In one word: Yuck!
The town is overrun with tourists. They cleaned up the walled city so much that if feels like a polished Disneyland. From a cafe outside of the town (which ultimately was as nice as it gets), you can see about seven huge cruise ships at any given time. Ow, Ow, Ow! The quantity of white-haired tourists is just absurd!
On our first night here, we hunted down some dinner and ended up in the rain at an outdoor cafe with the worst surly old waitress that ever existed. The next day after a mighty unpalatable and unfortunate meal, I found the restaurant listed as a place to go. I was dumbfounded. This was the entry:
Shoppers from Gundulic Square’s daily vegetable market gather at Kamenice’s outdoor tables for uncomplicated fare such as raw oysters (kamenice means oyster), steamed mussels, tiny whole fried fish drizzled with lemon juice, and icy mugs of Karlovacko beer. The wait staff can be surly, but the prices are much kinder.
So, we did it completely wrong. We ordered pasta and salads, and the one thing that I ordered that didn’t arrive that night was the ‘tiny whole fried fish’. Ah, sometimes the travel gods are just not on your side. The rain did wash away the tourists that night, though. The town was fairly empty.
The only real oddness of our stay was where we decided to rent for the evening. We ended up renting private rooms from the tourist office, which turned out to be rooms in a not-yet-open hotel that a family of three grown-up daughters were helping set up. The hotel came with a great big German Shepherd that sort of spooked me but didn’t phase our friend who became fast friends with that dog. It is a weird feeling being in an unopened hotel with half the amenities in place (such as no soap and having to hunt for bedding) and an imposing dog in the hallways, I kept getting the feeling that I had walked into a movie script that might turn a bit cold. Alas, our stay was ultimately uneventful, but our two partners in travel did meet the hotel’s owner and stayed up with him until the wee hours of the morning.
We parted ways with out travel companions on the way out of Dubrovnik, as they headed back up to Amsterdam and Brussels. We had spent the day finding a cheap fare to Prague, as we found getting out of the very south of Croatia with a day’s notice was rather limiting.
