So here’s the deal. I don’t disklike Dubrovnik. It’s a charming city. Everything is white and the stone streets shine from hundreds of years of footsteps polishing them. There’s a wide variety of old buildings- some are a little taller, some are a little shorter. There are churches and stuff. But.. I don’t love it.

OTD

And that’s fine, but I really wanted to love it.  And I came to love it, but that required leaving it (see next post!),..  Anyhow, what is there to be said about it?  We took a bus from Vela Luka (which is the city in Western Korcula, which I suspect means Beautiful Harbor in some Italo-Croatian mix-up) and I took some photos along the way.  Then we took a boat from Korcula (the city on the island) and arrived in Dubrovnik, then walked to our hotel.  When we booked it, we didn’t really know much about the city, but these seemed centrally located and affordable. The problem with centrally located is that Dubrovnik is rather large, and the cool stuff is at one end and the boring stuff is at the other end, so if you’re centrally located, you’re equally far from both types of stuff.  But we had a great view of both the boring stuff (by which I mean the port and the bus station) and the cool stuff (old town).  But it was far from both.  Follow everyone’s advice and stay in the cool part (which I forget what it’s called but it’s kinda south of downtown).

So what’s the city like?  Well, like I said, it’s a lot of buldings and they shine and it’s very well lit.  It doesn’t have the Ocean City vibe that SPlit had, and there are at least a few restaurants with entrees that sell for 70 euros.  A little fancier than our cottage in Gradina Bay.  Because we are, ultimately, not fancy, many of the nice things the city offers were not really available to us, by which I mean we didn’t order 70 euro entrees but instead ordered the worst lasagna ever made.  So bad that when the waiter asked me how the food was, I paused before I said it was great.  That’s how bad.

Has anyone else noticed that we do a terrible job picking restaurants?  Remember that pizza place in La Spezia?  It was better.

So…  we just walked around and took photos and saw the city.  I’m sounding all negative, which is inappropriate.  The thing is at this moment in time that I’m writing, I am tired.  There was a lot of awesome about it.  First, once you get more than a hundred feet away from a place that sells t-shirts, the city is beautiful and charming and unique.  The streets are very narrow, with lots of stairs leading to stairs and little backyard gardens and other fun things to poke around in.  Like most places, the fewer people there are, the better it gets.  Along the city walls there are occasional places to eat or drink that are charming and quaint.  The old city walls give a view of both the city and the sea, both of which could inspire an American to spend an entire SD card taking photos.

otd

Oh, but we couldn’t really go on the city walls, which maybe is one of the reasons I don;t remember it so fondly.  There was some summit in town so the walls were closed.  No, they were only like half closed, but that means twice as many people and they didn’t even give you a break on the price.  We’d seen signs of the summit the night before when a major street was closed down for at least a half hour waiting for some motorcade.  We didn’t know what the motorcade was for at the time, thought we thought it was such a big deal that it had to be more than even the president or whoever of the country.  It turns out it was bigger than the president of whoever- it was the actual queen of Europe.  We noticed a bunch of cops and crowd forming, so we decided to see what the fuss was all about, and then around the corner in the middle of a massive entourage of probably security guards and probably not security guards was Angela Merkel!  At least, we’re pretty sure it was, because later we noticed news crews interviewing some tourist in German, and the woman I (very briefly) saw in the middle of the pack looked a lot like her.  So that was pretty cool!

The queen of Europe is in there somewhere

Also, here are pictures of Dubrovnik.