The Black Lung Struggles to Understand the Exchange Rate, Part 5: All Vacations Must End

Our last stop of vacation was Dubrovnik, Croatia. Before going to Croatia, all I knew about Croatia was that parts of Game of Thrones is filmed there. In Dubrovnik, actually. You can go on Game of Thrones tours. Of course, I don't watch Game of Thrones, so that didn't really excited me (although a few people in our tour seemed into it). But really, the exciting thing for me is that Dubrovnik looks like the kind of place where they'd film Game of Thrones, which is to say, super olde-timey. Like 1600s olde-timey.

When we first got to Croatia (or more accurately, when we first woke up. Who knows what was going on before that?), it was super gloomy and rainy. But I appreciated that, because it made my rain coat and umbrella not be superfluous luggage items, which they totally were before. Croatia, at least the part where we were, is very different looking than Greece. For one, there are a lot more trees. And mountains or at least very large hills. Also, things are more orange and less white. Anyhow, it was super beautiful and a fun change from what we had been seeing for the past several days.

Dubrovnik is right on the coast (handy for our cruise), and it's basically at the bottom of a mountain. It has historically been a pretty heavily fortified city, because mountains on one side, the sea on the other side, and a wall all the way around. More on that later. So the first part of our tour was driving up the mountain so we could have a view of Dubrovnik from above. I don't mind saying that it was terrifying. Fun fact you may not know about me: I am afraid of heights, and when those heights are cliff roads with no barrier between the vehicle and falling to our doom, I am super afraid of heights. I could not look out the window. I actually traded seats with a nice man who really wanted to look out the window so I could be on the side of the bus furthest from imminent death. But it was a really good view.

You can't really tell from this picture, but this was the perilous viewpoint! That kind of orange section down there is the city.

After that, we headed into the city itself. There are two parts of Dubrovnik: the old city and the new city. The new city is totally ok, and I'm sure it has many fine qualities to recommend itself, but we really spent all of our time in the old city. Specifically, touring the old city walls. See, back when the old city was the whole city, walls were an awesome way to protect yourself from invaders. Dubrovnik has had walls around the city since about the 7th century. The early walls were destroyed and rebuilt at least a couple of times, I think. The current walls were built mostly about 400 years ago, although they were being worked on and changed for a couple of hundred years surrounding that. The walls are super awesome. They are cool medieval type walls, and you can walk along the top of them around the whole old city. And we totally did! I think all the way around is about 2 km. Placed strategically around the walls are a bunch of forts with cannons to fire at enemy ships and stuff. 

The walls are pretty high off the ground, as all walls that are protecting people from invaders should be. When we first got into the city and saw the stairs we had to climb to get to the top, 2 of our group decided to stay behind. Then about a 4th of the way around, another lady decided to go back because it was just too high for her. She was super freaked out. It was a little scary in at least one place, but I was mostly fine, because I wasn't relying on the bus driver for my life. I was relying on my own feet, and they're usually pretty reliable. 

The stairs we had to climb are on the far left of this picture. Also, awesome old building.

I think somewhere along that stretch is where the lady gave up because we were too high. But it was totally worth it!

As we were walking around the walls, it was pretty cool to see that the city looks pretty unchanged from how it probably looked hundreds of years ago. Except that now people have electricity and satellite dishes. One of the most noticeable things is the roofs of all of the buildings. They're made of these very pretty orange tiles (hence the orangeness of the city). Some of them are very orange, and some are more faded and greenish. That's because many of the roofs were damaged during the Croatian war of independence, which was really recent! Apparently, Croatia used to be part of Yugoslavia, and then decided it wanted out because Yugoslavia was a communist country, and they were not into it. The war started in 1991 and didn't officially end until 1995! During the first year of the war, Dubrovnik was shelled by the Yugoslav army for several months. A lot of buildings were damaged and a few were destroyed outright. There are still some ruins in the old city where buildings were not rebuilt. The city is a UNESCO world heritage site (just like the Sassi!), so the restoration work was done using the same materials as before. Hence the super orange newer roofs. 

At the beginning of our walk. You can really see the different tile colors in this picture. I guess they will all eventually have that awesome multicolored look. 

Some of the ruins that were left after the war.

Look how modern everything is! You can watch lots of TV now!

This was the view from one of the forts. You can see why the city looks orange from afar.

One of my favorite views of the city, because you can see part of the wall where we walked in the middle. This was after it stopped raining, though. 

I hope Dubrovnik never changes. It was an amazing place to see.

One of the other things you can see all around the old city are statues of Saint Blaise. He's the patron saint of the city. Also of wool combers and who you should pray to if you're trying to help someone who's choking. I could not make this stuff up. Anyhow, he's the patron saint of Dubrovnik because he appeared in a vision to some important dude in the year 971 to warn him that the Venetians were planning to attack. Why did Saint Blaise do this? Who knows? Maybe there were a lot of wool combers there. Maybe a lot of people in Dubrovnik were choking on stuff. In any case, there are many statues of him around the city. 

This statue of Saint Blaise is right above the gates into the old city. Also, we were totally crossing a moat(!!!) when I took this picture. 

A fancy church in the city that is probably named after Saint Blaise and definitely
 has a statue of him on top of it. 

