HugsHandShakeshi5s: October 2015

Ever Harvest Olives before? I recommend it.

So I am currently traveling around Sicily, and recently I was in Siracusa. Absolutely beautiful by the way, highly recommended. While in Siracusa through someone who knew someone who knew someone I met some people that rock-climb. I went climbing with them one day, and they are all really good. Their warm-up is what I aspire to. Anyway I had the pleasure of hanging out with them a bit while in town. Tomasso, one of the climbers is a farmer. He invited some people over to his place to harvest olives and eat together. It really was a beautiful day.

Meet Tomasso, the man in-charge... i guess.

So for those of you who don't know how olive harvesting works, you basically comb the tree. You use what possibly can be described as a hand rake to brush the branches of the tree as if it was hair, and the olives fall to the ground. Placed upon the ground is a giant net to collect all of the olives. Follow the pictures to get a better idea of what I am talking about.

Vai Federeica!

To reach the olives that are high up we used a combination of tree climbing, ladders, and these hand-rakes attached to sticks.

Luigi. Of course the rock-climbers are going to climb the trees to get to the olives.

Tomasso's Grandma helping out. She said she had to pick two olives this way she can claim she picked olives (plural) not just one.

At this point we are removing the larger pieces of litter, like small branches that fell in with the olives.

and into the crates they go

By the time you are reading this, these will probably be delicious olive oil!

The beautiful property.

Pruning some branches.

It is a smiley face! Do you see it?

Getting ready to eat our delicious lunch.

Buon Pranzo! E` stato un piacere a conoscervi. Grazie tanto per l'ospitalita`.

Croatia- the only country outside of Italy I have been to where speaking Italian is useful.

Croatia is a beautiful place, and most people I have interacted with say exactly that when I bring up Croatia. It is true, croatia is a modest sized country with a substancial amount of adriatic sea-front property. Croatia is well known for their plethora of islands and their blue, blue water. Most of the beaches in Croatia are not sand, but rather rock, which does not cloud the water, leaving Croatia with that crystal clear water. But what no one ever mentions, are the people. Well I am here to tell you, they are great, but I will probably say that about anywhere. They are friendly and their English is great, and sometimes if they dont speak English they speak Italian! Which is fun and strange for me; I'm not used to being the one with the higher level of Italian in a conversation. And as for the food, well to be honest I ate a lot of Burek (a savory, greasy cheese filled pastry, with various other ingredients) and Ajvar (a salty pepper and eggplant sauce).

I was lucky enough to travel along Croatia's coast with Sam, on our trip early this summer. It was the last country we had on our shared travel agenda. After Croatia I returned to Spain and Sam continued on in the direction of Vietnam, and is making many stops along the way. Sam had spent a summer in Croatia previously and was excited to return and I was happy to travel the country with someone who had some relevant knowledge. We traveled once again with couchsurfing and hitch-hiking. We had some hilarious drivers, from a very nice multi-lingual family that ate lunch with us at the beach and took us to all the way to the ferry to the pink-shirt, popped collar, tattooed real estate agent that spoke nearly no english and kept offering us mints to compensate for not talking, that left us the keys to his car at the beach while he went off to do some work-related things mid way to our destination.

So a summary of our trip. We stared in the Istrian peninsula, where we stayed with Marina and her lovely family! Four generations under one roof: 2 small children, eager to have their faces painted and be serenaded by the ukulele, Marina and her sister, the most logical and curious of the bunch, their Italian-speaking parents who were happy to share their home made liquors, and of course the crazy grandma that couldn't handle Sam's voluminous un-tamed hair.

Next we moved on to the island of Rab, which is a small island where everyone knows each other. Although oddly enough it is half-filled with tourists. But they are well-contained. Even though it is a small island, and i do mean small, there is some-sort of invisible line they just don't cross. We couldn't find a couchsurfer, but stayed with Marina's friend Pato. We stayed in his Bungalow!!! He had such an open and care-free attitude and is working on a pretty sweet future hostel. On Rab I think i painted the faces of every child in the village at a free acapella concert.

From Rab we moved on to Dubrovnik, where sam worked as a kayak tour guide in the past and had friends we stayed with. Dubrovnik is cute and charming and yes it is the site where they film Game of Thrones. However for these reasons it is also heavily touristic. I am pretty sure there are more tourists than locals. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but for me, I feel like it strips the location of some of its authenticity. Still beautiful and glad I went though. And I think we managed to do some less-touristy things, like visit an abandoned hotel. Ok, picture time.

Picking the last of the cherries this season.

Marina's niece was too photogenic to not post a picture.

Motovun, a beautiful town on a hill, where many artists go to live, create and sell their art. Aparently Motovun is in such a place on earth where the energy is more intense. If you live there you are supposed to notice stronger emotions.