Day 15: Fishing with gypsies

Today we had to wake up at 3:00 in the morning because we had to drive an hour to go fishing at a huge lake. It was amazing. The sun rises really early here; about 5:00 I would say and I was just in time to catch the tail end of it. Isn't that incredible? I am never up early enough to catch the sunrise here, so I was so excited to finally see it.



Katie and I sort of got to experience life as a gypsy today. I have only been fishing a couple of times before, and none of those trips were like this. These men are serious about fishing;they devote an entire day to it and they're really good! I mean, they kind of HAVE to be, because for some of them, that's what their family will be living off of for awhile. But even though they are intense about it, fishing today was actually incredibly relaxing. We started fishing at about 5:15 and were there until 4:30 in the afternoon, but we caught so many fish! I caught ten but three of them were too small so we had to throw them back, and Katie caught ten and we were able to keep 8 of hers. According to the gypsies, Katie and I are fishing champions. Haha yeah right, I think they were just surprised we caught anything at all. :)
Because Katie and I don't like to eat fish, Attila gave what the three of us caught to some poor families in Apalina, and I think it made catching the fish so much more meaningful for us.

I was really thankful that the rain was minimal today. It rained for about an hour, and then we pretty much had beautiful sunny weather for the rest of the time. I think I got some more freckles on my nose; I'm so excited!

At about 1:00 we had a picnic and all of the food was prepared over a little fire! It was SO good. I would definitely define it as "man food" haha considering it was mainly meat, but it really was incredible. I think the french fries were my favorite, but there really wasn't anything prepared that wasn't fantastic.

Katie and I are both more than a little sleep deprived and exhausted from our week of teaching, but we have been looking so forward to this trip; I can't begin to describe how happy we were to be able to do this. Plus we actually got home at around 6:30 tonight, so we might actually catch up on most of our sleep!