Dubrovnik

7/11

This morning I practically jumped out of my bed when I woke up before my alarm even went off, which is an extremely rare occurrence. I met friends up at breakfast (me eating breakfast being yet another rare occurrence), and all around us was the incredibly beautiful Gruz Harbor in Dubrovnik.  At a glance, it looks like a cruiser’s paradise. Adorable little docks and protected coves to anchor line a huge inlet protected from the surge of the Adriatic (which is already not much) by a small island covered in lush greenery. Hills come right out of the ocean, with a little pebbly beach in some places (although I’m told there is a beautiful sandy beach a short bus ride away…will definitely be checking that out) and little houses with tiles roofs tier their way up the hillsides. I haven’t even been into the historic area of the city, Old Dubrovnik, yet and I already know it will be fantastic just from the view I have from the ship. The water is gorgeous here, a deep, vibrant greenish blue that is so clear I can see right to the bottom in many places, and easily see fish swimming below the surface in others. Also, I have seen several small sailboats zipping around this wonderfully protected bay, so hopefully I will be able to locate a place to rent one for a few hours.

After breakfast we made our way to the nearby internet café for internet housekeeping, travel planning, and movie theater scouting. We still have to figure out the bus times to see if going to Krkr national park to see the fabulous Skradinski Buk waterfalls and pools will be plausible. I’m keeping my fingers crossed…I really want to go. We also need to check ferry times to see if we can do a day trip to one of the many islands off the coast, likely Mljet.

The weather is gorgeous…80-85 degrees predicted for the whole time we’re here, and not a cloud in the sky. This is perfect considering that most of my plans involve being in the ocean or some other body of water. It’s slightly humid, and my hair has responded to the humidity be settling somewhere between wavy and fluffy, but I don’t mind.

So far everyone in Croatia that I have spoken to speaks good English, which is helpful seeing as I only know a few key phrases/words in Croatian and I’m sure my accent is atrotious. Technically “zdravo” is hello and  “dovidenja” is goodbye, but Ivan (our interport student from Croatia who has been with us since we left Italy as a resource for all us non-Croatians on the ship) says he and all his friends just say “ciao” for both. I’m used to that from Italy, so I think I’ll just stick to that. Thanks is “hvala”, please is “molim”, excuse me is “oprosite”, yes is “da”, no is “ne” and wine is still “vino”.  That’s pretty much all the vocabulary I can handle at the moment, but we’ll see how it expands over the next four days.

This afternoon I went on a tour of Old Dubrovnik. It is easily one of the most charming cities I have ever seen, and reminded me a little of Granada, Spain, which is saying a lot because I definitely left a little piece of my heart there four years ago. The first city plan was laid down in 472, so it has always been a well-organized city with logically connecting streets and main thoroughfares (which is great for the directionally challenged like me). As the centuries passed, the city council passed laws about the height of buildings, width of streets, existence of balconies, location of windows, etc. that made the whole city fit together very nicely. The city was originally made of timber, but in the 1550s it was decreed that the city must be made of limestone, one of the most abundance stones of the area. So today as I walked through the city, the entire thing: the roads, the sidewalks, the inside and outside of buildings, was made of limestone. Most buildings date back to early Renaissance period, and the architecture reflects both that and their connections to the early medieval maritime empire of Venice. There are no cars allowed in Old Dubrovnik, so the streets, which are all pedestrian walkways, have been polished to a slick, lustrous sheen by centuries of foot traffic. Also, the entire old city is surrounded by one of the best preserved city walls in the entire world.

First stop on the tour was a medieval Franciscan monastery now turned museum. Inside was an apothecary run by the Franciscan monks opened in 1317, one of the oldest in Europe. The monastery itself, along with many other buildings in Old Dubrovnik, suffered damage in the Croat-Serbian-Bosnian wars of the 1990s. Our tour guide, a local of Dubrovnik in her late thirties, remembered the shelling of the city. She said that at first the people took the beginning of the attack as a short-lived scare tactic as Dubrovnik was seen as a safe place. But as the bombing continued and the locals had to struggle for shelter, food and water, this was clearly not the case. In the apothecary, a hole in the wall was left unrepaired and framed as a memorial of the destruction to the old city only 20 years ago.

