might rival Illinois ones. 

So for actual Halloween I dressed up as a slightly half-hearted (made in 1.5 hours) The Fox from the song and got a lot of "are you a cat?"s. But then it made it all the more exciting when people did get it. Yay. I also made chocolate covered pretzels for my class at school because 1) they had never heard of them and 2) I was feeling rawther Halloween-chocolate-deprived. It's really rare to find anything that combines salty and sweet here, so I got mixed reactions:

Over excitement courtesy of Barbara, Robi was begging for more, and Dorijan made the most hilarious grimace when he ate one that I was laughing too much to take a picture.

Wapapapapapapow

I didn't really melt the chocolate the right way so they were extremely lumpy and funny-looking but they tasted great. So at this point I have messed up the Snickerdoodles and the chocolate covered pretzels but I am determined that both the Thanksgiving pies and Xmas eggnog I have planned will turn out perfectly. We'll have to see.

Us outside the entrance to Mirogoj.

Using the Find-the-Dead-Relative-Omatic

Lanterns!

Fairyland

Yeah I think the president won. This wasn't even all of them. 

Giant Cross memorial

Weird and awesome grave.

Weird and awesome grave #2

Last weekend my host family took me to a cookout at a vineyard with friends and it was super pretty. It was near the top of Medvednica (the mountain that separates my village Bistra from Zagreb) and even though there were some insane winds it was really fun. 

Roasting chestnuts! We picked them in the woods and they are hella prickly. 

The light was so pretty at the vineyard.

Just because he's Oliver. 

Guess what? 
I consider myself a fairly intelligent person but every other day I get outwitted by a bus schedule. 
I listened to a This American Life about coincidences and now they're happening all over the place. Like we had to write down places we'd like to visit in English class and I chose Macchu Picchu and Cairo and then we had a listening test where the people went to both Macchu Picchu and Cairo then ran into their friend named Caroline. I mean SERIOUSLY?!