| Submitted by: Evelyn C. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 10 February 2005 |
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Even so, the
displays were fairly dull, dealing mostly with trading ships and
commerce. The paintings were mostly of ships foundering in storms
while the Virgin Mary and/or angels look on from an upper corner
without lifting a finger to help.
By the time we finished walking around the wall, we were hot
and tired and so decided to return to the hotel for a rest. The bus
took tickets or exact change--lucky for us, as the kiosk was closed
and this was not the sort of place where they are blase about
whether you pay or not.
When we got back to the hotel, I promptly fell asleep,
something that drives Mark crazy, since he *hates* to waste vacation
time in the hotel room, even though I've told him that watching me
sleep is far more exciting than anything else he could possibly be
doing in a country on the brink of civil war. Still, it had been a
long vacation and was winding down now, and the heat was the sort
that makes a person sleepy.
Dinner was, once again, nothing to write home about (so I
won't). After dinner we went down to the '15th Anniversary'
celebration of the Babin Kuk complex. They had a couple of bands--
one was playing music from GREASE, but the only person dancing was a
three-year-old girl. She wasn't bad though. They were also selling
food and drink, but we had just eaten. Most of the food looked
fairly bland, but they were grilling fish and sheep over open fires,
and that might have been worth trying. The stores were all open,
though not very interesting. They were the usual tourist stores one
finds in resorts, and probably kept resort hours (closed for most of
the day when people were at the beach, and open only during lunch
and in the evening when people were around).
We went to bed about 11 PM. Mark heard Mary and Steve
returning from Medugorje about 11:30 PM. They had gone on a day
trip there; tomorrow we will get a report on what it was like.
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Well, the vacation is rapidly approaching its
end. Today we on our own entirely, since the tour ended yesterday.
But since JAT doesn't fly to New York on Sundays we are stuck here
another day. (It's a pity we couldn't have had this extra day in
Prague, but that's life.)
We took the bus into town with Steve and Mary and walked around
a bit, giving them a quick summary of yesterday's tour. We walked
out to the harbor and took some pictures while people tried to sell
us cruises to various islands. We wandered up some of the side
streets, but only as far as the first set of stairs. Oh, I tried to
take a look at the synagogue, which had been closed yesterday
(because it was Saturday), but it was closed. The sign on it said,
'Open Sunday--Friday 10-12 except Sunday.' That is certainly a
peculiar use of the language.
We stopped in a chocolate shop for Steve and Mary to buy
chocolate for friends back home, then they returned to the hotel
while we decided to stay and climb some more of the stairs and see
more of the town. The back streets were very quiet, with the only
sounds coming from inside the houses as people prepared their Sunday
dinners. (Cars are prohibited inside the Old Town, so there was
none of that noise.) We climbed a lot of stairs, but ended up
seeing a fair amount of the town.
Finally, we went back to the hotel. We got together with Mary
and Steve and spent a little time at the pool. There are actually
two pools, an inside and an outside, both salt-water. They have
beach chairs for rent, but when Steve and Mark asked how much, the
man said 40 dinars (about US$2) each. Since we were only staying
for an hour or so, we decided to just sit on our towels. As they
were walking away, the attendant asked them how much they would be
willing to pay. Funny, it wouldn't seem as though this would be a
bargaining situation.
About 5 PM we took the bus back to the Old Town for dinner at
the Domino Steak House, recommended in a magazine article I had
read. It was a couple of blocks off the Placa and had only one
other table occupied. We had a very nice dinner (which, since I am
writing this almost two months later, I have completely forgotten)
for a very reasonable price. We ate early, because we wanted to get
back to the hotel by sunset so that Steve and Mark could do some
artistic stuff with their cameras and the sunset, which was visible
perfectly from our westward-facing windows. (Actually, they were
more like balconies, albeit very narrow ones. The sliding louvered
doors reminded me a lot of the open architecture of Club Med, and
opening the glass doors so that the breeze could come in was better
than turning on the air conditioning.)