From the monastery we continued through the picturesque off-white streets of Dubrovnik, with the windows on the 3-story buildings edging the street flanked by deep green window shutters and every once in awhile adorned with window boxes overflowing with flowers. Everywhere, the smell of lavender drifted from street venders selling bundles of lavender and jars of artisan honey. Our tour guide, Kate, told us that the medieval city was quite progressive about public health for its time. They were the first to establish quarantines in Europe in 1377, which explained why many of the diseases that decimated medieval Europe had a less pronounced effect on Dubrovnik. Also, beginning very early there were public officials who roamed the streets, fining anyone who littered, and to this day Old Dubrovnik is extremely clean, I didn’t even see piles of dirt or dust nevertheless trash on the ground. Of course, this may be because Old Dubrovnik is now almost entirely a tourist destination, and the only people in the city were locals working the restaurants and shops (who lived outside the old city in other parts of Dubrovnik) or tourists, travelers and vacationers. But that didn’t really make me enjoy how beautiful the city was any less. Also, the entire city of Old Dubrovnik is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, so that may help with draw in the tourists (over a million each year, mainly from European countries like France, Spain and Italy, but increasingly from the US and Japan).

We then went to what was in medieval and Renaissance times the city council building and the Palace of the rector, which was for Dubrovnik what the doge was for Venice. Dubrovnik was also an independent sea merchant city in the Renaissance like Venice, and while it was much less powerful than surrounding nations, it managed to stay independent largely by acting as a trade mediator between Roman Catholic western Europe like Venice and the Muslim Ottoman Empire in the east. This allowed the city to amass quite a bit of wealth, but also required protection against frequent sea invaders, which explains the incredibly well-fortified walls surrounding the city, which backs onto the sea. In the main entry courtyard of what was once the palace, today there is a stage area where musicians come to play. This seems to be the fate of many places in Old Dubrovnik whose Renaissance functions have since become unnecessary, which I think is wonderful repurposing.

St. Blaise is the patron saint of Dubrovnik. He never went there, but like any good Roman Catholic city Dubrovnik needed a patron saint and a relic (piece of the body) of that saint. I don’t remember how they originally came to reside there, but a skull fragment, entire leg bone and parts of several other bones (supposedly) belonging to St. Blaise now reside safely behind plexiglass and careful supervision in the Cathedral of the Assumption of the Virgin. But in 1667, tragedy struck. The forearm bone of St. Blaise was stolen by the Italians. Of course, the people of Dubrovnik sent a party to retrieve it, which they did, and brought it back to the city on July 5 of that year. So to this day, Dubrovnik still celebrates July 5th with parties and procession through the streets for the Forearm of St. Blaise Day. Catholic countries really do confuse me.

We visited the Cathedral of the Assumption of the Virgin. The back wall of the treasury there is full of gold and silver-plated hollow models of arms, legs and hands: cases for relics (pieces of saint bones). I had never seen a reliquary like this, and to be honest I was a little creeped out. In a case in the center of the room was the ornate gold crown that housed the skull fragment, the arm which held the famous piece of the left forearm, and a gold leg casing which held an entire leg bone. One side of this was mesh, so we could actually see the leg bone inside. After this, we went to a 14th century Dominican monastery which was also converted to a museum, where we saw (among other things) a Bible from the 11th century hand-written on parchment.

By this time, I was pretty over old stuff and dying in the heat, so I was happy to reach the end of our historical tour. A few friends and I found the nearest gelato place, where I had mandarina flavor that tasted like orange julius and was exactly the cold refreshment I needed. We sat down in the shade by the old port, dangling our feet over the edge of the water and eating our gelato. Gelato was not quite enough refreshment, however, and after a little more walking stopped by a café for a cold beer. They came out much larger than we expected, and our bus was leaving in five minutes by the time we were half way through at sipping speed, so we ended up chugging the rest and speed walking back to the bus, which we made just in time. Our waiter looked at us like we were crazy at that point, and I’m pretty sure we did some damage to the reputation of American young ladies, but oh well.

