One last Dubrovnik post

We´re back home allready - the kid´s school starts next week, unfortunately - but before I go back to regular posting, I allow myself one or two more vacation-related posts - I figured I love reading my old vacations myself, and over the years, I figured this is the nicest photo diary I´ve got. So bear with me :)

The picture above, by the way, was really hard taking - I wanted, wanted wanted a picture of the old town from above, and there´s a costal serpentine road from which you´ve got this breathtaking view.
Unfortunately, it´s really tough stopping the car for a photo - there is no, and I mean no place where you could stop your car. It´s all bendy and crowded. So I was really thrilled when Tim found an opportunity for a couple of minutes in the evening hours :)

I found a streetmusician with a lijerica who let me play! It´s really easy! Also, I found it quite interesting you didn´t push the strings down from above, as you´d do with a violin or a guitar, but push your fingers against the side of the string to change the tone. I´ve never seen that before.



I checked two music stores and several souvenir stores to find a lijerica for myself, but without success.



What I found fascinating to experience was how a country can get back on it´s feet.

The war on the Balkan was pretty much the first war I consciuosly took note of as a child - it also was the first war a german army participated in after WW2, and I remember the first refugee kids in our village. And many stayed - Eva´s got a good friend whose mom came over as such a refugee child, and I know plenty of kids in school who still speak Serbian or Croatian - which is pretty much the same language by the way.

Of course you do still see traces of the war, suddenly popping up in between the very European beach promenades.

Former fancy restaurants, hotels, stores, that now look like hollow teeth and have trees growing in the rubble, and you wonder how they might have looked 30 years ago, before the war, and how it came they were abandoned. And then you walk around the corner, and there´s a shiny beach bar where you get an awesome chocolate frappé.

And I felt like this was a gigantic exclamationmark of hope - a country that had been shattered by war, now blossoming. And the boarder to Bosnia is casually passed by thousands everyday back and forth, and nobody seems to mind. I really liked that.

And one last thing I want to keep of Croatia - after the view of Dubrovnik, the sound of the lijerica, the feeling of hope is...

...the taste of fresh figs. I mean, fresh from the tree, ultra sweet and crispy and delicious like you can buy nowhere and only get in Nikolina´s garden :)