Tales of Dubrovnik Glory: Volume II

If you've read this blog before, you  know that this was not my first time in Dubrovnik. When I visited Croatia for spring break last year, my fellow teachers and I had made a day trip from Split down to the beautiful old city, and although it had been a pretty good day and we'd gotten up on the wall (and had gotten a little hydrated for our efforts), the weather had thrown a definite monkey wrench in our plans. So when Jo and I started talking about what to see in Croatia and I advocated very strongly for Dubrovnik, because while Split had been very cool I felt that Dubrovnik was just a little bit more pedestrian friendly, a little more convenient in the general path we were taking, and most importantly, I really wanted a second shot there.

So I was very excited, it's fair to say, when our ship came in to the port. The stranger waiting for us was none other than Gordana's son, the lady who was renting us our room via airbnb. I think this may have been my most successful use of airbnb to date (barring my parents' visit and stay in an apartment in Budapest, but I don't count that since they were paying!). Gordana's son picked us up and brought us to our room, which was air-conditioned with an amazing balcony, some liquor, instant coffee, a comfortable bed, a shower with amazing (like, a little bit overwhelming) water pressure, and also, THE BALCONY. Look at this view. To see this view is to understand just how much we felt like we'd hit jackpot.

The only downside of this place: climbing up and down this damn hill every time we wanted to get into old city. Still, totally worth it.

  

Strikin' a pose.

   

And those are just SOME of the many, many pictures I took... on the first night.

I remember roughly what we did in Dubrovnik, although a lot of it is definitely a chilled-out haze. This was a really lovely stopping point for us between go-go-go sections of our trip. I'm pretty sure that on the first night we went down into the old walled city and had a nice dinner at Dubrovna, a fancy restaurant, but I think the next day we spent mostly hanging out on our balcony, soaking up some sun, taking in the views, and finding the supermarket/having a balcony picnic.

  

Blue skies.

Doom. Also, Lokrum Island in the distance, more on that later!

Although we had several delicious pizzas and good seafood, this was perhaps one of my favorite meals in Croatia. Jo and I raided the supermarket and came back with a lunch of bread, crackers, goat-cheese stuffed red peppers, cheese, dried fruit, dried meat, regular fruit, tomatoes, and dark beer. A good lunch was had by all.

A shot taken of the Minčeta tower, the highest point of the walls of Dubrovnik. I didn't even notice this at the time of taking the picture but if you look in the background you can see a huge bolt of lightning off in the distance.

Okay so if memory serves the next day we did actually get down to exploring, starting with a kayaking tour of the walls of the city, the nearby island of Lokrum, and a cave/swimming spot a few miles down the beach from Dubrovnik.

Legally obligated to be strangled to death by our life jackets.

Kayaking around Dubrovnik Castle/St. Lawrence Fortress/Fort Lovrijenac/Dubrovnik's Gibraltar.

Kayaking around the walls of the city.

Heading out towards the island, we were at least not the absolute slowest pair of kayakers.

Approaching the island. As we kayaked along the city the tour guide stopped us all periodically to tell us about the very interesting history of Dubrovnik as the capital of a republic and as a city that functioned basically as a city-state of its own. It benefited enormously from its strong walls, good position between Venice and the Ottoman Empire, and a tax imposed on all outsiders entering the city. But I don't remember too many of the details of those talks so I'd recommend looking it up for yourself if you're interested. I do remember the history he told us, however, of the island of Lokrum, which used to house a Benedictine monastery. The guide told us that when the monks were forced to leave the island they took all of their candles and lit them, then carried them upside down around the island saying that it would be cursed for whoever owned it for as many years as there were drops of wax in the sand. The island went on to be owned by the Hapsburgs (execution, insanity, inbreeding, general misfortune during the 19th/20th century) and as our tour guide said, now the Croatian government owns it and hasn't been doing to well either, so maybe the monks were onto something.

The island these days can be visited, there's a botanical garden, restaurant, and I think maybe even a hotel? And supposedly no bad luck will come to you, as long as you don't try to own it.

Kayaking into one of the caves in Lokrum.

Kayaking out of said cave. You can see just a small portion of all the damn birds that live on this island.

After stopping for a little swim in a nearby coastal cave [picture not featured] we headed back to our starting point, one of the little ports along the coast of Dubrovnik.

I noticed this sign as we were leaving, in a small cement patio near the water, which if true would make this structure older than my own country.

