Monday, May 11, hey we have been wandering around for over 2 weeks now and I still have not done any laundry.
Spent most of the day in Dubrovnik, walking the walls and then visiting some of the town's few other attractions.
Look, I know that Dubrovnik is a 5-star attraction, that busloads of tourists come in each day by the scores, and thousands of tourists are regularly dumped into the town when the cruise ships arrive and disgorge their eager shutterbugs. If it needed further attractions, it is the site (along with other Croatian sites) of many scenes from HBO's Games of Thrones (if you are not aware of or familiar with that show, congratulations to you for having a life outside of television) -- thus spawning Game of Thrones' tours. (I am not kidding. I even overheard one tour guide describing the history of the city in part based on the rivalry between the Lannisters and the Starks.) While it is definitely worth a visit, I think it is a one-trick town, a great looking historical museum piece, with few if any attractions other than the town itself. Unlike Split or Rovinj, which have both history and great looking old towns, albeit much smaller than Dubrovnik's, those towns are living organisms with real people living there. Dubrovnik has about 1000 residents, all the rest have fled to the suburbs and rented out their apartments to the tourists.
While Dubrovnik is chock full of restaurants, virtually all of them seem to be the same and I am told by a few that they are mostly mediocre. We chose to eat lunch in a vegan restaurant, Nishta with an Asian flair (we met an Irish couple, mother, daughter and son) there from Doolan where we had just been 3 months ago) to get out of the pasta, seafood, pizza, ice cream rut. Plus Dubrovnik is very expensive. Most expensive ice cream and accommodations in Croatia and we were not there in high season.
Walking the ramparts of the city walls is the prime activity. It is about a mile and a half of ups and downs with lots of stairs (better exercise than climbing the stairs in Sand Dune Park) and views of the city, ocean and mountains. You also see some of the residents' drying laundry and sitting on their balconies. Two soccer/basketball courts on roofs. if you race around it you can do it in an hour. I suspect that in the summer behind tour groups it could take 3 hours. It all looks great, but after that, not much. We went to a few galleries, a Croatian folk museum -- they are big on festivals and dressing up in animal masks, and the Rector's Palace. The rector was elected by the nobility, a bit of democracy way before the English or US, but due to their fear of one person accumulating too much power, the rector's term was limited to one month. However during that month he got to sleep in a great building. Some other attractions were closed on Monday, but it all seemed to be filler, stuff for the tourists to do after they had finished the wall and before it was time to eat.
If I had the chance I would have done sea kayaking. I think it would have been memorable to paddle around the walls and out to the islands. Maybe even to Italy.
There were also exhibits, including a lot of photographs, about the 1991-92 siege of Dubrovnik by the Serbs. The narratives spoke of the blood-thirsty Serbs and Montenegarians. I suspect that being besieged is not a lot of fun (no electricity, foul-smelling water and limited food) and the Serbs did some terrible stuff, targeting religious buildings and monuments and residential neighborhoods; but the Croats' exhibit was one-sided, narcissitic and overblown. 300 hundred people were killed, 100 of whom were civilians. Not good, but compare that to the Battle of Britain or what was soon to go on in Sarajevo. Moreover, just as Dubrovnik was being besieged, their Croat cousins up north were besieging the Bosnians in Mostar. In that action the Croats blew up the 400-year old Mostar Bridge for no reason other than it was a cultural symbol for the Bosnians.
That gets to my last topic, the Balkan wars of the 1990s. That period was not kind to the Balkans and to Bosnia in particular. There seems to be no logic to what happened and it was obvious from talking to several of the residents that it was a very painful period, when many suffered, lost relatives and some were even today reluctant to talk about it. From my memory of events [I was single during some of that period so I had a lot of free time to read about it in the NY Times after I put the kids to sleep], it seems that Tito had managed to make the many nationalities, ethnic groups and religious groups live together peacefully. There was even a fair amount of intermarriage among the groups. Sarajevo was described as a multi-cultural exemplar during the 1984 winder Olympics. Some of the people we spoke to still spoke of Tito in reverential terms. However, with his death the long simmering hatreds among these groups began bubbling up. As far back as the 12th century when the Croatian kings died out, the Croats threw themselves upon the mercies of the Hungarians as a counterweight against the Serbs (that was a mistake sine it took the Croats 600 years to get their independence back.) In the 20s a Croat parliamentarian leader was assassinated by a Serb. In the 30s a Croat nationalist movement developed with the goal of creating a Greater Croatia. In the 40s after the Germans overran the Balkans, they set up an Independent State of Croatia, which promptly murdered hundreds of thousands of Serbs, as well as a few tens of thousands of Jews and gypsies that were around.
