A Day in Croatia!

Today we took a trip over the border to Croatia! Slovenia is bordered by Italy, Germany, Austria and Croatia! Everyone in Slovenia speaks Slovenian and Italian fluently and all the signs are in both languages as well. Apparently Croatian is very similar to Slovenian too! Melania Trump is Slovenian and speaks many languages because they learn them in school here! So Slovenia and Croatia are on the Istrian peninsula where it sticks out into the Adriatic ocean. (The eastern part of Italy is also on this peninsula.) Sorry—here’s your geography lesson for the day! 😊 The tour was led by a lady named Anna and she showed us her home town! We started out in her medieval town called Oprtalj. She was super cute and MADE the tour! She was a jokester and her husband was funny as well! We got to taste some traditional foods made with truffles—which are similar to mushrooms, but you dig them out of the ground and they are hard like a rock! They are sort of round and kinda look like dog poop! Hahaha! This little village was completely untouched by tourists! Only the locals were there and they were super friendly as we passed through the streets—waving and saying hello in Croatian! It’s a very hilly town on top of a mountain with cobblestone everywhere and lots of OLD, I mean OLD buildings! It’s hard to believe that the stone walls surrounding this little town and everything in it are centuries old and that people still live there!! Anna’s husband was making a sink for Anna out of limestone and gave us a demonstration on the art of sculpting this soft stone! He was a character! They kept the jokes flowing the whole tour! We also got to hear Croatia’s version of the bagpipes! There was a lot of wine tasting at every stop—probably why the tour was so expensive, but we did not partake! Hahaha! Anna kept offering it to me and was probably wondering why I wasn’t drinking it! We also got to taste their olive oil too—which was also very good! This region has won various awards for being the best in the world for 5 years straight! They also told us about all the Croatians that invented things that we still use today! It was pretty cool! We walked through an old church that still had visible frescoes painted on the walls of scenes from the Bible! That was super cool to see! From that village, we went out into the woods for a truffle hunting demonstration. They use female dogs (because they don’t mark as much—you don’t want them peeing on the truffles!). Our dogs were so cute—Linda the black one and Kiki, the small white one. We walked around for a bit and soon after found several of them. They are pretty deep in the ground so they require dogs who’ve been trained to hunt them—it doesn’t matter what breed they are either—any dog can learn to hunt them. There are black and white truffles but this time of year, there are only black ones. Each truffle hunter goes out with 2 dogs. In the half hour we were out there, our dogs found 6 truffles, which is why they are so expensive. They are hard to find and take time for the dogs to locate them! After this, we headed for another medieval village up on a mountain called Motovun. It’s another walled city and is many centuries old as well. It was built in the shape of an acropolis on top of this steep hill and named after its Celtic origins—Montona—meaning “a town in the mountains.” It’s considered the most beautiful of all Istrian towns. Up at the top of this hill, we stopped at a restaurant where we ate lunch. We had pasta and other dishes with truffles. Truthfully, I don’t care for the flavor of the truffle. It was ok, but they put it in everything we ate for lunch, so it got a little old! Hahahaha!! 😊 After lunch, we poked around the town where people were selling their crafts. This town had more tourists, but not many compared with our tourist sites!! It’s crazy to me that people still live in these old cities—in homes that have been there forever! This was a long tour! We left at 9am and didn’t get back to the hotel until 4:30 and we were soaking wet with sweat—it was a very hot and humid day!! But it was fun and I’m glad we went!