After a rest at the ship, I gathered together with friends and headed out for dinner in Old Dubrovnik. The city was just as cute at night, but much more manageable heat-wise. We found the park in what used to be the old moat around the city and wandered around it for a little, watching bats fly overhead to their homes in crevices in the city walls and a cave on the ocean below the walls. We discussed the likelihood of being able to kayak into the cave, and also of finding buried pirate treasure in the cave. We roamed around the city, running into what felt like half of our ship, and stopped by to listen to a jazz music festival playing in one of the main squares. We ended up picking a seafood restaurant overlooking the ocean for dinner. I had a bowl of mussels, which were delicious. After dinner and a little more walking around the city, we went to (possibly the only) club in Dubrovnik called Fuego, which was almost all SAS students and wasn’t playing very good music, so we made it an early night.


7/12

Today I woke up for breakfast on the ship (it’s getting easier now) and went to the bus station to figure out travel plans for tomorrow. Unfortunately, it will be logistically impossible to make it to Krka National Park in the time we have left and make it back for the things we need to make to make it back for. So I’ll have to table the waterfalls until next time I come to Croatia.

But, we did find a great deal on an island tour that lasts most of the day and includes lunch and drinks, and I wanted to do an island day anyway so I’m looking forward to doing that tomorrow. Croatia has over (I think) 1,000 islands, which puts it near the top of the list of European countries with the most islands, so I figure that going to the islands here is a very appropriate thing to do, and much more feasible as the boat leaves right out of the port in Old Dubrovnik, only a ten minute bus ride away from the ship. Croatia is shaped a little like a pork chop (sorry for the comparison…but it is) with a main chunk toward the north of the Adriatic and a strip of coastline running almost the entire length of the Dalmatian coast. Dubrovnik is at the very southern tip of that strip, and there is no train station here, only a bus system. The bus system is very good, it just makes traveling to other places very difficult. Going to Krka, the closer and slightly less famous national park, would take at least seven hours of travel. With this is mind and with many islands right off the coast of Dubrovnik, traveling by sea is definitely the way to go.

With our plans arranged, my friend and I took the bus into Old Dubrovnik to do a little shopping. We really got to explore the side streets, which are adorable little alleyways lined with shops with scarves, bags of lavender, and other Dubrovnik trinkets hanging on the wide-open doors. Air conditioning was most welcome, so we stopped frequently. We also found the movie theater where we may go see HP 7 part 2, which comes out while we are here. We ate another tasty seafood lunch and hopped a bus to the beach. By beach, I mean tiny rocky cove, but it was very cute and the water felt fantastic. It was saltier than the water in Capri or the Pacific, which was a little alarming. We bobbed around, lamenting the fact that old men were still wearing speedos from their younger days and laughing at little kids playing in the shallows in their floaties. Even though the shore where we spread out our towels was rocky, laying out in the sun still felt amazing. We were tired and hot from a day walking around in the heat (in the 90s, humid and only s light breeze), so the refreshing ocean and a little nap was exactly what we needed.

When we had our fill of the beach, we hopped a bus back to the ship. We rested, showered, and gathered our friends to go out for dinner. Our friends had not been to the beach we went to yet, so we decided to have a picnic there. First stop: Konzum, the grocery store near the port. While pretty much everywhere else we had been had everything written in English as well as Croatian, the grocery store did not. Luckily, baguettes and brie are easy to find, champagne bottles always look like champagne bottles and the peach juice had a giant picture of a peach on it. Our main difficulty was locating everything we needed. It was a large grocery store, and included everything from food to tableware to clothes to cleaning supplies. Somehow, the first thing we found was the candy aisle (two of them, actually), so we tried some Croatian candy (and Kinder Buenos yum) as well. Another difficulty was chosing some kind of veggie dip for our bread. We saw a wall of what could have been dips near the cheese, so we all stood and stared at them for about ten minutes before picking one at random. It was dip, and it was quite tasty. Also, they didn’t use dividers at the checkout counter, you just left a gap between your stuff and that of the person before you. Other than that and everything being in Croatian, it looked a lot like a grocery store you’d find in the US. Fully stocked, we took our picnic to the beach we had found earlier that day. It was perfect: nobody else was there so we had our own private cove and dinner by moonlight (and iPhone light because the moon wasn’t quite enough).


