I have spoken to many travellers to Dubrovnik and the majority of them insist they are after the “local experience.” They want to taste local food, partake in local customs, and learn about the life here. While I completely respect this attitude, and indeed feel cultural curiosity should be the main driving force behind travel in general, I wonder how many people actually know what this “local experience” actually means.Advertising will have you believe local experience is contained mostly in the things you can buy or pay for. While you can buy local, eat local, or wear local, you need something completely different to be local. Local experience in Dubrovnik, as in any other place on this planet, boils down to small everyday things. Small things make life what it is and if you want to know what living in Dubrovnik is all about, here are a few things to try.Try to meticulously plan out your Sunday and then spend the entire day drinking coffee in the sun with friends instead. Try taking your family on a boat trip to one of the nearby islands and spend the day swimming and walking around barefoot, and then listen to your children cry all the way home because at 8:00 pm they still didn't want to get out of the water. If you are a man, try getting two teams together for a football match. Organise it for a week, set the time and the place, and then play for 45 minutes until everybody's gasping for air, only to spend the next few hours in one of the local restaurants eating roast lamb and drinking wine “to recover.” Try not paying for parking when you go for a coffee and then run out claiming you just arrived when you see the guy whose writing parking tickets. Try going to a water polo match, or try playing it. It’s really hard.I could go on forever, but you get the idea. True local experience is all about the things that don't appear in the brochures. It is difficult to try if you are here only for a few days, but that's exactly why us locals are the best at being – local.