Visiting the Village

Visiting the Village
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
4:13 AM

So while Cacak was Aleks' family town now, the real place was a village roughly two hours outside of Cacak, which was already two hours outside of Belgrade. We jumped back on the bus and Steve (Aleks' Father) gave us a great history of the region during the trip. Once we veered off the main road we were on a small, windy, mountain road that passed through numerous hillside farms. Steve said the village had a population of 8 which seemed pretty ridiculous after driving through all these towns but where we needed to go was definitely not on any paved road.

Once the paved roads stopped the bus parked at the bottom of a canyon and Aleks came up in a Trooper and started shuttling people the 2-3 miles to the actual village. There were about 25 of us so he took as many people as he could and everyone else walked. The walk was a pleasure, the entire valley was absolutely gorgeous and we even saw the schoolhouse that Aleks' Mom went to when she was a child. I was in on the last car ride and we had 5 people inside the car and 3 outside. Hanging off the side was wonderful and at some point I'll upload the video as it was pretty entertaining to go through the mountain dirt roads hanging on the side of the car.

When we got to the village I believed the 8 people statistic. It had quite a few houses but most of them were no longer in use. Only grandparents still lived there as everyone young had chosen to move away. They running water, a repeating phone line, and electricity were all fairly new additions (within the last 20 years when the locals were in their 70's). Every building had been built by hand by Steve's granduncle and everyone farmed the land, milked the cows, and of course distilled the raijka. It was great to get a taste of true country life and everyone was incredibly warm and welcoming to us. I'll echo again how beautiful the land itself was, I can't think of many places aside from the Japanese countryside and the Eastern Sierras that feel better for the soul.