Osojnik Village and Folk Show by day, Fuego by night

July 8: Dubrovnik, Croatia
I am obsessed with Dubrovnik. I want to vacation here for a whole summer or something. I can't explain how amazing this place is and how great the people are!

It’s been a few days since I have written! I’ve been so busy and having the best time ever in Croatia that I’ve put this off, but now I’m catching up!
On Thursday I had a trip to a village in the mountains of Croatia called Osojnik. I got to sleep in a little because the trip wasn’t until 1, and there was no time to do much before then! There were a few girls that I’ve become good friends with that were signed up for the same day trip to this village with me, which made it so much better! We got on the buses and headed up the mountain.

On the way up, we stopped on the main bridge. This bridge is massive and you can see some great views of the bay in Dubrovnik! You can also see little towns clustered together, waterways, and the ocean, of course! After sightseeing and taking a lot of pictures, we went up a windy mountainside to the village. This bus ride was just as steep and scary as the one in Anacapri, but the bus driver was slow and it made it less scary!! When we arrived, a little old man in a cute folk-ish uniform greeted us.

Our tour guide was telling us how the houses that used to be in this village were burned by the Soviets during the war, and that what we will see is fairly new, but not that nice, because it’s full of stonecutters and farmers (really nice ones!). In this village, there were fields of pumpkins, cherries, mulberry trees (to feed their silkworms), olives, and many more cool village vegetables! The houses were on top of barns, which were on top of cellars. The Osojnik people keep wine and olive oil in the cellars, and donkeys and chickens in the barns. Those are the only 2 types of animas that I saw, except for a little white friendly kitten! The village man walked us through their church and then down to where we were going to eat dinner and watch musicians perform traditional stuff. When we walked into the main place where we stayed all day, we were greeted with moonshine (which was disgusting) and yummy dried orange peels covered in sugar, I think. There were also a lot of fruits and nuts that they have from their farming. Oh my goodness, I forgot about the figs. They were to die for. I can’t explain how they were prepared because I don’t know what figs normally look like, but they were really soft and covered in a thin dough layer, with some powder stuff on it. I had so many, I should’ve bought some when I left but I was so full I didn’t think about it! We walked down to a patio where there were little grills with a fire. We were handed these long olive branches that were shaved and sharpened at the end. We had no idea what was going on! Then, they brought out small squares of bacon! It was raw and we weren’t sure if we were supposed to eat it or not, so naturally, the boys tried it. Then the village lady said some Croatian words really fast and then took the bacon from them while shaking her head and laughing. It was pretty funny. A village guy showed us how to cook the bacon over the fire using the sharpened branch (basically, he was a mime because he didn’t speak English). Once I cooked my piece of bacon, I put it on the fresh bread that was brought out, along with some kind of white cheese, it all melted together! I had so much bacon and cheese! The flavor of the bacon was unreal in how amazing it was! It was so flavorful and salty, and dripping with fat! Probably not the healthiest appetizer, but a good one!

Once we all played with the fire and took more pictures, we sat down at long wooden tables and starting drinking the wine that was made from the grapes that were hanging above us! It was really sweet, and an odd shade of green. For dinner we had pork pieces that were in a pot with a sauce that also flavored the potato slices. It was soooo good! The salad was delicious too, the tomatoes were picked right before we ate them; can’t get any fresher that that! For dessert, we has this bread thing with cinnamon butter spread on it. It was rolled up like a cinnamon roll, but it was much better and I could just tell that it was some home-made secret recipe, the good stuff.

After sitting and talking to everyone about everything possible, we all went up to the top porch where the old man (one that greeted us in the beginning) started playing some small string instrument with a bow. There were two village ladies in long blue dresses who danced around him, kind of slowly, with their arms in the air while snapping. It was pretty cool to watch and everyone started clapping along, and after about 5 minutes, everyone was dancing! It was really unique but so fun!

After that, we left and I was exhausted from eating so much and dancing. I went back, met up with Shea and all of the girls that live by us, and we went out! You have to take a bus (about 10 minutes, and 10 Kuna) to get to the main part of Dubrovnik because our ship is in the port part. We were just walking around the town and hanging out, and started talking to some locals. They told us the cool places to go so we went! It was a discotheque called Fuego, and was jam packed with Semester at Sea kids. We met one guy in general who is Croatian and plays basketball in America, and he told us a lot of fun things we should go do and see! We stayed there into the wee hours of the morning (I’m talking 5am) and then took the bus back, slept for a few hours, woke up, and went back out to see beautiful Dubrovnik!