From an email

I am lazy so I copy and paste: I am completely recovered now and I have been in Novi Sad for a week. Things are going really well here. The program is small so we all made friends very quickly, except for some who tend to keep to themselves: a polish couple and an Austrian girl who is staying here with friends. The rest of us are about half a dozen americans and a pair of swiss germans. There are only two people in my class, although we may have gotten a third today, a girl who arrived late. The instruction is really good and I am learning a lot, I think a lot of things are falling into place for me because I have a good base and I am ready to learn. So I am pleased with my progress. We have been working very hard, class all morning, several hours of homework, and activities in the afternoon or evening. Of course there is also time for relaxation, as they say here... The swiss have fallen in with a gang of Serbian football hooligans so that makes things interesting. I just returned from a weekend in a traditional serbian selo (village) farm where we ate a lot of food (they really wont take no) and herded cows, etc. It was a lot of fun and good language practice, although we were in central serbia and the monasteries we went to visit were the same ones I saw last summer in Valjevo. One of them has some really nice frescoes. I am uploading some pictures of novi sad, you can see them here if you like: http://ucla.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2217943&l=ff40c&id=2500453