Umag, Croatia
- Daniele Iannarone
- Aug 1, 2016
- 2 min read
As planned, on the Friday of the week in Slovenia we headed down to Umag, Croatia. Umag is in the North of Croatia not too far from the Slovenian border, and we were headed there to attend a music festival that Samo goes to every year. In fact, Samo has a country house there in Umag, which is a five-minute walk from the beach and a short drive from the city.
Essentially this was a music festival to celebrate the ATP (tennis) tournament held in Umag that week, and people showed up by the thousands. Of course, we went hard. We arrived on the Friday night and had a few drinks before showing up to the music festival and staying out until 6 AM. I don’t even know why we decided, on both nights of the festival, to walk the 6 km home, but hey, whatever, travel stories. Also another highlight of my time at this festival was beating Samo’s friend Maja in a chugging contest, she was so sure she would beat me…
So Friday and Saturday we went out ‘til about 6 AM, and during the day we went to the beach near Samo’s house. Interesting to note, Croatian beaches, as I’ve been told, are not naturally sandy. They are more likely to be rocky, and I learned that when I went to the Umag beach near Samo’s. Rocky beaches are less comfortable for sleeping, but hey, the water in the sea was perhaps the best water I have ever been in, in my life, hands down. It’s hard to put into words why, but I’ll try. Essentially the water was an extremely comfortable 25 degrees, or even warmer, it was calm and swimming in it was extremely pleasant, but what I found the most pleasant was just literally lying on my back, basking in its warmth, and staring up at the beautiful sky. I spent one hour per day in that water and am determined one day to do a full Croatian-coast road trip.
Of course, we also visited the town of Umag itself, which was quite cute.
Really, the centre included that old square and the seaside, which was quite pretty, and the city is actually quite overrun by Slovenians, who always seem to be around, though for the music festival there are quite a few tourists from all over the place.
Something I found interesting about the North of Croatia and the Slovenian seaside, and here’s something probably not everybody knows. They speak Italian there. Italian is a minority language that has co-official status with Slovenian and Croatian in these municipalities, and especially in Croatia, I heard lots of people, locals, Croatians, speaking Italian as their native languages, ergo, among each other. In Slovenia too, Slovenia is the country in which there is the highest percentage of Italian speakers as a minority language in the world, and there they even greet you with their version of the Bonjour/Hi, essentially ‘hello’ in Slovenian (I don’t even know what it is…) followed by “ciao.” I even tried them one day in Portoroz and I asked for information in Italian, and the employee answered me in perfect Italian. Interesting.
It was back to Slovenia after that!
-Daniele
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