Croatia!!

Wow. I am so sorry to all of you out there you have been loyal fans to my blog all semester that it has taken me such a ridiculously long time to update it after Istanbul. (actually, I have no idea if any loyal fans really exist, but I thought I’d apologize anyways). But here it is!

Croatia.

Croatia was not actually a particularly exciting place, but it ended up being really nice to just relax a little bit in port without the worry of trying to see it all and fit everything into five days. Instead, the highlight of Dubrovnik is a cute little walled city where you can walk on the walls, look out over the ocean, and meander the little cobblestone streets. You might eat some delicious food while you’re at it, but basically that can all be accomplished in one day. You don’t actually need five.

So to keep this kindof short and sweet because I’d rather talk about the exciting things that happened in Spain. The first day in Croatia I did all the things I talked about above. We had horrible weather that day, it was cold, rainy, and when we were up on the walls it even started hailing. But Dubrovnik was a beautiful city, walking around the old part of the city was a bit like going back in time a couple hundred years.

The second day my friends Lauren and Erin and I took a bus to Split, the second largest city in Croatia. We left super early in the morning to catch the bus at 6:00am and got to Split a little after 10:00. The bus ride had been beautiful, I saw the sun rise and the whole drive was along the coast of the Adriatic (I think…) which was covered by these rugged, craggy mountains. We also drove for about half an hour through Bosnia and actually took a rest stop there, so I can now say I’ve officially stepped onto Bosnian soil. Once we were in Split it was just another cute little town, it didn’t feel like a big city at all. But we had fun walking around, visiting book stores and looking at travel books and making more plans for other trips. We walked around the old palace, saw a church turned into a cultural museum that along with historical artifacts had a show up of photographs from Tibet (made me really want to go to Tibet too, so I’m adding that one to my growing list). We had lunch at a little pizza place and drank Croatian beer (pizza was really good, the beer not so great) and then we had ice cream for dessert (even though it was still really cold out). We caught the bus back that same day around 5:00, so we had another couple hours of beautiful scenery before the sun set and we drove back through Bosnia (so now I’ve been there twice!) and back home to Dubrovnik.

The second day I walked around Dubrovnik by myself. It was the first time I had spent a lot of time out and about in a country by myself, and it was actually really nice. I walked along the water for a long time, went to a couple museums, and treated myself to a fancy lunch. It was very peaceful.

The third day we took a ferry boat ride out to one of the nearby islands and spent the day exploring. We walked through the woods and lived off the fresh clementines and pomegranates that we picked from trees along our path. We were walking through what I think were public areas, so I’m not sure if anyone actually owned the fruit trees. We came to the conclusion that it wasn’t stealing if we picked the fruits that hung over the path itself and we’d offer to pay if anyone came out and yelled at us. Nobody yelled, and the fresh fruits were absolutely incredible.

The last day I went back to the old city and walked around the walls one more time. And then spent a couple more hours just wandering around, even though at that point I think I had seen it all already. It was actually really nice to not have anything pressing that I needed to see or do. Dubrovnik was a lovely little town and I’m sure we would have had an incredible time if we had been there during the actual summer tourist season when the beaches would have been fun and there would have been tons of other things to do. As it was, the area was slowing down, getting ready for winter. To enjoy our stay in Dubrovnik, you had to mentally avoid calling the place boring, and instead call it relaxing and soothing.