This is where we left from. As you can see it was a gorgeous day for swimming and that wall on the left side served as a kind of jumping rock for many, many teenagers.

This was an ambitious day for us as we not only kayaked around the city but we also went up and walked around the whole (well, most of) the city on the medieval city walls. Jo did, anyway, I only walked around half of the city for reasons I will explain below.

Views of our walk from the first half of the wall, having a lovely (if somewhat hot) stroll along the wall, taking in the island and the fortress from a different vantage point, enjoying the people watching.

And then. As we were walking we chanced upon a shop (still on the wall) selling freshly-squeezed juice. Though we at first made to walk right past this shop, we both paused seeing the juices coming out (they looked amazing and we were so hot, so thirsty). We ordered two and excitedly sat down, at which point we both realized we no nowhere near enough Croatian currency to pay for the juices. And we were on the wall where there was not an ATM in sight. What to do?! Our juices arrived and we continued to panic quietly, huddled together at our table while we tried to devise plan. First we decided only one of us could leave. I knew we were close to the halfway point of the wall where you're allowed to climb down into the city, get some food if you want, then climb back up and complete the second half. So off she went to try and find an ATM. She came back soon enough, because she could not in fact find one nearby. Then I realized that I had a $20 bill, which would cover our juices (fucking Dubrovnik prices!). But we were pretty embarassed at this point, so we left the money and ran when the waiters weren't around. As we scurried up the stairs to the next clearing in the wall we thought we'd gotten away with it. Only as we neared the stairs of the halfway point did I realize that I'd left my ticket on the table, which meant that if anyone was checking tickets I wouldn't be able to get onto the second half of the wall. Jo was a true champion and went back to the juice place to check for the ticket but alas, it was gone. So I climbed down and made my way back towards the starting point, grabbing some money and stewing in my failure on a shady doorstep near the entrance of the wall while I waited for Jo to come down.

Here's a shot I took while we drank our juices. Those umbrellas were actually a fairly large cafe, set in the stone cliffs outside the walls of the city, that looked amazing.

Here I am reveling in the failure and panic of our juice acquisition.

We spent some more time eating and exploring in Dubrovnik, although I think those are the most noteworthy adventures. These last two photos are from a late-afternoon coffee we had on the main street (Stradun) while we enjoyed some tourist watching. It was then that the little marching band of the second picture strolled by, drumming and marching, as one does when part of an olde-timey marching band. A nice end to the trip.

The next day we were up and out early, headed to the bus station. I fully confess that I was a total grouch about it after being spoiled by sleeping in (relatively speaking) for a couple days. And Jo and I both fell down on our transportation game a bit during our time in Dubrovnik by not going to the bus station and buying our tickets ahead of time, forcing us to leave for the bus station at the crack of dawn in hopes that tickets to Kotor, Montenegro, our next destination, would not be sold out. In my defense, if we missed that bus we would have been very much screwed re: hotel/transportation costs. So it was a tense 35/40 minutes that we waited, the sun barely risen, at a dinky little bus stop near our airbnb apartment for the bus to come and take us to the real depot. Thankfully, things worked out in our favor. We made it to the station, and although the first bus was sold out (okay this part did not work in our favor) the second bus, ostensibly leaving at noon, still had seats available. We sat down at the bus station and enjoyed a coffee while we waited... and waited... and waited.... 11 AM and the bus we wouldn't take came and left, and still we waited. Noon rolled around and we got ourselves to the spot where we thought our bus would arrive. Time rolled on and I believe it was almost 1:30 before our bus, unmarked and parked in the wrong spot, finally pulled up and start loading people on. The only indications we had that it was in fact our bus was that we were by that point desperately searching every bus that arrived and this one's noticeable lack of signage indicating its destination seemed like a good a clue as any it was ours, and although the ticket taker/bus driver was EXTREMELY unhelpful re: whether this was our bus, on comparing our tickets to other passengers boarding we found they were going in the same general direction as we were.

Good enough.

