Man's best friend, indeed
Laura Butterbrodt
Multimedia Journalist
Hvar
July 11 & 12
We had a sailing race against Lastovo, the other boat. With Geoff, everything is a competition! And of course, our boat was by far the winner. We moored this time, instead of docking at the harbor like at our other stops. This meant we were in the middle of a harbor and had to take a water taxi to land.
It was still sooooooo hot that we spent almost the entire afternoon in the water. I always thought the pictures I saw on Instagram were edited because the water looked way too blue and clear to be real, but it really did look like that!! You can see all the way to the bottom, which was really cool but also made it impossible to know how deep it was. We saw lots of fish swimming with us, and also lots of urchins that we had to avoid!
One of Val's delicious lunches: prosciutto-wrapped chicken. She cooked it while we were sailing and almost lost it all when we hit a giant wave, but she saved it!
We took a water taxi to the island and city of Hvar, which was so fun! It was a really small boat that went super fast and was really fun to ride the waves on. The driver was having fun too and was bumping some Flo Rida to get us in the party mood. We were dropped off at the beach bar Hula Hula, where we spent an incredible amount of money on a couple of drinks to share. The bartender was very courteous and provided us with several 6-foot-long straws to help us share our million dollar drinks.
After sunset cocktails, we walked down the island for dinner, where we ate with Marta, Andrew, Jess, Erica and John. Sid and I shared calamari and a caprese salad, and I had a bite of Hannah and Kristen's truffle pasta that was TO DIE FOR! I was proud of myself for being more adventurous with the calamari, because I figured, when else am I going to get to try fresh seafood? This became my motto through the week, as you will see. We also had some delicious Mediterranean gin and tonics that were so tasty.
After dinner, our million dollar drinks had worn off and the gin and tonics hadn't quite gotten us back into the party vibe, but we walked down to look for a nightclub because we heard Hvar was the party place. We happened to be walking down the main streets during the Euro soccer game, which was really fun to watch the reactions of the crowd despite not really knowing or caring what was going on in the game.
We ended up at the end of a pier, where there was a boat waiting to go to Carpe Diem beach. We weren't quite sure what it was, but it opened at midnight and it was 11:59 so we decided to hop on the boat and check it out. After about 10 minutes on a very mysterious boat full of drunk people, we were at Carpe Diem, which was like a private island nightclub. It was extremely expensive and I'm still not convinced the drinks they sold there had any alcohol content in them. Despite not being super hyped up to party and the DJs playing the same. song. for. three. hours. we were able to have some fun dancing, working up a sweat and people watching. If you're ever in Hvar, I don't recommend Carpe Diem, but it was certainly an experience! We headed back on our water taxi around 3 a.m. and I was so excited to go to bed! Above the completely black water (no, our boat didn't have a light for some reason), the stars were SO BEAUTIFUL! Even though we have pretty great views of stars at home, it was really magical.
Had an incredible dance battle with the male dancer (right). I'm not sure if he knew it was a battle but it was a very close match of skills.
Kristen, Vallery, Katie, Erica, Vincent, Jess, Marta, Hannah, Andrew, Sid, me