Good bye Germany, hello Croatia!

Dubrovnik — By Ryan on February 24, 2010 10:26 pm

As per usual my day started especially early with my flight leaving in the wee hours of the morning. Not quite as bad Scotland but the 8am flight or so meant I had to be out of the Hotel by 5 to be safe. And as per usual I was hella glad that I took that paranoid extra step to leave early. After my shower I checked out and then stopped into the basement dinning room, grabbing handfuls of buns and other goodies that the hotel had out for their continental breakfast before making a mad dash to the train terminal. You see I couldn’t resist another amazingly long shower in that cubicle of musical raining bliss so I was running a little late and I had a train to catch. The funny thing is is that I was in such a hurry as in my mind Germany was the absolute model of efficiency, trains here, of all places, would never ever be late. Everything in Germany ran perfectly and on time, 100% of the time in my mind. I remember thinking those literal thoughts as I headed to the train terminal and arrived with 2 minutes to spare before the train to take me to the airport arrived. A train which, going to the airport only costs €3.00 and yet coming from the airport cost €15.00. Anyways, as I was thinking about this country being the model of efficiency a lovely german woman came on the PA to announce my train was 5 minutes late and 5 minutes later she came back on to announce the train was another 10 minutes late. 35 minutes or so later the train did finally arrive and the crowds of impatient germans bustled on. Only later to be bustled off by a woman who was saying something, the only part I could understand was ‘Kaput ist Kaput!’ – when it’s fucked, it’s fucked And so we were all bustled into the front cars of the train, a few of us got off but for the most part we all stayed there. Until of course I realized that in Germany the Front sections of the trains end up going to totally different stops than the back parts of the train. Argh, in a mad dash I jumped off the train before the doors closed and I watched it head off somewhere I didn’t need to be. Counting my lucky stars in the Terminal the lovely lady got back on the PA to tell us that the train to the airport would be arriving in 15 minutes or so. That extra hour early I woke up just saved my ass from the hour late unreliable german trains ha! It’s all good in da hood of course, that’s why these things happen. The next train did arrive relatively on time and I head off on my quick 15 minute commute to the airport to catch a plane to Munich, which would then take me to Zegrab and finally on to Dubrovnik. Joy of joy! A few transfers but all in all it was a relatively short flight into my second country where I didn’t know a clue about the language.

The flight and the planes were surprisingly comfortable, when you think Croatia you automatically assume something from a 1960′s Bond film in Eastern Europe, but it wasn’t much different than anywhere else. Everything was nice, new and the people were friendly and without too much fan fare my plane finally touched down in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, the most in Europe I am willing to wager. Although the airport was 30 minutes outside of town and it was just any old small-town airport. Dubrovnic, I discovered only has a population of 40,000 or so, mainly do to the restrictive nature of the geographic that it sits on. A good thing because the town has maintained the wonderous ancient look and feel without becomming overgrown by sprawl or new developments. It truly is a snapshot in time and a national treasure for Croatia. I grabbed my bags over in the international arrival section after waiting a few minutes in the domestic terminal with everyone else(we did come from Zegrab after all) but eventually some attendants came and dragged a few of us into the next termianl where our bags were waiting, and so was a crazy bearded Croat name Vice. I wasted no time to run over to this man and give him a great bear hug and introduce myself as the mystery voice he’d been hearing all of these months. There was an awfully cute and petite lass by his side which I learned quickly enough was his sister. Of course after seeing how shy she was, and that this was Vice’s sister I wasted no time in capitolizing on the opportunity of making them both uncomfortable as I relentlessly flirted with this unpreppared and quite engaged symbol of Croatian beauty A little game that would carry on everytime I had the pleasure of her company that week, much to Vice’s chagrin.

We arrived to my home for the week, thanks for Vice’s sister driving all the way to the Airport and picking my Canadian ass up and taking me all the way back(I think the chance to see a real live Canuck was just too much for her to pass up) and I quickly unloaded everything into my little corner of the apartment to set out on a quick guided tour of the surroundings and the old city with Vice and his wonderful girlfriend who’s name roughly translates into ‘Petal’, although I use some creative liberties and pretend it translated into ‘Beautiful Petal’ which is what I decided to call her for the duration. Not that Latica isn’t a beautiful name in it’s own right but Beautiful Petal got a little smile out of her every time and so I stuck with that

We left the apartment after a short visit with Vice’s sister and began our glorious walk towards the old city. It was briefly sunny that day and by far the warmest of all of my stops with temperatures close to 10-15 degrees. I was gleeful from the moment I stepped outside the apartment but my glee turned to Elation after walking 5 minutes and comign to a cliff overlooking the magnificent beauty of the Adriatic. It had been weeks since I was away and while I wasn’t conscious of it during my stay in NYC and the rest of Europe I certainly had been longing to see majestic landscapes of nature like back home. The spots in Europe and the US were majectic, of that there can be no doubt, in the human made component, however after growing up with landscapes in my backyard that would make most of the world weep you certainly get used to having such over powering beauty on such a grand scale around you at all times. It wasn’t until this divine view of the Adriatic stretching out as far as the eye could see, the water crashing against the cliffs, opened up in front of me that I realized how much I longed for nature to inspire awe in me with it’s beauty. At which point I turned into a 6 year old boy and spent most of the rest of the walk jumping up and down and exclaming just how bad-ass this part of the world was, and then we arrived to the City Walls themselves and my babbling 6 year old turned into the incomprehensible gurgling of a small infant.

Of the limited cities of the world I have seen Dubrovnik has no equal. For me it is like taking the serentiy of Venice and encapsulating that in the grand majesty of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul(minus the middle eastern motif). The scale of this city is mind boggling, in fact outside of the great wall of china Dubronik has the second longest running city wall in the world and in sections of it it is over 3 meters(21 feet) thick of solid stone. Thank goodness too because during Croatia’s war of independence the city was shelled heavily for weeks on end, and something I learned from seeing the pitiful damage cause to the outer city structure is that missles and grenades are absolutely no match for fortifications of this magnitiude. Sure there were small pock marks here and there but nothing deeper than 5-8 cm and nothing wider than 15 or 20. The damage that the interior buildings took, more specifically the roof tops was more substantial of course as was demonstrated by the large diagram on the wall as you walk in showing where all of the mortor hits and fires were from the attacks.  The black dots represents mortor strikes and the red marks are places of major fires.

This city took one hell of a beating and fairly recently too, that is what makes this place so different than anywhere else I had ever been. The people in this city that are my age had lived through war, lived through bombings and the raids by the former Yugoslav government. Vice, Latica and I stayed up one night talking about the experience and what they had went through 19 years ago:

The rest of the day involved sitting down with Vice and paying my dues for the previous week of taunting over our ensuing Tekken 6 battles when I arrived. Vice being an avid Tekken player laid down the gauntlet and I, having never played Tekken at all in my life, picked it up and slapped him right back. Well I certainly got slapped around that night but much to Vice’s horror that would soon change

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Tags: adriatic, croatia, dubrovnic, fort