new apartment in Montenegro

I moved in on saturday (see video tour of the new digs at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-WQGfgjANo) and it is grand to be living alone without having to worry about people watching me. I can do anything I want! I never have known the joys of this. The first thing I did, after perusing the local market, was cook (sorry nothing obscene). My labmate had a snail party that night and I made a peach upside down cake, which was really easy but comes out very good and looking really elegant. I think it will be my new dish. So anyway, it was a great way to break in the kitchen and find out where everything was (and the very few items Francisco is wanting for, which is an electric mixer by the way...).
The dinner was great. We arrive at 7pm at Sonia's which was out in the "country" to find dish after dish of various spreads, sausage across the blood content gamut and stuffed vegetables which sonia had spent all day preparing. As promised there was also a large wok filled with simmering land snails. After dinner we sat around the port dispenser sipping the selections (a white and a tawney). Below are pics of Filipe, the post-doc I work with here, Licinia and Susanna making gaspacho and sonia dispensing the port.
This morning I woke up to wind which did not bode well for the dive I had planned with Filipe and Rita. Sure enough, there was a text message from Filipe saying as much. I was glad though since I had not fallen asleep until 6am, not for lack of trying! I had taken a bunch of herbal sleeping pills and they had no effect. I thought living alone would GREATLY improve my sleeping but I am still on the same anti-US Laura schedule. Lying in bed from 11 to 6 and sleeping from 6 to noon. I am hoping for tonight though. It was probably the port at midnight....

So instead of driving down the coast to do a dive on the southwest corner of the Algarve, I got on a somewhat rusty mountain bike and set out to find the pine forest that people keep talking about near the university. I finally found it and it is really cool. Sand roads through a short pine forest that appears to be quite large. There was no one at all on the trails which creeped me out a bit at first. But it could have also been the fact that it was high noon in the Algarve and no local would even think of braving that heat, esp. to ride their bike through 5 inches of sand. (below is a picture I took near the fire tower and the pine forest with the campus behind it.)
After about an hour I came across a large fire tower and decided I would rather keep going forward than backtrack so I called my logistics director (Licinia). Meanwhile the first person all morning came into view, unfortunately it was a lone older mustached man driving his golf very slowly past me and gawking. I guess his speed could have been due to the deep sand he was navigating and the gawking may have been in response to the combination of my funny american fishing hat, the inch thick gear grease streak running up my calve, and the fact that he had caught me clicking shots of the graffiti on the fire tower....but it was still creepy. Licinia assured me that I could probably make it back to the town if I kept going. After a bit of meandering my bike on foot through some sand troughs I found the "main" dirt road that took me back to a town, not where I started though.

I realized that I was actually closer to my house than I thought and just had to cross the highway to get there. What should have been a 3 minute ride to my place was 15 minutes due to the most insane foot bridge I have ever seen over a highway, esp. a 2 lane highway. It had 5 switchbacks on each side, no stairs. You just had to walk up and up and up to walk down and down and down. This came just short of the effect that the walker not noticing they are walking uphill, even though it is about a 40 foot elevation gain. But finally I reached home and congratulated myself because 1) I had such a keen sense of direction :), 2) I had remembered how to ride a bike, and 3) had ridden that bike for a whole 3 hours despite the constant rust-induced creaking that was coming from the steering shaft, pedals and gears. I am sure my butt will have something to say about all this tomorrow but right now I am happy. The picture below is my building. My apartment is the bottom corner just behind the tennis court.