Croatia (Part I)

If a picture says 1,000 words - then let this tell the story of Dubrovnik. Ok, so maybe it's a little trite to suggest that a picture of me jumping into the Adriatic in any way signifies anything about Dubrovnik - it's simply a "belligerent American" (which is how we referred to ourselves on this trip) mindlessly and reckless trying to get a little thrill (which I did and, yes, I have health insurance). I will admit though that one of the highlights of the trip was roaming the city walls of the Old City, looking for new places to cliff jump.

Constructed in the late 12th century and situated on the coastal southern tip of Croatia, the Old City of Dubrovnik was a leading trading center for centuries. The world watched in horror as the Old City (Stari Grad) of Dubrovnik was blasted by over 2,000 shells in 1991 and 1992 during the civil war that ravaged the former Yugoslavia, causing damage to 68% of the 824 buildings in the Old City. We noticed no effects of the shelling as the Croatians had carefully and meticulously restored the Old City to her former glory.

Let's get this out of the way...Croatian women are beautiful - there's really no other way around that. We pretty much referred to it as a "joke" the entire time. I mean, really it was a big joke. With that said, as three Christian young men, we did our best - and were quite successful.

From the slick marble city streets to the cathedrals, the architecture in Dubrovnik was intricate and stunning. The city walls jet out of the Adriatic forming a barrier about a half mile square protecting the city from invaders. We wandered around the city during the day, cliff jumping, wandering through the old city streets looking for cool retro Croatia T-Shirts and, of course you can't forget the backpacker's patches - which we picked up in every country to sew on our packs.

We found the fish in Croatia to be prepared slightly different than we were used to, but good nonetheless. After wandering around the Old City for a day, we headed off to find a Sobe - Croatia has a huge network of people who have converted a room in their home to a guest room - and they denote it with a sign out front that says "Sobe". If you walk down any Croatian street near a tourist location, you'll see Sobe after Sobe. We would walk up any house with a Sobe sign, knock on the door and see if they had a room available. That was probably one of the coolest things about Croatia - we didn't have to book or worry about hotels or hostels - we just knocked on people's doors and found places to stay.

After leaving the Old City, the 2nd house we came to had a Sobe sign. We secured our room for the night with 45 Euros and headed off to jump off of more stuff. Cotter, pictured below - poses in mid-air.

Our Sobe turned out to be amazing - we had an epic view of the Adriatic from where we had our dinner. Trying to conserve money, many of our dinners consisted of some sort of sandwich we threw together at a local market, cheese, and wine. The girls at this market were kind enough to make us sandwiches to go. 3 sandwiches, a bar of chocolate and a bottle of Croatian wine = 70 Kuna, or about $13. The girls at the market were also kind enough to laugh hysterically at us the entire time we were in the market...we still don't know why, but we found that to be a common theme...so we just laughed along - because if we were laughing too, then, in our minds at least, they were laughing with us and not at us.

After a some dinner and a shower, we headed down to the city to enjoy a Dubrovnik sunset. We watched the sun set below the sea and toasted a glorious Dubrovnik day. After the sunset, we headed back within the city walls for some espresso. European coffee is good. It was kind of hard to put our finger on the different coffee experience we were having...but we decided that for Europeans, coffee is more of an "event" than it is here in the States. Something to be savored, not guzzled. I'm not sure, maybe we were just sort of euphoric about the whole thing - either way, we loved it.
None of the three of us are the clubbing type, but being in Europe for over 2 weeks, we figured we had to go "out" at least once. So we "put our shirts on" as we said (each of us brought one nice shirt which were collectively referred to as "our shirts"). Anytime someone wanted to look a little more than a scummy, smelly, American backpacker - they would suggest that we put "our shirts" on and go out.
At any rate, we headed back to the room to put our shirts on. Being my little brother's birthday, I had promised before I left that I would propose a toast to him with Croatian Plum brandy "Slijvovica" (the Croatian locals are famous for distilling their own, so we figured, when in Rome...). I had picked up the brandy from a farmer on the side of the road on our way to Dubrovnik for 40 Kunas = about $7.50 US. It was...powerful...to say the least - but we forced it down as I proposed a toast to James.
Feeling warm, we headed to Club Latina (which is a misnomer because there's nothing Latina about it...Croatians love to dance to remixes of 90's rock music). We clubbed it up, Croatian-style in Dubrovnik and capped off, what was my favorite stop on our trip.