Thursday 24 June 2010

Hrvatski

Everything is in Croatian - even my Google and blogger homepage. It seems I am being forced to learn. :-)

I arrived yesterday and it is beautiful. My beloved aunt, Teta Tugica, fed me massive amounts of food and seemed rather disappointed that I only had one portion of each of chicken soup with dumplings, beef stew and rice and tomato salad. Truly delicious, but I don't seem to have inherited the Croatian capacity for food (as perhaps my lovely sister has). I have eaten ALL the biscuits in my Mama's flat however. Piggy Ninki that I am. Well at least I have now effectively removed all temptation. :-)

I managed to find a supermarket yesterday too, where I obtained some rather yummy bread through use of Croatian and some soya milk - hurrah for world domination by Alpro!


Of course, last night, being my first night alone in a flat, I worried about the Daddy Long Legses crawling into my nose and eating my snot. Thank goodness for brothers however - my middle bro Stan did a bit of internetting and informed me that they are only in DLL format for two days (prior to this they are lavae-like) and that they don't eat during their DLL phase, so it would not eat my snot and would be dead within 48 hours anyway. Phew. I also worried mildly about ghosties and such stuff, but it seems they don't care about me here, so that was okay too. Maybe it was the garlic I ate.

Today I applied for a few jobs in the morning, though one was a bit of a long shot. I then visited my lovely Teta Tugica and chatted for a little, while watching a curious documentary about a guy who likes injecting himself with snake venom to see what it does. My cousin arrived with her son who had absolutely no idea who I was. This has happened a few times over the last month. Either I am becoming unmemorable or something very significant has happened to my appearance. Maybe I'm morphing into something else. Or maybe it's just the fringe. As with babies, maybe adults recognise people by their hairline.

This afternoon I went off for a walk. I think I might actually have gone mad if I hadn't gone outside. I wandered to the NE and SW of Zagreb centre and found some rather lovely parks and street side cafes and bars. Oh if only I had someone to amble with! I enjoyed it anyway and think I may have found a good running route. Must try it out tomorrow.

Well, that's me done for the day. I am ravenous and determined to sit down to a hearty polenta feast. Better get cooking, I guess.

Peace and love to you all. xxx

2 comments:

  1. "Everything is in Croatian - even my Google and blogger homepage."

    Nope it is because you are using Google.com instead of Google.co.uk

    Google.com adjusts itself, so here it serves up Dutch language pages by default unless you log in and explicitly change your language to English. But you have to do that with EVERY browser on each computer you own. In Norway Google.com shows pages in Norwegian. In Germany it shows pages in German etc etc.

    I find that 'Add to Searchbar' is a useful plugin for Firefox. Once installed you can go to say Google.hr (or Yahoo.hr) and with a right click on the search box add google.hr to your search engines (entry field top right).

    I have done this for google for the de, no, co.uk sites. The point to this is that if you put in a search term that exists in more than one language you will get different results depending on which Google country you have selected.

    Add to Searchbar is far and away the easiest way to set up different language Google search pages in Firefox. In fact it is a pity that the Firefox developers have chosen to use a complicated long winded system for 'installing' search engines.

    They all need a good slap for that one.

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  2. I know. You told me about this before. I think I did as instructed then. But I quite like it being in Croatian. Good for my language skills. Thank you for the reminder though - I had forgotten I could change it. Useful if it irritates me too much. :-) xx

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Lovely to see your thoughts.