Dubrovnik, Day One Half

I headed out on the road again. Well, not literally on the road. It’s a long, wet drive from Toronto to Dubrovnik. Besides, I don’t own a car, amphibious or not. And I don’t think any car rental companies would rent me one for intercontinental travel.

But here I am. In Dubrovnik, Croatia. Planes had a lot to do with getting me here. Two planes, to be exact. One from Toronto to Vienna and another from Vienna to Dubrovnik.

I’ve been to the Vienna airport once before. I don’t remember it being as big as it is. That could be because, on that first trip, Vienna was my destination, not a connection point. So I didn’t have to walk to customs and immigration and then walk back to the same gate area my flight landed at, as I did today. Plus, on the way back to the gate area today, I had to go through security again. Then, I had to wend my way through the shopping mall they call the departures area.

On that first trip, I didn’t fly out of Vienna. I flew out of Munich, so I wasn’t subjected to the departure shopping concourse in Vienna.

But enough about the Vienna airport. This is supposed to be about Dubrovnik. Let’s get to that, shall we? Why the heck are you leading me astray with a discussion about the Vienna airport? If you leave it be, this post will be over in no time.

By the time I got to my hotel in Dubrovnik, secured my room (I got there before check-in time and it wasn’t ready when I arrived), and settled in it was about 3:00 in the afternoon. So I didn’t do much in the way of tourist activities today.

Not much, but not nothing.

Dubrovnik Old Town

After checking into my hotel and making use of my bathroom (I’m an old man; bathrooms have taken on a greater significance in my life these days), I walked to Dubrovnik’s old town. It’s beautiful.

For one thing, cars aren’t allowed in. The old town consists of one wide street and some narrower parallel and perpendicular streets and lanes. All of those streets and lanes are paved with stone bricks or tiles. (I didn’t pull any up to see if they have enough depth to be called bricks rather than tiles.)

The surface of the wide street is quite shiny. The paving stones on the narrower streets and lanes sport rougher surfaces.

Many of the lanes, as narrow as they are, have a row of restaurant tables lining one side of them.

On one side of the wide street, the cross-lanes aren’t so much lanes as long sets of stairs. They don’t have restaurant tables. I imagine it’s hard to teeter a restaurant table on a normal depth step.

The shiny-surfaced main street raised a couple of questions in my jet-lagged mind:

1. How do those paving stones stay shiny with the multitudes (see below) tromping on them?
2. If they are shiny when it’s perfectly dry (as it was today), how slippery are they when wet? I hope Dubrovnik has liability insurance for that.

These are the sort of questions that keep me from ever considering anything the least bit important in my life.

I don’t know the vintage of the buildings in the old town, but, as one would expect in something called “old town,” they are relatively old. Most of the shops cater to tourists—restaurants, souvenir sellers, and lots of gelato shops.

The old town also incorporates the old port. It’s a scenic spot by the sea. If it were a landlocked scenic spot it wouldn’t be a port. That’s not how those things work. And that is not to say that all waterfront spots, scenic or not, are or were ports, you understand. Don’t be silly.

Small craft anchor and dock in the old port and a mountain looms up behind the other side of the inlet that shapes the port.

Another feature of Dubrovnik’s old town is people. A great many of them. At least, there were today. I hoped that by going in the shoulder season I might avoid hordes of tourists. It was not to be. I took the pictures here when crowds weren’t blocking the shot. That sometimes required a lot of waiting. In many cases, I gave up on taking a picture of something I wanted to capture because the crowds refused to clear in a reasonable length of time.

Maybe the existence of the crowds had something to do with this being a weekend day (Saturday). I’ll see how it is during the week.

I don’t like crowds. Damned tourists. Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m a tourist. But I never promised to not be hypocritical. I dare you to read all the posts in this journal and find a single instance when I promised to not be hypocritical. If you came here for unwaveringly non-hypocritical verbiage you came to the wrong place.

Here’s the thing. Tourists are perfectly free to visit popular places. But is it too much to ask to have them check my itinerary and avoid going where I’m going when I’m going there?

Franciscan Monastery Museum

In the old town, I stopped in at the Franciscan Monastery Museum and its cloisters. There’s not a lot to see there. The museum is one room. It displays a number (not a huge number) of religious artifacts, including some reliquaries shaped like body parts. There are arm-shaped reliquaries, leg-shaped reliquaries and a head-shaped reliquary.

I’m not going to search for it, but I’m pretty sure I mentioned in previous posts how macabre and weird I think reliquaries are. Nevertheless, old European Catholic institutions are lousy with them.

While I viewed the reliquaries, an older English-speaking couple also looked at them. (I’m pretty sure they are younger than I am, but older than middle age, so “older” in that respect.)

After reading the labels on the display, the wife turned to the husband (I’m only assuming they were married; maybe they were travelling in sin) and asked, “What is a reliquary?” The husband replied, “I’m not sure. But I think we can figure it out from the word. ‘Reli’ is like religion. So I think it has something to do with religious quarries or queries.”

A mental image formed in my brain of me slapping my forehead with a solid wack.

I don’t normally speak up unbidden in that sort of situation. However, under the circumstances, I felt the need to tell them that, “No, reliquaries hold relics left behind by aliens from the planet Quary when they visited Earth centuries ago.”

I felt the need to tell them that, but, unfortunately, that need went unsatisfied. I just told them they allegedly hold relics, typically bones.

The museum also contained a display of the pharmacy that opened there in 1317. For some reason, there was a “no photography” icon in front of the pharmacy display, but nowhere else in the room. So I don’t have a photograph of it.

The pharmacy opened in a new location within the monastery about a century ago, but the Franciscans have operated a pharmacy somewhere in their monastery continuously since 1317.

What sort of pharmaceuticals did they sell in 1317? Eye-of-newt? Then again, the modern pharmacy there closes early on Saturdays, so I couldn’t go in. For all I know, they may sell eye-of-newt now.

The monastery’s cloisters are quite lovely. They surround a small, but lush green space with a path bisecting greenery. At one end of the path sits what I think at one time was a fountain. But it was dry when I was there, so I’m not sure.

My Hotel in Dubrovnik

My hotel is about a half-hour walk from old-town Dubrovnik. So, it probably wasn’t the best choice in that regard.

But it’s a nice resort hotel right by the sea with some lovely views, including the one in the accompanying photo.

The hotel has weird elevators. The only buttons inside the elevator cab are door open, door close, and alarm buttons. There are no floor buttons. Instead, you tap your room keycard on a box on the wall of the elevator lobby. You then use a touchscreen to indicate which floor you want to go to. (I don’t think it would let me choose a floor other than mine or one of the amenity floors.) The touchscreen then tells you which of the three elevators is yours.

It works. And it’s probably more secure. But, for some reason, I find it somewhat disconcerting to not have floor buttons inside the elevator.

It was a short day today in Dubrovnik. I hope I’ll have more for you tomorrow.