Friday: No One Was Kidnapped by Bandits

This week another amazing weekend started early when we got on the bus at 9:00 on Friday morning and headed out, this time to the east side of Sardinia. After a two hour bus ride that consisted mostly of sleeping, and some pretty amazing stories of Sardinian history from Paola, we arrived in Nuoro to the Museo Etnographico Sardo. Here we saw some beautiful traditional Sardinian clothes and artifacts, some masks you would not want to run into in the dark and at least part of the cast of Lord of the Rings.

From there we headed to a beautiful, tiny church nearby where Grazia Deledda, the first Italian woman to ever win a Nobel Prize for Literature, was buried. After that we took a couple minutes to run up the hill next to the church to check out the view, which seemed pretty amazing at the time, until later in the day when we found something new to compare it to.

After that, we headed to Orgosolo, where we ate a delicious lunch provided by the shepherds. I didn't eat any of the suckling pig, but I hear it was delicious. I can tell you that the bread and cheese were pretty excellent.

After eating, we got to know some of the other guests, including some older ladies who were very fond of some of the boys. Then the shepherds started up some music and some dancing and singing ensued. 

After that, we escaped the onslaught of the boys' admirers and headed into the city of Orgosolo itself where we saw some pretty incredible street art. We learned that they arose from a time of social unrest in Sardinia in the late 1960s and have continued to be used to express discontent with the state of the world to this day. It was one of the most photogenic places I've ever been. 

After that we headed to our hotel, which was perched about 20 switchbacks up the side of a mountain. It was sadly around this time that my camera battery died so I have no pictures of my own to show, but I will show you this picture that Maggie took, just to give an idea of what kind of view we were working with.

Photo cred to the lovely Maggie Osbahr: http://mkodoccagliari.blogspot.it/

After arriving and marveling at the view for a couple minutes, the majority of the group headed up the hill even higher on a short, but pretty intense hike in search of an even better view, which we found. We then headed down, and made it just in time for some delicious dinner and a spectacular sunset. We ended the night with some stargazing out on the balcony.

Because of how ridiculously full this weekend was, I'm going to split it into two parts, so stay tuned for Saturday's happenings.

Next time on Cagliari Dialogue 2015: sunrise hikes, carsickness inducing busrides, copyrighted caves, enormous bag lunches, perfectly clear water, feet destroying rocks and jumping off of bigger rocks.