June 12 Dubrovnik

 We spent our second full day in Dubrovnik today.  Since  most of yesterday was spent touring the main walls and sweating our guts off, today we spent most of the day wandering around inside the city (still sweating our guts off).

We checked out a ton of overpriced shops looking for something that the kids.  We found some ladies selling the fake stuff towards the back of the city.  They were pretty funny -  telling us that today was a special price, or that they were going to give us a discount, or taking everything we even looked at and making Jen try it on - "Elegant", "Perfect", "the Best", "Unique".  Don't tell Jen, but I'd start looking a some necklaces just so they'd make her try it on, and then I'd leave and move onto the next vendor while Jen was still looking "Elegant".  That was fun.  We also went into a jewelry gallery that sells the REAL Adriatic Coral, which is only found along the coast here.  The guy was an amazing artisan and showed us how they take raw coral, which has a skin on it, and then use a dremmel to buff the skin off, which also polishes the pretty red coral beneath it.  It is very rare stuff and he was showing us a necklace that was basically just a simple string of marble sized coral.  But the Adriatic coral doesn't get too big, so the marble sized coral is hard to find.  Throw in the fact that the coral is found at depths of 200 feet or something and grows super slow, and what to you get?  Expensive coral.  Today's special price? $70,000 dollars.  Yes, dollars.  Amazed that he could sell a necklace for that amount of money, and that apparently there are people out there who can spend that kind of money on a necklace.

Not having much of an itinerary was nice.  We kind of just walked wherever.  No deadline, no schedule, just exploring. Today we got to enjoy the little things about the city - the gargoyle in the wall, the faces on the columns, sitting in the shade and watching all of the boats come in and out of the harbor, etc.  Here's a few of the little things we enjoyed today.

We got to go check out a 13th century pharmacy.  Pretty interesting.  Notice Jen sporting her new Croatian necklace made of coral.  Can you guess which store we purchased it from?  Don't worry, the ladies promised that the necklace was made of 'real coral'.  Good thing none of you will ever know....

This is a huge fountain at the entrance to the city.  Continuous flowing water from the mountains.  This allowed the city to fully operate under siege, if needed.  At least until the enemy figured out where they were getting their water from....

Look at that lovely lady filling her water bottle at the fountain!

Pretty cool how the plant has grown out the wall and up through the hand in the wall.  Around this corner was a restaurant called Lady Pi-pi, named after the stone statue/fountain at the front of the restaurant.  Yep, a very anatomically accurate lady fountain doing her business, staring at you as you walk by.  Can we blame the Romans on that one Jen?  Good thing this wasn't the fountain they used at the entrance to the city - it's only for the people crazy enough to climb about 200 steep stairs up into the city.  Yep, we were that crazy today.  But not crazy enough to post the picture that I took of it.  Sorry kids.

Rubbing a nose for good luck.

  

This would be ice cream.  Mountains of it!

This is why we were crazy enough to climb all those stairs - to work off all the ice cream we are eating.  How do they get it mounded like that and not have it melt when the doors are always open scooping ice cream.  So many flavors to choose from - we've tried lime, lemon, orange chocolate, green apple, banana, hazlenut, pistachio, cherries and yogurt, vanilla with cookies, and chocolate hazlenut.  Who needs food when you can eat ice cream on a hot day, right?

Backup to Crepes for breakfast  - cherry and chocolate/nutella and peanuts, chocolate and carmel.  This is my "why are we taking a picture of crepes" face.  Oh that's right... because I need a 4th chin... Fine, twist my arm.

Speaking of arms, can you see the line in the stone next to Jen's.  They built a column in the square where the town news was announced by the town cryer.  The line at the foot of the column was the length of an 'elbow', the unit of measurement back in the day.  I wonder how many elbows we walked today?  My dogs are barking.

Jen being the town crier.  I'm sure she's announcing something very important.

We took this picture at least 20 times.  Jen's eyes are closed in every single one, except this one.  The people around us must have thought we were very self absorbed for taking some many photos of ourselves.  Nope, just good at timing our blinks with the camera.

 

While eating lunch at a pizzeria, we noticed the sign that said they were sold out for the world cup game.  No TVs in the old town that we had noticed, but this shop was setting up a TV outside.  So we looked around and noticed many more were setting up TVs.  We walked over to a restaurant and made a reservation for the opening game of the World Cup - Croatia v Brasil.

Here was our view of the game.  In one of the town squares, front row.  Perfect weather and great food - calamari, then shrimp risotto.  

Since we were so tired the first night in Dubrovnik and didn't get to see the city at night, we took advantage of the soccer game ending around midnight to stroll through the city for a bit.  Here's a few of the photos we took.

Notice the column?  Tonight the city needed a different type of town crier - they lost 3-1 thanks to some terrible calls and non-calls by the referee.  

Jen at the town gates as we left for the night.  I think she was putting out the vibe or copping an attitude with the guards. 

Great thing about getting home at 1am is that we get to facetime with the kids as they arrive from school.  Great to see their faces.  I'm sure they are being good little kidlets and enjoying their time with gma and gpa.