Then the Soviet Union imploded with 15 new countries created and the other eastern block nations threw off their communist regimes (I recall the killing of the hated Romanian ruler and his wife). The Slovenes (don't get them confused with the Slovakians up north or the Slavonians further south) pressed for more freedom within the Yugoslavian federation, and ultimately voted for independence. They were getting increasingly concerned about the antics of the new Yugoslavian leader who was running around Kosovo telling the minority Serbs there that he would use the militray to defend their rights. That was too much for the Slovenes and the Croats, who declared independence. The Serbs, who were the big shots in Yugoslavia, resisted and sent in the Yugoslavian army. (That army had lots of Slovenes and Croats in it, so it must have been a problem to expect them to kill their ethnic cousins).
The war against Slovenia was over in 10 days. However the was against Croatia was ugly and lasted 3 years. It led to the siege of Dubrovnik and its destruction (it was rebuilt) and a spillover into Bosnia, which became a three-way war, Croats, Serbs and Bosnians. That war was really ugly with the long sieges of Mostar and Sarajevo and the mass killings of civilians. It was so bad that at one point the leaders of Croatia and Serbia got together in an attempt to parcel up Bosnia. The Europeans were too pacific to do anything other than to send in peacekeepers, who stood by and watched massacres take place. The whole thing was not finally stopped until Clinton unleashed some bombing runs and Holbrooke forced all to make nice in 1995, resulting the Dayton peace accords.
This is too long. Now I am going to bed so you will have to wait to hear about Mostar until next time.
Spent most of the day in Dubrovnik, walking the walls and then visiting some of the town's few other attractions.
Look, I know that Dubrovnik is a 5-star attraction, that busloads of tourists come in each day by the scores, and thousands of tourists are regularly dumped into the town when the cruise ships arrive and disgorge their eager shutterbugs. If it needed further attractions, it is the site (along with other Croatian sites) of many scenes from HBO's Games of Thrones (if you are not aware of or familiar with that show, congratulations to you for having a life outside of television) -- thus spawning Game of Thrones' tours. (I am not kidding. I even overheard one tour guide describing the history of the city in part based on the rivalry between the Lannisters and the Starks.) While it is definitely worth a visit, I think it is a one-trick town, a great looking historical museum piece, with few if any attractions other than the town itself. Unlike Split or Rovinj, which have both history and great looking old towns, albeit much smaller than Dubrovnik's, those towns are living organisms with real people living there. Dubrovnik has about 1000 residents, all the rest have fled to the suburbs and rented out their apartments to the tourists.
While Dubrovnik is chock full of restaurants, virtually all of them seem to be the same and I am told by a few that they are mostly mediocre. We chose to eat lunch in a vegan restaurant, Nishta with an Asian flair (we met an Irish couple, mother, daughter and son) there from Doolan where we had just been 3 months ago) to get out of the pasta, seafood, pizza, ice cream rut. Plus Dubrovnik is very expensive. Most expensive ice cream and accommodations in Croatia and we were not there in high season.
Walking the ramparts of the city walls is the prime activity. It is about a mile and a half of ups and downs with lots of stairs (better exercise than climbing the stairs in Sand Dune Park) and views of the city, ocean and mountains. You also see some of the residents' drying laundry and sitting on their balconies. Two soccer/basketball courts on roofs. if you race around it you can do it in an hour. I suspect that in the summer behind tour groups it could take 3 hours. It all looks great, but after that, not much. We went to a few galleries, a Croatian folk museum -- they are big on festivals and dressing up in animal masks, and the Rector's Palace. The rector was elected by the nobility, a bit of democracy way before the English or US, but due to their fear of one person accumulating too much power, the rector's term was limited to one month. However during that month he got to sleep in a great building. Some other attractions were closed on Monday, but it all seemed to be filler, stuff for the tourists to do after they had finished the wall and before it was time to eat.
