Captured Echos: Day 3- Prizren

Saturday, June 2, 2012

..and I thought I was exhausted the past few days. HA!

This morning, I got up at 7:20 AM (Our bodies are still trying to adjust to the 6 hour time difference. They say it takes 1 day for every hour difference). We didn't have breakfast until 9, but guess what I got up to do? Yes, I went running with a few of the girls (Jenna, Aryn, and Katherine). We went to a park right next to Hotel Rozafa. When you think of a park you have something very different in your mind. The city of Suhareke is not like city in Gwinnett. Even though the war was 12 years ago, it is still in the process of being rebuilt. The park is really not a park. It's just a dirt path in a semicircle. Then we ran on the road to complete the circle. Aryn was pretty fast, faster than when Jana starts a race! I kept up with her. We only ran for 15 minutes but it was a good pace to make me sweat.

After breakfast, we took a little walk to the bus station and took a bus to Prizren. The ride there was quite pleasant. We chatted with Morgan, Evan, Berat, and Valdete. When we arrived in Prizren, we walked around the city and hiked up this mountain to a castle (Turkish ruins). From the castle, we could see the entire city including the 36 mosques. It was a breathtaking view. We weren't able to breathe much either because we pretty much ran up the hill chasing Berat. We drank out of an artesian spring and saw a shepherd with his sheep. After spending a while up on the hill, we made our way down the hill another way. At first we were going up hill and we were confused because we thought we were going DOWN the hill. Valdete said we had to go up to go down. We enjoyed the afternoon walking around and ended up walking quite a few miles. We spent from about 11-3:30 walking around, with a little break to eat some "bureks"(flakes with with cheese or meat in the middle). At the end of our walk we ended up walking 15 minutes to a mall. It was more like a Wal-Mart again. The leaders ate some ice cream and relaxed while the team walked around. Our walking pace started to slow down as the day wore on, but we had a great time in Prizren. The ride home was a different story though. We hurried onto the bus because we were told it was about to leave us. We didn't end up leaving the bus station for another 10+ minutes. While sitting there, we started sweating. I was sitting with a Kosovar girl that goes to the university. I said a few things to her but didn't know enough to carry on a huge conversation. She said she was hot as we were too! People started fanning themselves with whatever they could find. She pulled out some packet of papers and fanned "herself" for a while. The air hit me too. It was a few minutes later that I realized she was fanning me. I got the packet from her and started fanning her. By the time we got back to Suhareke, we were all sweating and had to take showers. Oh wait, never mind. It was when we got off the bus we realized that the front of the bus had air and the back didn't. We were sweating for the whole time and didn't realize the front wasn't suffering at all! Oh the memories. After cooling down, we had a little free time then we went to dinner at Kulla with Morgan and Evan. After dinner we did our manuscript study and watched a movie (Oceans 11). The manuscript study was a little challenging. Everyone had lots of questions with this part of the study and so we tried to work through the questions. I did a little blogging while the movie was going on because I was getting a little behind. I am using Jeremy's computer so I could put some pictures on here. Feel free to go back and look at the pictures added to the other days. I'm sure I'll add more as I load the pictures from my camera onto the computer. I probably will do this at some point in the trip or when I get home. Probably my favorite part of the day came after the movie. We started talking with Morgan and Evan and ended up talking, playing Monopoly Deal, and laughing for quite a few hours.

Here are some of the pictures from the day.