After we went all way around the walls, we were set loose on the old city to do some shopping! Here is where life got a bit confusing. Even though Croatia is part of the EU, they don't use the Euro (like the UK keeping the pound, although I guess it doesn't even matter any more. #brexit). Instead, Croatia uses the Kuna. The exchange rate of Euro to dollars is pretty even. Basically, a Euro is usually about $1.30. So I just kind of pretended everything was dollars and wasn't too far off. But the exchange rate for Kuna is about 6.65 Kuna to 1 dollar. Or 1 kuna is about 15 cents. Basically, it was extremely hard for me to figure out how much $$ I was spending on anything. At one point, I wanted to buy some super beautiful jewelry, and after I bought it all, I realized I still had 200 kuna left. I had to buy more stuff! But it turned out to only be about $30. LOLZ. I did treat Bonnie and Leanne to some delicious ice cream, which was crazy cheap. I got Bitter Orange ice cream, which is apparently a big deal there because there are bitter orange trees growing all around the city. The oranges are not the kind that you can just eat. Even in the ice cream they were pretty bitter. But good! And then I got to buy a cute little nativity from the Christmas store, which was a delight. 

Eating some delicious ice cream, with the Christmas store right behind us. A lot of the streets in the city were awesome little alleys like this. 

Hey, there's the moat! We will miss you, Dubrovnik!

Then it was time to go back to the ship. We made friends with an old British lady that afternoon, who told us all about her super crotchety cruise companion, and it made us even more grateful that we are awesome friends/vacation partners. 

Farewell, Croatia! You were very different but equally as awesome as Greece.

I forgot to put this awesome picture on a previous post. But I'm pretty sure it's a heavenly sign that I am meant to go on fabulous vacations. 

The next morning, we docked back in Venice to start our journey home. The first part went pretty great, honestly. The Venice Airport has the fastest, most efficient security lines I have ever seen. Venice, I salute you. And we got sandwiches on the plane, even though we were only flying to Paris, and it was a really short flight. The airport in Paris was pretty crazy, but still, everything went really well. We were flying to Atlanta, which is about 9 hours, so that was kind of rough. I could not sleep. I maybe got 15 minutes during those 9 hours. And I was too tired to read, so I watched a lot of movies. That was actually pretty nice. I watched Far From the Madding Crowd which was very good and beautifully made (Bathsheba was crazy to not figure out which of her fellas was the best right away. He was even the cutest one!). I also watched Creed, which was really well made and acted, but I didn't like it, because they spend too much time punching each other in the face. Yes, I realize that I was watching a boxing movie. Then I watched The Man From U.N.C.L.E, which was super fun. Very silly and exciting. And since I still had time, I watched The Peanuts Movie, and it was super sweet. I got a couple of episodes of Brooklyn 99 in there too. And of course I walked up and down the aisles of the plane a lot too. Plus, when you are on a long flight, they feed you a lot. I think it's to keep you from getting restless. I made myself a little sick eating all of the airplane food. I guess I could have said I didn't want all of it, but I needed something to do!

We finally arrived in Atlanta, and then we just had a short flight to Baltimore before home. This is where everything went to total crap and life became terrible. Atlanta Airport, you have joined Delta on my list. Also NBC for their terrible Olympics coverage. Keep in mind that at this point, I have already been awake for about 21 hours with only a short 15 minute nap. So, grumpy. Anywho, when we got off the plane, we had to go through customs. I get it, we had just come from international places, it's cool. Of course, the line was insane, and even though we asked an airport worker about moving up in the line so we could catch our flight, she said they didn't do that. Which is really stupid. But it was OK, because customs went really fast, even with the insane line. The real problem was, then we had to go back through security. This is madness. Customs should be inside the secure part of the airport!!! And once we got to security, there was only 1 lane open, because they didn't have enough people working. If you are that busy, you should hire more people!!! And even though our flight was really soon, the lady working told us that they could not let us move to the front of the line. I call shenanigans. They could have let us move to the front of the line. That is an accepted practice at airports. I have seen them do this in NYC, which is way bigger and more important than Atlanta. Basically, forget you guys. The long and short of it is, we got to our gate about 3 minutes before our flight was supposed to leave, but the plane had already pulled away. I know for a fact that the plane sat on the runway for at least half an hour before taking off, so this was especially infuriating. Basically, we were stuck in the airport all night. I was really mad. Bonnie said she had never seen me that mad before. I think it's because she had never seen me that sleep deprived before. Luckily, I was able to sleep on airport chairs for about 2 and a half hours on and off, and it really made me feel 1000% better. But I was still filled with total rage towards both Delta and Atlanta. My advice, never fly through Atlanta unless you want to have a hellish experience. 

Luckily, the next morning, I finally was able to fly to Baltimore! Leanne came with me, because she had to get stuff from my house and then immediately head back to the airport to fly to SLC. I felt super bad for her. Bonnie had changed her flight to fly directly to SLC from Atlanta instead of stopping in Bmore for a day because she could not handle travelling anymore. And my wonderful friend, Monica, came by and fed Boh for me again because I was 12 hours late getting home. When I did get home, my baby Bohseph was super glad to see me, and I was super glad to see him, too. He's a good boy. And he was super nice about napping with me all afternoon. Funnily enough, even though I didn't get too seasick on the trip, I was super landsick for about 5 days after we got back. I definitely felt like I was still on a boat, even though that wasn't at all how I felt on the actual boat. I'm not going to become a sailor any time soon.

So that was it! Our fabulous European cruise vacation, with terrible beginnings and endings and awesome middle parts. The Black Lung will return! hopefully, next time I have enough money to go somewhere cool.  

The Three Amigos will ride again! Someday!