If I had the chance I would have done sea kayaking. I think it would have been memorable to paddle around the walls and out to the islands. Maybe even to Italy.
There were also exhibits, including a lot of photographs, about the 1991-92 siege of Dubrovnik by the Serbs. The narratives spoke of the blood-thirsty Serbs and Montenegarians. I suspect that being besieged is not a lot of fun (no electricity, foul-smelling water and limited food) and the Serbs did some terrible stuff, targeting religious buildings and monuments and residential neighborhoods; but the Croats' exhibit was one-sided, narcissitic and overblown. 300 hundred people were killed, 100 of whom were civilians. Not good, but compare that to the Battle of Britain or what was soon to go on in Sarajevo. Moreover, just as Dubrovnik was being besieged, their Croat cousins up north were besieging the Bosnians in Mostar. In that action the Croats blew up the 400-year old Mostar Bridge for no reason other than it was a cultural symbol for the Bosnians.
That gets to my last topic, the Balkan wars of the 1990s. That period was not kind to the Balkans and to Bosnia in particular. There seems to be no logic to what happened and it was obvious from talking to several of the residents that it was a very painful period, when many suffered, lost relatives and some were even today reluctant to talk about it. From my memory of events [I was single during some of that period so I had a lot of free time to read about it in the NY Times after I put the kids to sleep], it seems that Tito had managed to make the many nationalities, ethnic groups and religious groups live together peacefully. There was even a fair amount of intermarriage among the groups. Sarajevo was described as a multi-cultural exemplar during the 1984 winder Olympics. Some of the people we spoke to still spoke of Tito in reverential terms. However, with his death the long simmering hatreds among these groups began bubbling up. As far back as the 12th century when the Croatian kings died out, the Croats threw themselves upon the mercies of the Hungarians as a counterweight against the Serbs (that was a mistake sine it took the Croats 600 years to get their independence back.) In the 20s a Croat parliamentarian leader was assassinated by a Serb. In the 30s a Croat nationalist movement developed with the goal of creating a Greater Croatia. In the 40s after the Germans overran the Balkans, they set up an Independent State of Croatia, which promptly murdered hundreds of thousands of Serbs, as well as a few tens of thousands of Jews and gypsies that were around.
Then the Soviet Union imploded with 15 new countries created and the other eastern block nations threw off their communist regimes (I recall the killing of the hated Romanian ruler and his wife). The Slovenes (don't get them confused with the Slovakians up north or the Slavonians further south) pressed for more freedom within the Yugoslavian federation, and ultimately voted for independence. They were getting increasingly concerned about the antics of the new Yugoslavian leader who was running around Kosovo telling the minority Serbs there that he would use the militray to defend their rights. That was too much for the Slovenes and the Croats, who declared independence. The Serbs, who were the big shots in Yugoslavia, resisted and sent in the Yugoslavian army. (That army had lots of Slovenes and Croats in it, so it must have been a problem to expect them to kill their ethnic cousins).
The war against Slovenia was over in 10 days. However the was against Croatia was ugly and lasted 3 years. It led to the siege of Dubrovnik and its destruction (it was rebuilt) and a spillover into Bosnia, which became a three-way war, Croats, Serbs and Bosnians. That war was really ugly with the long sieges of Mostar and Sarajevo and the mass killings of civilians. It was so bad that at one point the leaders of Croatia and Serbia got together in an attempt to parcel up Bosnia. The Europeans were too pacific to do anything other than to send in peacekeepers, who stood by and watched massacres take place. The whole thing was not finally stopped until Clinton unleashed some bombing runs and Holbrooke forced all to make nice in 1995, resulting the Dayton peace accords.
This is too long. Now I am going to bed so you will have to wait to hear about Mostar until next time.
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