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Friday November 30th, 2012: Dubrovnik, Croatia
Bob: Some folks rhapsodize about the romance of sea travel. I'm not sure about romantic, exactly, but certainly at times our experiences are uniquely beautiful. I awakened during the night to see a brilliant moon shining over the tops of some clouds alongside our ship, and padded out onto the balcony to try to take a picture of it. And arriving at a port just at dawn, as we did in Dubrovnik, often provides the odd but pretty vision of the lights of the port buildings reflecting across the dark morning waters of the harbor. |
Monika: Sailing into Dubrovnik at dawn was another beautiful sight. Our ship docked in Dubrovnik in the new port area, as we had done on our first trip to Dubrovnik. On our last trip, we had anchored off the old harbor and were tendered right into the old town. This time we had to take a shuttle bus there. Since we were tired, and I felt that I really had seen the old town well the last time we were there, we decided to just walk around a bit in the modern city of Dubrovnik. Besides I wanted to do our laundry, since our first couple days on the Pacific Princess would be port days and we were both getting a bit low. |
Bob: It was dark, rainy, and cool in the morning, so we decided to stay on the ship and do our laundry rather than take the shuttle into the old town section of Dubrovnik. But after we had finished that and had some lunch, we walked around the port area of Dubrovnik a bit. |
Monika: After that little chore was done, we walked off the ship. First we walked towards the north towards where a beautiful high bridge was crossing a river the flowed into the sea. I had hoped for some pretty gorge pictures, but it really was not very photogenic. Walking any further seemed to be dangerous since there was no sidewalk next to a rather narrow street. So we retraced our steps and walked towards the town. Since we had so diligently written letters on our surprise sea day we were looking for a post office. When we found it we went in and handed the guy behind the counter our letters. He told us 50 Krone, when we ask how much in Euro and was told 10. So we handed him a 10 Euro note, and to my surprise got 15 Krone back, which made the exchange rate pretty much 6.5 Krone for 1 Euro. |
Bob: At the head of the bay was a park with a couple of war monuments. The first was an armoured personnel carrier with a list of names, presumably men killed in the fight for independence in 1991. The second was a kind of small PT boat that was part of the Croation Navy, and both were built locally. One thing we noticed was that smoking was rampant, even among youngsters whose age we judged at 11-13, which saddened us greatly. |
Monika: The little town is arranged like a U around an inlet. Our ship was docked at one end of the U and the main part of the town radiated out and up from the middle. We walked up one of the street and then down a series of steps to get back to the commercial area. There I spotted a supermarket; after all we had 15 Krone to spent! After a lot of waffling, I finally decided on a nice bottle of beer for 6 Krone. I was surprised to have tax (probably a luxury tax) added on. With that purchase done, we decided to head back to the ship stopping at another store for some more pretzels. While walking around school had just let out and we watched the youngsters walking home and getting on buses. I was surprised that there were a few who were already smoking. We did notice in general that more people were smoking in the streets than what we were used to at home. |
Bob: We were particularly intrigued by a new ship constructed to resemble an old, square-rigged sailing ship. The exterior was wood, but everything else looked very new and modern including metal crow's nests and some kind of self-furling main sail. We even saw a vending machine through the rear window! |
Monika: Walking back to the ship we enjoyed looking at all the old ships docked there. One old sailing ship was especially interesting. |
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