Dubrovnik

B and I decided that life would be easier if we just hired a driver to take us from Bosnia to Croatia. A very nice man picked us up and we started on the two hour journey. He made a pit stop by his house so he could pick us some fresh grapes from the vine. 

Driving to Croatia

We had heard the border crossing could take hours so we were pleasantly surprised when there were only two cars in front of us. B and I had to singly get out of the car and go get our picture taken at the booth, but then we were off. Maybe 15 minutes total? 

I didn’t realize it, but Croatia has tons and tons of islands. Our route took us to the Adriatic and then south to Dubrovnik so we got to see very pretty scenery en route. Once in Dubrovnik our driver had to drop us outside of the town because only residents are allowed to drive in the old town. This kinda sucked for me because I have my carryon suitcase and it was a fifteen minute walk in really hot temps. Inside the city gates the streets are all white limestone and I wanted to participate in the ‘Respect the City’ campaign so I carried my bag instead of wheeling it. It sucked. Especially going to a giant staircase…but I guess that was better than going up it!

Old Town

Dubrovnik has been the ‘it’ place to go for years now, so of course, I have refused to go. I had to eat crow once we got there, because this place is slamming. The buildings are all made of the limestone along with the streets, so everything is the same color. The roads are narrow and pretty much only for pedestrians. All in all, it is adorable and if a couple hundred thousand tourists weren’t there with me, I would have loved it so much. It was pretty packed with people, though. 

Museums

Once we recovered from the heat exhaustion, we bought the Dubrovnik Card which I took full advantage of. We knew we wanted to walk the city walls and the price of that was the same for the card, so that evening while B worked, I visited a couple museums.

• Franciscan Monasteries/Apothecary Museum: this was an old Monastary so it had a pretty cloister. I liked how the columns of the cloister had unique carvings at the top, so faces, animals, plants, etc. The museum part of this had some religious artifacts but also a display of the medicines and tinctures they used back in the day. I enjoyed seeing the scales and ingredients. Rather cleverly, they have a working pharmacy as part of the building.

• Maritime Museum: this museum was all about Dubrovnik’s impressive maritime past. I learned that at one time they built the best boat available, the Karaka, that was so famous Shakespeare mentioned them in a couple of his plays. Also, Dubrovnik banned the slave trade way back in the 1400s! Super impressive. Take that everyone who says, ‘you can’t judge people in the past by our present day values.’ If 1400 Croats knew it was bad, 1800s Americans knew it too.
• Dulcic Masle Pulitika Gallery: my keyboard won’t do the accents needed with a couple of these names, but each word is a different guy’s last name. They were all Dubrovnik artists and this super small museum was in a cool building. Interestingly, the first room was dedicated to a US Ambassador who died in a plane crash in Dubrovnik in the 1990s. 

Odyssey

In my wanderings I came across an advertisement for an outdoor theater. It was the Odyssey’s opening day and at 9:00 PM we watched it in the middle of the city under the stars. It was really fun and I felt kindred because I was only a couple steps from the Mediterranean Sea. 

City Walls and Swim

The next morning we got up really early so we could tackle the city walls before the heat became too oppressive. The walls of Dubrovnik are a couple kilometers (no idea what this is in miles) and it took us about an hour to go up and down the stairs and around the city. We obvs stopped for pictures every ten steps because the white buildings, red roofs, and blue sea are a killer combination. 

Even though we were done at 9:00 AM it was still super hot so we found a spot where you can go through a hole in the city wall and go down a bunch of steps to jump into the ocean. It felt so wonderfully refreshing. There wasn’t a beach, just rocky cliffs to jump off of. 

More Museums

My sister really would have been proud of how hard I went with the Dubrovnik Card. That afternoon we visited the Rector’s Palace which has a staircase that was filmed in Game of Thrones that people were fan-stairing but was wasted on B and me. We then went and looked at traditional Croatian clothes at the Ethnographic museum. Thanks heavens I don’t have to wear the special headress that marks me as an unmarried woman nowadays!

Goodbye Dubrovnik

We spent the rest of our time in Dubrovnik checking out the cute shops and ice cream stores. Fortunately, B found a less stair-intensive route on the way out of Old Town to our bus stop that would take us to the airport. I can say now that Dubrovnik deserves its acclaim. But I would never come back here in the summer with the heat and tourists.