Day 18 - Dubrovnik

Last night, after my chicken curry at the local Chinese restaurant, I went to a pseudo-semi-Irish pub with Christina and Anne. Three times thirty is not 120. I must remember this. They had a live band playing, with different guys taking turns through the night. Piano, acoustic guitar, upright bass, drums. A Croatian version of jazz, but they called it Mediterrean pop-something. Whatever. It was good music. Apparently they play there every night. I hope they enjoy it. The hostel's curfew (the front door is locked) is at 2 a.m., so I cut out a bit ahead of the lasses (they have a hotel). On the mile-long walk back, the night was filled with lightning and thunder, but no rain. It started dumping an hour later, or so I hear.

This morning, after laundry and breakfast (yes, in that order), I toured the walls of the old town.



The slightly-lighter tiles are new ones from after the shelling during the Homeland War.



There's not really any more words that I can add that isn't summed up by those two pictures, so we'll move right along. Here are some more pictures from wandering through town. First, the cathedral as viewed from the portico of the rector's palace.



And now the clock tower. Note the time is shown twice, analog and digital.



And 12:40 just happens to be when I was walking past the tower to catch the 13:00 boat to the island of Lokrum, which is just offshore Dubrovnik. There's a monastery there. There's always a monastery. Besides the monastery are botanical gardens with all sorts of exotic plants that the island's owner imported in the 1800's and let grow wild.



Lokrum has several "beaches," too, but their definition of "beach" is very loose indeed. Craggy rocks and boulders with just a few flat spots where you could lie down and not really any place where you'd want to enter the water. The nude beach was uninhabited.



I had considered leaving Dubrovnik on an 11:00 bus this morning, but I'm glad I changed my mind. This city just needed more time.