As usual on our action packed summer courses, the days are flying past: the welcome party on Saturday, an orienteering exploration of “our” island on Sunday, and on Monday, Croatian language lessons began. Monday ends with much merriment, music, magical vistas and some considerable mental agility, so a day off on Tuesday allows everyone to recharge for the second half! Julia takes us though the events of Monday and Tuesday while, talking of second halves, the group contemplates an early start for Lastovo on Wednesday, and wonders if they’ll all be able to stay awake for the England v Croatia World Cup Match late in the evening.      Castles In The Air

And today, Monday, the lessons started.  Thankfully our group was not first in to bat and in the morning Dr John and I went for a drive around in search of a decent beach.  Having driven as far as the Hotel Adria  without any luck we returned and had a quick dip in the town swimming spot before returning for a shower and lunch.  Our lesson started with conversation and quite a lot of laughter and after the break we read from the text book about how we are becoming addicted to shopping centres and how they have developed around the world.  And then it was time to get ready for our evening outing and everybody started to arrive.

We set off in four cars and, after a short drive along various off the beaten track roads, we stopped at a viewing point before proceeding to our venue for the evening.  This looked like a kind of castle and it too had a beautiful location overlooking the sea and facing the sunset.  It was actually a restaurant and on arrival we were offered home-made rakija and then we sat down to our first course, which was a delicious mixture of typical Dalmatian dishes.  When everyone had finished we got down to the main event of the evening, which was playing Croatian Scrabble.  This kept us pretty quiet for a while, as we started off trying to play by the rules in competing teams and ended up by collaborating with our opponents to try to cover the board.  Our teachers and other Croatian speakers in the group came round to help us with thinking of and spelling the words.  In our group we weren’t helped by the fact that at the beginning we picked out tiles almost exclusively with vowels on them and later in the game ones which overwhelmingly had consonants but we struggled on and by the end there were only a few tiles left unused including dž, which would have helped to spell džem but there was nowhere where this word could be placed so the dž remained unused.

When all the Scrabble boards had been cleared away, we carried on with the main course of delicious grilled meats and fish followed by kremšnit for dessert.  Meanwhile the sun had been gradually setting and lots of photos were taken of the beautiful display of golds and reds.  All this was accompanied by Marin and his colleague playing guitars and singing traditional Croatian songs.  Not long after sunset, a wind blew up and the temperature dropped and so it was time to leave our lovely castle balcony and return home along the narrow winding roads before the light was completely gone.  It was the end of another delightful and memorable event in this year’s summer school, which as usual is flying by far too quickly.

Pauza

Apart from lessons today, Tuesday, there were no other planned activities so we were all free to go off exploring and swimming or if necessary to have a rest before our very early start tomorrow for our trip to the neighbouring island of Lastovo.  The five of us from the school house went out for a meal in the evening in a pretty little restaurant garden in Vela Luka and then returned home and went off to bed early to get up strength for tomorrow.

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For more information on Vela Luka: TZ Vela Luka – Vela Luka