early anniversary

I had a really good weekend! Unfortunately Denis spent his in the car. Friday he got up at 3am to drive to New York to get his visa from the British consulate (5+ hours I think). Then he drove to Pittsburgh to see me (more like 6+ hours). We spent the night in Pittsburgh (more on that later). Then Saturday we drove to DC (4 hours), then Sunday we drove back to Pittsburgh (4 hours--I did drive half of the time), then Sunday night Denis drove back to DC (another 4 hours). You do the math.

He did all of this so that we could celebrate our third wedding anniversary together a few days early (it's Wednesday). We had dinner at a very nice Italian restaurant (although it took us a while to get there because of the gay pride parade in Dupont circle, we didn't even know it was parade weekend, oops.) He got me a pink, engraved ipod mini that hasn't arrived yet. Yay! I can't say what I got him because it's still in the mail too.

My best present was spending the whole weekend with Denis followed by sleeping in our large comfy bed, in our cool, clean, dark bedroom, and simply being in our airconditioned, clean, apartment with internet access. (Are you getting an idea of what my apartment in Pittsburgh is like?)

Pittsburgh

Today is the first day of the second week of my language program. The program itself is great. We have 5 hours of classtime a day followed by homework, studying at home, lunches together two days a week, and occasional all program activities (pizza Tuesday, happy hours every Friday, last week was Polish happy hour, there was sausage). The teachers are really good. The primary teacher for intermediate croatian is a linguist and since I love learning language grammer it's great. The other students (four other women in my class) are also really nice and I'm enjoying getting to know them. Since I never had a formal beginning croatian class my knowlege is pretty spotty, but I've been doing fine. It helps that I have multiple years of foreign language classes (nothing is worse than morning drill). The worst is that I don't have a very large vocabulary so it's hard to always understand what's going on. We have tests every Friday. The first one went okay. Not great. It was fair-to-challenging. I'm not stressed because I don't care about my grade for this class since I'm primarily doing it for my own knowledge and no one will see the transcript unless I want them too (and only if I apply for money for more language training.) I think I'm making progress although I don't now how much I'll be able to talk (primarily because of vocab) in July. We'll see.