Dubrovnik

In case you ever wondered how an island with no roads or cars gets rid of their trash – we have your answer! A dump truck gets on a barge and comes to the island and processes the garbage from the dock. It was fascinating to watch each shopkeeper/household roll their garbage bins to the barge. They would also trade out empty gas canisters for full ones. We found out they come twice a week and they get charged by the amount they dump.

We watched this process until our ferry arrived and took us to Dubrovnik. It was an hour journey as we worked our way to the famous city.

We should have turned around and gone back to the island when we saw 3 cruise ships docked at Port but didn’t really think through the ramifications of an extra 10,000 people walking around until it was too late!

We got a cab to the Old Town and we’re immediately shocked at the large number of tourists wandering around aimlessly. SO MANY PEOPLE!We made the best of the situation and started wandering around ourselves.

One of our first stops was this cool candy shop. The design and layout of the candy was awesome! As we left the store sampling our purchases we realized that they didn’t taste like we had imagined. They weren’t bad but they weren’t as sweet as we are used too. The displays we’re beautiful though and made up for the lack of taste!

We wandered though town a bit more and came across the clock tower.

And an alleyway that had ancient pieces of the buildings that had fallen off over the years.

We also came across a bronze statue of the writer Marin Držić. Lovingly called Dubrovnik’s Shakespeare, he is best known for his comedies which shed a light onto the social realities of the Renaissance period. Apparently it’s good luck to rub his nose…

Cat wanted to be our photographer for awhile and took some great photos.

And then threw herself on the cannon from exhaustion and starvation!

We stopped for lunch and had a delicious meal of mussels and torttolini.

One of my favorite things to do abroad is to check out foreign grocery stores. Croatian stores are pretty normal aside from the Coke advertisement on the door but H and Cat got a bit silly while we were there!

The only thing that made me giggle was their energy drinks! Is Mtv still a thing?!

Because we didn’t get enough stairs in yesterday we decided to keep walking and see where they took us!

We saw a sign that said Cold drinks with the most beautiful view. We kept walking to see what the view was but there were a lot of people in line to see the view as well. We just kept walking as we didn’t think any view was worth 20 minutes of waiting.

We felt very fortunate that Amanda warned us against the walk around the city walls. It was similar to Everest in that it was a single line around the rim and you couldn’t pass slower walkers.

We could see traffic jams like this one all around the city walls. Our taxi driver told us at they had 3 million visitors last year and 1 million tickets sold to walk around the walls. That is a lot of people to be serviced by the 45,000 residents. We walked just within the walls and got lost in the city streets and we’re often by ourselves.

It was fun and an intriguing maze.

I think we all breathed a sigh of relief when our ferry came to bring us back to the island.

At the end of the day Cat wanted to have room service so we ordered her dinner and H and I had a fancy romantic dinner in the hotel while she stayed upstairs and binge watched Mako Mermaids. It was a perfect way to end such a good day!

Steps: 13879

Stairs: 19