It wasn't until we'd left and been riding for about 20 minutes that we finally got an actual confirmation, when the ticket checker looked at our printed our ticket receipts and nodded almost imperceptibly, that we were in fact going to Montenegro.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Löwendenkmal

In all honesty, my main motivation for going to Lucerne was to see the Löwendenkmal, the Lion of Lucerne. It's a sculpture, a relief carved into a stone wall in the city, that is beautiful and sorrowful and has an interesting history. It's part of an effort that can be seen throughout the whole town to commemorate the Swiss Guard killed during the French Revolution. It was sculpted by Bertel Thorvaldsen. The words carved into the sculpture read, Helvetiorum Fidei ac Virtuti ("To the loyalty and bravery of the Swiss"). The wikipedia article on the lion has a quote from Mark Twain, which I think describes it better than I possibly could:

The Lion lies in his lair in the perpendicular face of a low cliff — for he is carved from the living rock of the cliff. His size is colossal, his attitude is noble. His head is bowed, the broken spear is sticking in his shoulder, his protecting paw rests upon the lilies of France. Vines hang down the cliff and wave in the wind, and a clear stream trickles from above and empties into a pond at the base, and in the smooth surface of the pond the lion is mirrored, among the water-lilies.

Around about are green trees and grass. The place is a sheltered, reposeful woodland nook, remote from noise and stir and confusion — and all this is fitting, for lions do die in such places, and not on granite pedestals in public squares fenced with fancy iron railings. The Lion of Lucerne would be impressive anywhere, but nowhere so impressive as where he is.

It's really worth seeing, if you've got the time or the inclination. Another interesting fun fact about it: around the lion the stone is hollowed out in the shape of a pig. From what I can remember of what I've read, Thorvaldsen and the person who commissioned the sculpture had a disagreement about how much the sculptor would be paid, and the pig outline was his response to the outcome of that disagreement.

So that was obviously the high point of being in Lucerne as I have wanted to see that sculpture for some time. But after I finished eating some breakfast and visiting that site it was about 11 AM, and I still had a lot of day left before taking the train back to Italy the next day. So I began to explore the rest of Lucerne, starting with a visit to the Bourbaki Panorama in the center of downtown.

The top can be seen here, along with some of the old panels on the walls. Unfortunately an ugly new glass and steel entrance is blocking the front of it, as well as a bus depot.

Inside, I learned a whole lot about Swiss mercenaries, Swiss military history/neutrality (since 1821) and the Red Cross. The Panorama was interesting, as you walked up a set of stairs and stood on a circular platform and could look out at the painting, which surrounds you 360 degrees from floor to ceiling. Besides the painting there is also essentially a giant diorama set up in front of the painting, on the ground floor between the wall/painting and the elevated platform where everyone is taking all this in. At the same time, they play audio that tells the story of what's happening in the painting. Although I waited around for probably about 20 minutes I heard the thing run first in French and then in German, I didn't have the patience to wait around for the English version. Ah, well. No story for me. 

While waiting to see if the audio track would ever play in English, I took a video that probably helps illustrate the space I'm trying to describe better than I can. (Sorry it's kind of wobbly, I was trying to show the whole display from floor to ceiling! And also walk.)

The Bourbaki ticket also gets you access to the Glacier Garden next to the Lion, which I thought, okay, this'll be good for about 10 minutes right?

WRONG.

There is actually a ton of stuff to look at inside this mixed open air/enclosed museum and while a lot of the displays are only in German/French/Swiss, it's still pretty interesting.

These glacier tracks were discovered when some guy (meticulous research, that's my motto) decided he wanted to make this part of town into a vineyard and began tilling the soil only to discover these rock formations underneath. He then worked to turn the place into the museum/tourist attraction that it is today. Congratulations, some guy!

Fake pengwings (Sorry not sorry, Benedict Cumberbatch)!

Inside were a couple different attractions, all very kid-friendly (lots of stuff to climb on, watch videos off, pick up and put down). These were some of the most interesting things, for me.

From France: an animal bone with a picture of a mammoth carved on it, from about 13000 years ago.

I'm just going to copy this one verbatim in case you can't read the English description at the bottom:

Wild Horse
Carved from a mammoth tusk
One of Europe's oldest works of art
Approx. 32,000 years old
Vogelherd Cave, near Ulm, Germany

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat.

Bones of an ice-age bear, doing what icebears do.

I really wanted to take this woolly mammoth photo-op prop with me. Alas, Big Boy Blue had not the space for such a treasure.

Connected to the museum is the house of some dude (the research that went into this post, I tell you!), possibly the wannabe wine making dude. I walked through one room where I saw this chandelier and decided it was way too nice a day to be wandering around Some Swiss Guy's House (philistine, reporting for duty).

Some information about the Glacier Garden... if you speak German.

