The next two weeks went by pretty fast, I can barely remember what I did! My school had discount tickets to a football game one night so me and my roommates took advantage and ended up having seats pretty close up to the field - Fulham vs. Hull City.
After that we had another week of classes before spring break. Classes ended wednesday but we didn't leave until Sunday so I had a couple days to relax and get ready for the next week. The weather was really nice so on the night before we left we sat outside in our little "garden" and just relaxed.
On Sunday my roommate Jenni and I left for our trip to Croatia and Montenegro. We first went to Dubrovnik, Croatia which is one of the Dalmatia Islands. Even though it was their "winter" and offseason, it was still really beautiful and the weather was a comfortable 50-60 degrees. We stayed in a fabulous guest house that I found online - this older woman, Anka, had about 4 rooms in her small "house" right inside the old city. For about 20 bucks a night, about the same as a hostel, Jenni and I shared room with a queen sized bed, private bathroom with towels and hair dryer, tv, adjustable heat, and we access to a small kitchenette that had tea, coffee, milk, biscuits, and cookies. They were so welcoming and laid back - they didn't want payment until the day we left and they even let us keep the keys for our room and the house for whenever we decided to come back from Montenegro. We mostly interacted with Anka's 32 yr old niece who splits her time between Australia and Croatia. We had a good time talking to her and she took us out one night to experience the nightlife which was a little limited since it was off season. She said there was only really 1 place to go that night to get the real Croatian experience and kept describing it as "ethnic" which we didn't understand at first. Once we got there we realized that the music was all Croatian sang by a little man with a microphone and the bar was extremely tiny, but it ended up being really fun despite the fact that people just couldn't understand that we didn't speak their language!
Over the couple days we stayed in Croatia we spent a lot of time walking around checking out the old city which is basically a fortress with really high walls that we were able to walk on. We spent about 2 hours walking the walls and got great views of the city and water surrounding it. We also met several English speaking people up there. We also walked outside of the old city and checked out the surrounding town. We also found a wooded park area and also walked along these rocks on a cliff.
Since we only booked 2 nights at the guesthouse we decided to pick up and take a 2.5 hr bus to Budva, Montenegro. We got there and had absolutely no plans so we had to ask a tourist office about where to stay and ended up with this lady who spoke absolutely NO english whatsoever! The first few minutes were very amusing and frustrating - we could understand that 1 night was 15 euro a night each and 2 nights would be 10 euro a night each, but we could get her to understand that we were going to stay one night maybe two. After each of us speaking our own languages repeatedly louder and slower (as if that were going to help...) and various hand motions, she bursted out laughing and ended up calling her friend whose 12 year old boy helped us translate.
After we got our sleeping situation figured out, we decided to check out the city. We had a map and stopped to ask someone for directions by pointing to the map, but it just so happened that the person we stopped spoke English! Turns out he was a soccer player who was originally from Nigeria and used to play for Italy but just got moved to Montenegro. His teammate who was also there was from Serbia and spoke Serbian and a little bit of Italian but no English, so we had a fun time trying to communicate between all four of us. We found this restaurant that had tables right by the water and it was a great day out so we spent a while there. Later that night we had a really good dinner at a restaurant right by the water. Again, it was there offseason, so it was even more desolate than Croatia but still an interesting experience. We walked around the city and realized that it was definitely not as well off and that their lifestyle was totally different. We couldn't figure out why we only saw women working at the supermarkets and quick shops and saw men sitting around drinking coffee all day, and we later figured out that after the war (Montenegro split from Yugoslavia relatively recently) men had to sell their farms and so have nothing else to do! Also, their views on woman are very different - apparently they are viewed as only useful to have kids and so they all have kids young. Great. After staying for two nights (it pretty much rained our whole second day... we spent a lot of time in supermarkets looking at all their weird food) we were ready to go back to Croatia. Still, the 2.5 hr bus ride was worth it because the views were AMAZING. There were no bridges or anything so we literally drove on the side of a cliff around the island and had beautiful views of ports, towns, the ocean, and even snow capped mountains.
Back in Dubrovnik we had really great weather and at one point laid out on these rocks by the water and got some sun for a couple hours. It was still in only the 60s but there were some older locals swimming getting their laps in. On our last day we bought some handmade lace and embroidery from these old ladies that we kept seeing during the week. Overall our time their was really relaxing and we spent a lot of time walking around and enjoying the weather but we also enjoyed laying around our room and taking naps and catching up on sleep.
Pictures will be up soon! You will die when you see them!
No comments:
Post a Comment