We Do Adventure

It is not every morning you are shaken from your sleep by the sound of a gun fight; nor that this is immediately followed by the sound of someone running under your bedroom window; nor that you get to take a photograph like this from the comfort of your own living room. But that was last Thursday in Jajce. It was a day that was supposed to have been all about Project Avant-Guarde, a street-art project Rowan has been part of organising for the past couple of months. However a rare armed robbery, or attempted robbery , got in there early in an apparent attempt to steal its thunder. Real thunder and lightening had a go at playing with the best laid plans too. Our PA equipment got caught in a freakishly fast and heavy hail storm. For a moment I thought our mixing desk might have shipped a little too much water to work again, but careful use of kitchen towel, with the aid of gravity and a hair dryer seemed to save the day. Going into details about the Project is best saved until ...

I learnt some new vocabulary today. That’s not unusual. We’re learning things all the time. Mondays and Thursdays are the days we usually have language lessons so, this being a Monday, it’s particularly not unusual – if that makes sense! What is unusual is the some of the words we learned. We keen to learn relevant language; words and phrases we’ll actually use. When we have to do exercises it’s good to do them around things we really do rather than hypothetical situations. For example, in today’s lesson we had to make a sentence starting “in my opinion...” Well, in my opinion it’s easier to ride up a mountain than down one. The speed and possibilities of grisly crashes make down a much more tense experience. (Tense is not helpful to smooth riding!) Explaining all this I went not to recount the fact that I turned round during this afternoon’s ride up a mountain road after hearing two very distinct gunshots! The shots seemed reasonably close and as I was further up than I’d been before ...