Next I stumbled upon the Labyrinth which was designed in the style of El Alhambra in Spain (a recurring theme for me is being in places that are influenced by that beautiful palace while being deprived of the chance to see it myself!) and which was really, really cool. Beware: this is the selfie portion of this blog post. Unfortunately, some of them are blurry because I was trying to take them quickly before one of the many roving hordes of Teutonic tots rampaged into frame.

When you finally make your way through the labyrinth to the last room, there are a bunch of mirror-based puzzles. I am not too proud to admit that I had a LOT of fun putting this one together. (They were just a pile of semi-circles or little arches, you have to line them up to the mirror correctly to get the chain effect.

This one was also cool: two mirrors, with one on hinges like a door, and two pieces of string connecting them. As you can see here, when they are close together the reflection of the strings look like a circle and as you pull the one door open the shape of the string's reflection perpetually changes. 

This was just fucking cool, no puzzle involved. Worlds within worlds.

Outside, in a less dreamlike fenced off pen, there were bunnies!!

This bunny was keeping weirdly close to the fence/cement, considering how much room he had to romp. He also kept giving me the side eye. He was definitely the paranoid conspiracy theorist of the group.

What amazed me was that the so-called "Garden" was really this sprawling park that just kept going and going. I kept turning the corner and seeing a new walkway with a sign post pointing to 2 or 3 other areas.

A far less profound or moving lion sculpture.

Just hanging out in the stairwell of the wooden tower. Guarding... the... railing? Maybe?

From a wooden tower next to the labyrinth: a view of the city and the glacier tracks below.

Just a little gnome guarding his stash of minerals, hidden within his tiny cave in a random corner of the park.

Cross section of the local rock formations, I think?

Don't lie to me, little sign: THAT IS A FERN. THEY'RE ALL FERNS!!!

The park also affords you a nice, slightly closer, view of the Lion. The real one, not that little gargoyle.

Having exhausted the sights and sounds of the Glacier Garden, I made my way over to the old town and the harbor to see what there was to be seen.

Swans, being asshole swans, mostly. Attacking babies, picking fights with dogs, pecking each other to get to the crumbs tourists had thrown. Stupid swans.

My God. They've learned to walk up stairs. We're all doomed.

Chapel Bridge (or Kapellbrücke), another famous sight of Lucern that was built in the 14th century. There are several footbridges in Lucern, and they cross their way back and forth through old town, across the Reuss River. It's the oldest covered bridge in Europe (1333).

This bridge was missing a lot of the paintings that (I believe) used to cover every triangular arch where the beams supported the roof. Apparently there was a pretty bad fire in the 90's (I think, RESEARCH! No, just kidding, I double checked this one on Wikipedia and it says the fire happened in '93) and a lot of them were lost.

That church with the two towers in the distance is the Jesuit church.

The Water Tower (Wasserturm), a fortification built in the 13th century.

Jesuit church, from the side.

Shepherd dude.

Just a quick little sculpture of the city to refer back to. I saw these all over Europe, it's a pretty popular phenomenon. Also, in the background, a super cute dog whose owners were playing fetch with him! He was very well trained, I was impressed.

Jesuit Baroque Church who's claim to fame is that it's the first large baroque church built... in Switzerland.... north of the Alps. Still, a fussily beautiful space.

Like praying inside of a fancy teacup.

The hills are aliiiiiive, with the sound of toooooourists!

The other famous covered footbridge of Lucerne, the Spreuerbrücke or Spreuer Bridge. This one was built in the 1300's as well but what's kind of cool about this one are the paintings of death throughout the bridge.

Just Death hanging out, bein' a citizen. Duelin'. Whatevs.

A panoramic (homemade by yours truly using the incomparable magic of Windows Paint©) view of the two bridges.

What the plaque says. There were a lot of beautiful old buildings to be seen in old town.

Where the Wild Things Are!?

Oh, hello narcissistic excitement over things that vaguely resemble my name! No, I didn't go inside. The prices of all the restaurants in Lucerne were ridiculous.

But giant murals and footbridges and ornate medieval buildings are free! Gloriously free!

So then I decided to try and walk up into the hills and on this old protective wall that still surrounds part of the city. Except somehow I ended up not being able to find a way to gain entrance to the actual wall. I turned down one side street that I thought might lead me to an entrance point and instead ended up in someone's backyard (awkward) so I decided to scratch that plan and just enjoy my view from beside the wall.

