Towards the end of our week, Allie turned to me and asked me what my five favorite and five least favorite moments of the trip were. I gave her my answer, and then being me… I realized that she had given me a great format to write my blog post about Croatia! (Sidebar: She then smacked me on the arm for being such a dork. This happens more often than you would think. Actually… probably about as much as you would think.) So, without further ado, the five best and worst moments of my Croatian vacation! (Sidebar: Hey, that rhymes! If Allie were here, she would have smacked me in the arm again right now.)
The Five Worst Things About Croatia:
Number Five: The Language Barrier
Now, you might be confused about this one, seeing as I am currently living in a foreign country where the language isn’t even read in the same direction as English, which Croatian certainly is. And truth be told, this wasn’t even that much of a problem, but I needed a fifth issue. However, in Israel, even when you encounter someone that doesn’t speak English, a real effort is made to understand each other until some form of communication is established. My Hebrew is still pretty weak, but I can get around pretty well here. However, when you encounter the rare Croatian that doesn’t speak any English, you’ll find you have a problem. I’ll focus on the time that Allie and I went to a café in the old city for lunch one day.
(Sidebar: Hold on. This is number six. FROMMER’S NEEDS TO FIRE WHOEVER WROTE THEIR SECTION ON DUBROVNIK AND CROATIA. They had no idea what they were talking about, from their restaurant selections to their assertion that Croatians all eat a huge lunch and barely eat dinner. Every store in town advertised a “light lunch” of a sandwich or some pizza. This was really frustrating throughout the trip. Not the lunch thing. The bad advice. Grr.)
So Allie and I were looking for a place for our “light lunch”, and we decided on a café overlooking the main street. We asked the waitress for a menu, and after she got excited about her English customers… she gave us a menu in Italian. OK, so that’s not such a big deal. Maybe a bit of a warning sign, but no big deal. We sat down, looked through the menu, and Allie chose two dishes she was deciding between. We called over the waitress – “Excuse me, which of these two do you like better?” “Yes!” Um… no? This went on for a while. “How big is the sandwich?” “Uh huh!” Oy vey. This went on for a while. “We’d also like two glasses of water. Not bottles. No, NOT bottles. From the sink.” At this point, I was even pantomiming turning on a faucet and filling a glass. Any guesses as to what we were given? In the end we had a very nice lunch… but at least some effort to communicate would have been nice.
Number Four: The Weather
Throughout the trip, the weather was pretty consistent. Not too cloudy and between 60-65°F the whole way. Pretty nice, right? OK, now look back on what I wanted from the vacation. Does this sound like beach weather to you? For all my talk about how I wanted to relax on the beach, and how Croatia has the some of the most beautiful beaches in the world… we got to spend a few hours at the beach on the last day. We wanted to go to some of the islands, but they were all closed due to the offseason. (We’ll pick up on this again later.) Even when we did go to the water, it was way too cold to get in. Even the hotel pool was closed! Very nice weather for sightseeing, but not so much for getting a tan.
Number Three: The MuseumsAllie and I spent a few days exploring the old city, and we decided to spend some of that time exploring some of the various museums that were available. It was a pretty good deal: 40 kuna for 1 museum, 45 for 2, and 50 for all three. After dropping the 50 kuna (or 10 bucks) for all three… well, we didn’t even make it to the third one. Our first stop was to the agricultural museum, which was hidden in some corner of the city about 75 stairs up. Probably a bad sign. To our surprise, we were the only people there – there was one curator who went scurrying off the second we hit her floor. On top of that, the items were barely (if at all) labeled. For example, next to the rake was a card that read, “Rake”. No year that it was from. No special description of how it was used. Nothing. For all I know, this thing was used a month ago and then tossed into a tub of water to rust it. Despite that museum’s failure, we headed off to the cultural museum – had to be better, right? Well, it was certainly more crowded, and the items were labeled better, but I had a bit of an issue with the curators. And by “curators”, I actually mean “security guards”, since that was the role they played. We were followed into every single room, and rather than be asked if we would like any more information on what we were looking at, we were watched like hawks to make sure we didn’t touch anything. In fact, none of them said a single word to us at all, instead giving us accusatory looks the entire time. “How dare these visitors look at our museum exhibits!” After that frustrating experience, we decided to skip the maritime museum – I had better things to do with my time than be treated like a delinquent child.
Number Two: Everything in Dubrovnik Closes at 9PMOn one of the first nights of the trip, Allie and I went to one of Dubrovnik’s nicer restaurants to celebrate our 6-month anniversary. We decided to book the reservation for 9:30, figuring there was no reason to rush. To our surprise, pretty much the entire staff (including the manager) was waiting at the door for us when we arrived, ready to guide us to our table. We quickly realized why – there was only one other group at the restaurant! It ended up being a great meal, but we began to realize that this was a sort of trend. For some reason, everyone in Dubrovnik shuts down really early, leading to a total lack of tourists in the city at night. When we attempted to find something to do another night, we found that every single shop was shut down and there was nothing to do. This was really part of a greater trend, that being that we had inadvertently shown up at the offseason (despite Frommer’s assertion that April was the start of the tourism season – damn you Frommer’s!). We managed to work our way around it, but there were quite a few things we weren’t able to do because of this.
And that leads us directly into our number one issue with Croatia…Number One: Korcula
We took a few day trips during our week in Croatia, one of which you’ll read about later, and one of which was to the island of Korcula. The day got off to a good start – we had a friendly and informative tour guide (who looked just like Jimmy Fallon), we stopped off in a cool and tiny little town called Ston for some Croatian coffee, and then we boarded a long and slow ferry for the island. And then we actually got to the island. To our surprise, practically the entire island was closed, making it a virtual ghost town. No shops open. No restaurants open. No one on the streets. Absolutely nothing. The island is supposedly the birthplace of Marco Polo, but even his house – what you would think to be the main attraction – was closed. (Sidebar: Remember when Egypt claimed to have the Burning Bush? I put this in the same category. For example, the house we didn’t get to go in was built in the 15th century, but Marco Polo was born in the 13th century. Seems like that would be a bit of an obstacle.) After a quick walk through the very small town, we were on our own for three hours. Three hours. IN A TOWN WITH NOTHING TO DO. We tried going to a restaurant that the tour guide recommended, an Italian place with homemade macaroni, but they ran out of food by the time we got there… at 12:30. We resigned ourselves to eating at a pizza place where the waiter rolled his eyes at me when I asked a third time for the water he had never given me. The rest of the time was spent hanging out on a little rocky area by the shore that we found for ourselves, where a stray cat found us and decided to keep us company. Really, just a disaster of a day trip, and the easy choice for the worst thing about Croatia.
I'm going to cut it here to prevent this from getting too long, but check back tomorrow for the 5 best things. We really did have a great trip, promise!
