The Pearl Of The Adriatic

Let me just say without preamble... Dubrovnik is an amazing city.  We are staying in a nice guest house with a very friendly proprietor on the hill above the town, and we get pretty spectacular views of the ocean and the sunsets.  We trekked into the Old Town on our first day here, which is surrounded by a huge wall, constructed between the 13th and 16th centuries, and which is closed to cars.  The effect is to plunge back into history (albeit with modern day tourists), with narrow cobbled streets, old monasteries and churches, and vendors selling their wares.  The wall protects the harbor, which was historically very important.  It was all too easy to imagine commanding the defense of the city from atop the wall.  After doing a tour of the walls, we decided to escape the direct sun (it's cooking hot here, and less breezy than Hvar, resulting in a lot more tiredness!) and explored the little streets of the old town.  We made our way to a museum called War History Limited, which displays the work of photo journalists.  The exhibits there currently all centered on the conflict that arose upon the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, and the photos were intense.  It was relevant to where we are, and especially where we're going next, and it was helpful to get more of a context for the cultural difficulties facing the people of Croatia and Bosnia and Hercegovina. From what we understand, the upcoming stops in Mostar and Sarajevo are going to show the conflict much more obviously than Croatia and Slovenia have.  After the museum, we both needed some time to process, so we grabbed an ice cream (chocolate solves everything, ok?), and hid in the shade of a giant drinking/bathing fountain that emits deliciously cold water... a blessing in this heat!

Today we started off the day at the Museum of Modern Art, which was doing an exhibition on Steve McCall, the photographer for National Geographic (among other influential magazines) who took the photo of the young Afghan Girl.  All his work was amazing, and we really enjoyed ourselves trying to guess people's life stories from their piercing eyes.  He is a really amazing photographer... I aspire to capture half of what he does in portraits.  Then we walked to the beach, with the idea of getting some sun.  In the end, we spent most of the time in the water, because it is so darned hot!!  The water here is warm, it's hardly refreshing.  We had a really lovely view back over the water to the Old City and harbor.

Tomorrow we're taking off really early for Mostar, since we only have one day there.  We have a list of things to see, and we're psyched.  Loads of love to everyone at home!