And then: cows! Seriously just hanging out in a field on a hill in the middle of the city, cool as cucumbers.

Climbing down the other side of the hill. Still denied access to the wall. Never did find the correct place to climb up it, although I know that you can because I saw people on it!

Just a really lovely entrance way to someone's house. If I ever own a house I want someone else to garden this into existence for me.

When you see it....

I... Oh. Okay.

Also in old town:

Many, many tchotchke storefront windows overflowing with this kind of total creepiness/clutter.

And of course, enough stores selling Swiss army knives/watches/chocolate to arm a small nation's obese but extremely prompt military.

Walking back towards the harbor, along the other side of the Reuss. Do you see it? On the left, in the water.

Let's zoom in.

Beagles gonna beagle.

Relevant: a doggie poo bag dispenser I saw on the street whose logo I'm preeeetty sure was modeled after a beagle.

The Church of Leodegar which sadly I could not visit as there seemed to be something happening inside that looked suspiciously formal. A wedding, perhaps? Vague thoughts towards wedding crashing tempted me but in the end there was still too much Lucerne left to see.

So, then. Onto the harbor, which was full of traffic, mostly from tourist ferries taking trips around the lake and surrounding towns. Plus a few private yachts, doing what yachts do.

And swans. Fucking swans.

Still, not too shabby a view to eat your dinner by, as I did later on.

By this point I was pretty tired so I decided to go buy my train ticket for the next day (the kind of thinking that would have helped me in Dubrovnik!). It was not surprisingly, very easy, considering this was Switzerland after all. On the way out of the ticket office I encountered some promotional people with baskets handing something out for free. At this point I just want to say something: Switzerland is outrageously expensive. I mean, I fully admit to being spoiled by the prices of things in Hungary and Georgia but even compared to, say, Belgium/The Netherlands/Italy/AUSTRIA, Switzerland is ridiculous. My hostel, which provided NONE of the services that Milan's Ostello Bello provided, had one horror show of a bathroom per floor, shoved three bunk beds into a room so that they were on top of each other with only a balcony door for airflow (not a lot of room for compromise there), made guests leave the common room area by 11 and check out by 7 in the morning, and had wifi that didn't work outside of said common room, cost the same amount of money. The same amount!

On top of this, I forgot that for some God forsaken reason the Swiss use a different kind of outlet than the rest of Europe. So not only was I tripping all day over how much everything cost when converting it to USD/HUF, but I could not charge any of my electronics which, true to form, died promptly upon arrival.

So after a whole day of wandering around, left to my own basic intuition to try and find things to do/see, when I saw that there was some possibility of getting something for $0, I threw out my elbows and made my way to get the prize.

The prize turned out to be a lovely little cup of delicious ice vanilla ice cream. I ate it while leaning on the railing of one of the regular car-and-pedestrian bridges over the Reuss river, watching tourists take in the sight on the oldest covered footbridge in Europe. Not a bad cap for the afternoon, I'd say.

After dinner I thought about going to a random bar but between the prices of drinks and my aversion to partying alone I decided instead to go see a movie. I returned to the Bourbaki Panorama/Museum, which is also a movie theater in the basement. As I asked the teller for one ticket for Boyhood she warned me not once, not twice, but three times that this was an extremely long movie. So long that it had an intermission. Was I sure? I couldn't help but laugh. I wanted to tell her, Lady, I've been waiting for years to see this movie. Yes I'm fucking sure. Anyway, no regrets on that decision. Boyhood is a stunningly ambitious film and despite whatever flaws it may have I'm happy not only that I got to see it in a theater but such a cool theater, in such a cool place. It was a great end to a great day spent totally alone but not really lonely, wandering around a breathtakingly scenic and historic place.

The next day I was up early and eager to get away from my shabby, overpriced hostel and onto my next destination: Lago di Como. The train ride back to Italy was spectacular, even if it was a bit rainy and cold. The first part, through the Interlaken system in the Alps, was on a train that felt more like light rail. The second train, down through the southern part of Switzerland and into Italy, was on a train that was more Amtrak style. When I boarded that train I was pretty upset to see someone sitting in my seat, because I had paid extra to sit at the window. His wife protested that he had gotten the seat facing backwards and that he would be sick. I told them I was sympathetic but also did not budge on the window seat thing, so finally the third person in their party gave me her seat. So I got my window seat, even if I did have to face backwards for the next two hours or so.

Worth it.