Dubrovnik

12 June 2009

"Did you see that?"

Cat #2 hopped through the window and onto the chair and had run out of the room.

"What do we do?"

There are two cats loose in this house.

"Is the front door open?"

"I hope so."

Seconds later Cat #1 returned to the kitchen and jumped out of the window. We were still trying to eat our dinner. Our "hostess" had insisted we eat some plumbs (from her garden?) and sit in her kitchen to eat. By the time the cats started jumping, the others had retreated to their rooms and we were alone.

The meal itself was grim. The canned corn was our main staple at the meal. Everything else was there for decoration. How do I explain this? We were only going to eat the corn, but the hostess, her family and guests (we can't tell who is a guest and who is family) were all witnesses to our pathetic meal, so we brought in all the food we had: chip crumbles, avjar (eggplant and pepper sauce), 2 dried bread heels, and leftover pasta salad. All of this old food was just for show. We were sitting in our hostess' personal kitchen, so we already felt awkward - we didn't want to feel any weirder by having her see us eating only corn.

Sobe are rooms in someone's home for let. Sometimes you end up in a shared apartment situation and sometimes you end up falling asleep staring at photos of somebody's kid. This sobe is somewhere in between.

We don't know this lady's name or even her address (I'm not positive we could find the sobe on a map), but we are staying with her for as many as four nights.

All we know is that she is very generous and had ten toothbrushes in various states of decrepitude in a cup sitting on her medicine cabinet. I'm pretty sure that at least some of these toothbrushes are currently in use. Hopefully, they are all used for different cleaning tasks (the grout in the tub, around the faucet, etc.)

The lady at our last sobe (whose name we also don't know) set up our stay in Dubrovnik (which was really nice seeing as we had no internet and no way to reserve anything ourselves). Although, if we had arrived without a reservation, there would have been no end of little old ladies trying to rent their extra room to us. As soon as we stepped on the bus, we were swarmed. I'm glad we didn't have to sort through the little old ladies to try to find a decent one. We lucked out in Korcula when we did exactly that, but I'm not sure how long our luck would have lasted.

Dubrovnik is spread out like Brasov, Romania. The bus station is some distance from old town, and our sobe is somewhere sort of in between.

Yesterday, we spent the middle of the day in old town Dubrovnik walking around and taking photos.

We spent the afternoon lying on rocks like iguanas at the ocean. We swam a bit, but the water was so cold I couldn't feel my toes, so I wasn't in for long.

Our day ended with the discovery of internet at our sobe and our meal of corn and dried up bread.