7/13

This morning I got up for breakfast again (I amaze myself sometimes) and headed out with Kallen and Abby to go on an island hopping excursion for the day. We left from Old Port in Old Dubrovnik at 10:45am and come back at 5:45pm. We boarded our bright red mock-pirate ship, Rudolfo, along with maybe thirty other people, none of which were SASers (yes!). The first island we stopped at, Kolocep, was tiny and so cute. The town only had a few stores, and it had a nice sand beach (which are rare and highly coveted in Croatia), so a giant resort hotel had popped up on the other side of the cove. I saw almost no other Americans there, but head a lot of people speaking French, Spanish, or with British accents. As we walked down along the water (which was perfectly flat in the large, well-protected cove), we passed something I had never actually seen set up before: a beach polo court. I started freaking out to the girls I was with. Nobody was playing, and there were no balls in the court but the boundaries and goals were all set up a little ways off the shore, waiting for people to come by and play. Beach polo actually played in the ocean had always confused me before now: in California the poor visibility and swell would make setting up and court and then actually playing very difficult. But here, the water was as flat as a swimming pool and so clear you could see straight to the bottom. Also, as we were walking toward the beach, we saw this local old fat guy in a speedo (of course he was in  a speedo) casually watering his plants, cleaning his front porch and hosing off the tourists that walked by.

We had about an hour to cruise around on this island, and we were hungry so we stopped into the tiny little grocery and picked up bread, cheese, and these really yummy crackers which I really hope I can find when I get back to the US. When we got back to the boat, we saw that they were serving lunch, so we put away our snacks for later in the trip. I had this delicious whitefish that was pretty salty but delicious. It had some spice rub on the outside, and I tried to ask the chef (who was wearing a red and white polka-dot pirate cap, a flowery apron and green crocs with the little decorations on them) what seasoning was on the fish, but he only knew the names in Croatian. Our next stop was an adorable little fisherman’s village. I unfortunately don’t remember the name of it…but we had about an hour here too and used to jump into the ocean and swim around. The final stop was Lokrum. This is one of the most visited and largest islands directly off Dubrovnik (although it is still fairly small). There was also a beach polo court set up here, so I freaked out about it again. We headed to the large, sandy beach, laid down our towels to claim a place and ran into the water. It felt perfect, and the beach itself sloped down gradually so we had plenty of wading room with soft sandy bottom for our rock-worn feet. After a much needed cool down swim and some sun bathing, we decided to walk around some of the shops along the water. They were all pretty touristy, but had cute stuff and air conditioning. We stopped for ice cream, where I had a chocolate milkshake that had a hint of nutella taste…yum.

When we got back to Old Dubrovnik, we found the movie theater and tried to get tickets to see HP, which came out in Croatia today. But, the movie theater was closed (again) and apparently only opened half an hour to an hour (nobody we asked knew for sure) before the show. We asked when the show would be and got plenty of noncommittal shrugs and answers varying from 7 to 9pm.  Also, there were no show times posted anywhere around the theater. It was so strange to me that the movie theater was only open for the one nighttime show and only opened just before to sell tickets, but I going to the movies in Croatia isn’t the same thing as going to the movies in the US. So, we were not able to see HP 7 part 2…but maybe in Greece.

We went out to Revelin, a club within the city walls. It was really cool because it looked like a castle and despite the fact that the entrance tunnel was hot as a sauna, it was a really fun night.


7/14

Today I slept in, which felt much better than getting up for breakfast. This afternoon I will go snorkeling, hopefully around caves. Now I’m heading over to the internet café outside our ship for some updating of pictures, so be sure to check out the Croatia pictures on my album!

As always, I love hearing from you, so feel free to send me an email at vescholtes@semesteratsea.net
I think my internet here eats some of my incoming and outgoing messages, so if you sent me an email and I didn’t respond for a few days, please resend it.

Love from Dubrovnik,
Ginny