First days

I went to the university today for the first time, so it was sort of like my first day of school.  It was fascinating and somewhat overwhelming at times.  I enjoyed taking in what I learned about Croatian culture (a bit of which I'll mention here).

I spent the morning with a representative from the university's International Relations Office, who was very helpful in taking me through the process of filling out the necessary paperwork so that our family can receive temporary residence permits.  As we talked, we discussed cultural differences between Croats and Americans.  She explained that according to many Croatians, the stereotype of American women is that they are aggressive and express their opinions all the time.  She thinks it will be interesting to talk to my students about such things when I teach Women and Gender in American History here.  So do I!  She said that many younger Croatians get their sense of Americans from watching Oprah and Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

Then, I met a number of my colleagues in the English department.  Even though I'm a modern American historian, I'll be teaching in the English department and more broadly, in the Faculty of Philosophy (also called the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences).  Each faculty, as it's called, is very separate from all of the others.  I guess that the university is moving in the direction of becoming integrated, but the different faculties are resisting that.

When I first met my main contact in the English department, she said that she had to ask: am I related in any way to two high school classmates of a friend of hers (her friend is a historian in Rhode Island who graduated from a high school in Queens (NYC) in the mid-1960s)?  As it turns out, those two people are my uncle (my Dad's younger brother) and my Dad's first cousin.  Small world!  My last name isn't terribly common but certainly not unique....

Today was also the girls' first day of homeschooling.  They're using the Calvert School homeschooling program (http://homeschool.calvertschool.org/), which is recommended by the State Department (the State Dept. runs the Fulbright Program).  Our plan, as of now, is to have them do their schooling in the mornings and into a bit of the afternoon, and we've hired a young Croatian woman to help with tutoring. 

We found the tutor through Erin, who is a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant from Texas and Oklahoma and who is here in Rijeka all year.  She gave me a lot of useful information before we left the States, and she very kindly had our family over for dinner on Saturday night.  We've been lucky to have so many people welcome us in various ways.

Here are a few other musings (the first, serious; the others, not-so-serious) that don't relate to first days of school:
1.  When we met the girls' tutor, she talked a lot about Croatian culture and customs.  Though she was very young during the Homeland War (Croatian War of Independence, in the early to mid-1990s), she has some clear memories of it.  Rijeka didn't have any fighting.  However, her parents decided to go to see her grandparents in Zadar (further south on the Croatian coast), where she remembers her family's car getting shot at. 
2. Now for the not-so-serious....here's a photo of Caroline on Saturday at a store on the Korzo:

3. We learned that the big grocery (more than groceries) store, Konzum, to which our landlord drove us on our second day here, has an online shopping option.  Yesterday, we placed an order, and today the groceries arrived.  Seemed like magic!  I realize that some friends reading this may have used such a service in the States, but this is not an option where we live back at home.  There was something very Jetsons-like about this: press a button, and voila, food gets delivered!  We found this very handy as people without a car and people who don't speak much of the language (it's easier to spend time online looking through and trying to understand the shopping options than trying to figure out everything with our whole family present!  And thank goodness for Google Translate!). 
4. I like the look of Rijeka--the Austro-Hungarian architecture, the water, and the hills.  It's very hilly here and in that way, a lot like San Francisco.
5.  I also like having much less stuff here in Rijeka than we do back at home.  It's quite liberating!

Laura