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Last day. We got up at 4 AM, along with all
the other folks who had early planes out of Dubrovnik (mostly
British tourists). Breakfast was coffee, bread, and juice laid out
by some poor staff member who had to get up equally early. Our van
arrived at 5 AM. We saw the driver come in looking for us, so we
went out and loaded our stuff up. When he came out, he seemed
surprised that the van was already loaded and ready to go. I
suspect most tourists let him do this part.
The drive to the airport was longer than I expected. We
checked in, having to remove all batteries from our checked luggage
(this made our carry-on stuff even heavier, as we had a lot of spare
batteries); I don't remember ever having to do this before, but then
I rarely check luggage. Steve and Mary waited near the information
desk for someone to show them where the elevator was to the boarding
level while we went up. Well, it turned out we were boarding on the
tarmac, and through the back of the plane at that. Steve and Mary
were already on, with a story of some complicated maneuvering to get
Mary and her wheelchair on the plane. (I figured that if hordes of
people in wheelchairs came to Medugorje for cures, the closest
airport--Dubrovnik--would certainly be able to handle wheelchair
passengers.)
In the Belgrade we got a surprise--another airport tax. At
first we thought they were just charging us the exit tax twice
(since we had paid already in Dubrovnik), but the amount was
different so I think it was an airport usage tax and not the same
thing again. (This doesn't make me any happier about it, of
course.)
Our flight back to New York was marked by a baby who cried the
entire way. Well, 'baby' is probably not accurate, as the child was
actually three years old. But he was a Romanian orphan being
adopted by someone in the United States (for some complicated
reason, some people who were *not* adopting him were delivering him
to the people who were), and even though he was three years old, he
looked about half that, and was as thin as the children you see in
the famine shots on television. More of Ceausescu's legacy (when we
got home there was an article in WORLD PRESS REVIEW about the 'lost
children of Romania').
As on the way out, the lights and headphone jacks in our row
were broken. Why do they even bother to hand out headphones?
At Kennedy, they had eliminated the quick walk-through for
United States citizens. On the other hand, you cleared immigration
and customs at the same point (before getting your luggage), so when
we got to the carousel the luggage was all pretty much there (the
last piece arrived fairly quickly) and we could just walk out,
handing our customs cards to the man collecting them.
And at last home. All the clothes into the hamper, the den
looks like a whirlwind hit it, there's an enormous stack of books to
be catalogued, there's another pile of film rolls to be developed,
and tomorrow we head back to work.
And the answers to the two quizzes are:
Quiz 1:
1. 23 kilometers
2. Bosnia-Hercegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia,
Slovenia
3. Salzburg, Austria
4. Vienna, Austria
5. 16
6. Johann Strauss
7. Skoda
8. Dalmatia or Dalmatian Coast
9. Kurt Waldheim, Vaclav Havel, and Iliescu
10. St. Vitus' Cathedral in Prague
11. 1968
12. December 25, 1989
13. April, 1990
14. Yugoslavia and Austria
15. Carpathians
16. Moldavia, Transylvania, and Walachia
17. Prague, Bratislava, and Brasov
18. Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia,
Romania, and Bulgaria
19. Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Turkey, and Yugoslavia
20. Romania and the U.S.S.R.
21. Dinar (Yugoslavia), schilling (Austria), koruna
(Czechoslovakia), forint (Hungary), lei (Romania), and lev
(Bulgaria)
22. Mojca and Tone
23. They were originally on the side of the government but are now
siding with the students against the government.
24. Milos Forman
Quiz 2:
1. Croatian, Slovenian, Czech, Bulgarian, and Serbian
2. Serdica
3. Wisdom
4. Monasteries, Black Sea resorts, spas, and winter sports
5. 1876
6. Germany and Austro-Hungary
7. Roman Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Islam
8. Dubrovnik
9. 1918
10. Royalists who started by fighting the Germans in World War II
and then sided with the Germans against the Partisans.
11. King Peter II
12. Archduke Franz Ferdinand
13. Brown and yellow
14. Plum brandy (slivovitz)
15. Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian
16. 500 years
17. Slovenia and Croatia
18. Greece, Albania, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Romania, and
Bulgaria
19. 4.5
T H E E N D
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| Copyright © - "Evelyn C. Leeper" |
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