Friday 26 June 2009

Dubrovnik

After two weeks of travelling relatively off the beaten track we have arrived in tourism central, testified to by the bustling crowds and the price of a coffee.
Dubrovnik is an absurdly beatufil walled town, with marble streets and intricately carved edifaces that juts out in to the Adriatic.
We booked a small apartment up a stepped side street, with half a dozen more staircases and twisting corridors inside before we get to our little Croatian hideaway.
On our way from Sarajvo we stopped in Mostar for a couple of nights, a town that was badlz damaged during the Bosnian wars of 2002 to 2006 but whose historic bridge and a Turkish quarter has been more or less restored but a couple of streets away the shells of buildings are testiment to the ethnic violence of 15 years ago.
It was in Mostar that we first noticed that we were no longer the onlz English speakers in town, with bus loads of people coming from the Adricatic coastal resorts in neighbouring Croatia.
That sort of prepared us for the falling standard of food in the restaurants we ate in and the price of drinks, which seemed to double from that advertised outside to what appeared on our final bill.
As we came in to Dubrovnik we saw a couple of huge cruise liners docked by the bus station whose passengers spilled into the town for a few hours before being ferried off to Montenegro, Venice or one of the Greek islands.
This morning the numbers of people pushing down the main street was unbeliveable and we felt glad that we could retreat to our apartment while everzone else got soaked in the thunderstorms that have been hoveing over the Balkans for the last few days. But we dont want to hide away for too long. It is the last day of our holiday and we will be flying back to Ireland tomorrow where the letters y and z will be back on their proper places on the kezboard and I wont keep making the same spelling mistakes.

1 comment:

John L. Murphy / "Fionnchú" said...

It all comes back: the weird keyboards while you frantically type in fifteen rented minutes on the Net, the lack of any English speakers to give directions, the doubling of prices on the bill once the waiter sees you: while my memories are Prague and Hungary, they ring as true as yours, Tony. Slán abhaile go luath, a chara.