Long day, Beautiful night

My day has just been extremely long. You know those days when you wake up on the wrong side of the bed, well today was one of those days for me. Having a sinus infection is not the best way to start any morning, let alone a morning that has to be starting at 6:30 AM. Everyone on my trip today was just exhausted before we even left the port. As soon as our bus pulled away and made its way to Tristeno, Ston and the Island of Korcula, everyone was asleep. Really... they should know... we are college students not early risers!! The first stop we had at Tristeno was beautiful but extremely hot and humid. You can't feel a single breeze in this whole country until the sun sets around 9:30 pm. Our tour guide was just taking us around this beautiful botanical guarden like the heat was nothing at all to her. Unlike most tours, we got to see how olive oil was made before machines came into the picture. Remember donkeys... they used to spin a wheel around as it turned a wheel to press out the oil from the olives. Hard, old fashioned work has been completely replaced by machines except for one press that is still powered by donkeys in Dubrovnik. Anyways, we got through with this stop and made it to Ston about an hour later. No one was outside in the cities today because it was so incredibly hot and there is very little shade to be found. Despite the fact that I was "extremely" excited about seeing the salt fields in Ston, I opted out of the tour and just sat on a bench to people watch. Sorry Ston... I was trying to save my energy (and my water) for Korcula. Korcula is the birth place of Marco Polo. (Or at least his legendary birth place.) We toured the incredibly hot island and then made our way to have lunch at a hotel in the area. Our first course: hot vegetable soup. I was extremely sad that it wasn't something cold! We had a few more warm courses that were delicious but then we got an awesome dessert fruitcake thing. It had layers of fruit-flavored cakes and pudding along with whole peaches and bananas. It was so refreshing! After that, my friend Mary and I went shopping in air conditioned buildings! We then dipped our feet in the water to cool off before our 3 hour journey home. My funny moment of the day: Amanda (my roommate) and I have a new phrase that we walk around saying. If some says Kuna, we just smile and look at each other and say Matata. Then we break into song, "It means no worries, for the rest of your days, it's a problem free philosophy, hakunamatata!" The ship just looks at us like we've lost our minds but deep down inside I know they're jealous they didn't think of it first! haha. Thanks for the emails I've been getting from you guys. It is so neat to wake up to an email from someone just saying hi. If you ever want to email me... use layoung@semesteratsea.net instead of my other email. Have a great day!!