Last week was Semana Santa, or Holy Week. As an overwhelmingly Catholic nation, all sorts of pasos (parades) take place in pretty much every city all over Spain. However, I missed out on this cultural experience and decided to stretch out my traveling legs and hop around Europe for a bit. One of the girls I work with, Erin (a fellow Oregonian!), and I flew out of Sevilla and hit up Dubrovnik and Split in Croatia, Ljubljana in Slovenia, and Venice in Italy. It was a fantastic trip and there’s a lot to tell, so I’ll try and share some of the highlights:
Dubrovnik:
Located in Southern Croatia, it is a gorgeous city right on the coast of the Adriatic. The old town is surrounded by large fortress walls and only has a only a few main entryways that can be shut off through simply by closing its heavy metal doors. The buildings in the old part all have red-orange wavy shingles on the rooftops, so everything is quite picturesque, especially around sunset, especially when looking down on the city from above. The hostel we stayed at was outside the old town, up in residential area which was tucked up in the rocky foothills above the coastline. It was a fantastic place to stay – we had a great view of the city and ocean below, were outside of the typical touristy atmosphere, and best of all, actually staying in one of the upper floors of a Slovenian family’s house! The woman who ran the hostel didn’t speak much English, but fortunately her 16 year old daughter (who could pass for at least 20 what with the crazy beyond-her-years poise she possesses) spoke excellent English and gave us helpful suggestions about what to see and where to go and how to get where we needed to be.
A few things we did in Dubrovnik:
Took a day-trip to a few of the nearby Elaphite Islands in a small tour group. (Kolocep, Lopud, and Šipan are the three we visited…) The islands were beautiful, the water was unbelievably clear, and we even lucked out and got sunny weather that followed us to all of our travel destinations throughout the trip! There wasn’t a whole lot open on any of the 3 islands we visited (it’s not quite tourist season), but given the large accumulation of junk piles and hotel/beachfront restoration going on, it was pretty apparent everyone was getting ready to get things ready for the summertime vacationers. One of the most hilarious elements of the trip was our boat captain. Now, I know you aren’t supposed to make fun of how people look, that judging by appearance is a shallow way of evaluating a person, but oh man this guy was a real character … a short wiry Croatian man in baggy pants and worn sweatshirt, with longish hair that hadn’t been washed let alone brushed in so long I think the sea, wind and sun turned it all into dreadlocks which ended up sticking out in all directions like a case of perma-bedhead. The fact that he was alternately texting, rolling cigarettes and smoking while controlling the wheel are all humorous little descriptive details, but one of the most surprising things he did was shortly after we set sail. In his broken English, our hospitable captain asks if any of us if we want anything to drink. Without waiting for a response, he opens up a compartment and whips out a bottle of some sort of homemade (?) hard alcohol complete with seaweed and snail in the bottle. This, along with a couple liters of coke and orange soda along with a sleeve of plastic cups are placed out in front of the group free for the taking. The stuff smelled downright nasty, but a few brave souls went ahead and tried it because really, how often in your life are you offered snail alcohol?
Another highlight of Dubrovnik was getting to walk around the perimeter of the old city on the (aforementioned) giant walls. Not surprisingly, it provided some great views of the city and the surrounding area. A final thing we saw was the war memorial there. It is located on the top of a hill and is located in a building that was actually a fort/look-out used during the fighting. The museum had a lot of information (unfortunately only about 15% of it was translated into English from Croatian…), but a lot of the visuals – pictures taken during the fighting, old weaponry and even some video clips of some of the battles itself – were quite powerful. More than anything, it’s crazy to imagine that there was fighting going on right where we were standing as recently as 1991.
Split:
From Dubrovnik, we took a bus up to Split, which is in the middle of the country longitudinally but still on the coast. Despite being just over 200 km, the ride still took 4.5 hours due to semi-frequent stops in other cities along the way and the drifting two-lane coastal highway that the bus took. It was a pretty ride though, and interesting to see the subtle changes in the landscape. The landscape mostly consisted of rocky hills and cliffs (not large enough to be called mountains) that rise up fairly quickly from the coastline and a wide variety of trees and other sorts of greenery, which kind of surprised me from how rocky the surrounding land seemed. Off the coast were sprinklings of islands, mostly small formations inhabited by vegetation and not much else and, of course, the incredibly clear blue-green waters of the Adriatic.
There wasn’t really a whole lot to do in Split, but it was and interesting place to see and we met some cool people in our hostel and got to spend time sitting around playing cards and swapping travel stories. Anyway, a bit more about the city itself: the oldest part of Split was constructed in/around the walls of a castle built by the Roman Emperor Diocletian in 293 AD, so everywhere you go are old walls and arches and such. Split also seemed to be big on hawking a lot of tourist crap to, well, tourists, and had a large maze of stalls selling various forms of jewelry, shot glasses, postcards, and a million other overpriced trinkets that are fun to look at for 15 minutes or so and then make you really disgusted/bored because everything being sold is the same and the sellers all try and jump on you once you touch one of their products (“Oh, I give you good price…”) when really all you wanted to do was look. We only spent a day and a half here, and while it is a cute city, that’s about all we needed…
… soooo we decided to take the night train to Ljubljana, Slovenia, which I loved, but am going to have to write about later because this post is long enough and I’m sleepy. Laku Noch! (Good night in Croatian!)
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