Beautiful, blah blah blah

So I went to Bosnia today. Dubrovnik isn't connected by land to the rest of Croatia so you have to go through Bosnia to get there. Pretty uneventful; they didn't even stamp my passport. But still, I went to Bosnia.

The bus ride from Split to Dubrovnik was fantastically beautiful, at least the twenty minutes or so that I was able to stay awake for. The road winds around these cliffs that drop down to the sea, which is about fifty different shades of blue and green. There were people sailing, mountains in the background. It was perfect.

When we arrived in Dubrovnik we got absolutely bombarded with old ladies offering rooms. We had to fend them all off because we already had a room; some were really hard to get rid of. We already had a room because my landlord, who is fast becoming my favorite person ever, recommended a place to stay. It's cheap and in a beautiful house in a great location and the owners even let us use their washing machine. Making the reservation was a little bit of a mess, though, because the credit on my cell phone ran out while I was making the reservation. (Vodaphone must be really screwing me on international calling rates.) And I don't know how to recharge my phone since my ATM card doesn't work here. No problem, we'll just call from a pay phone. But we couldn't find any pay phones. Everyone we asked pointed us in the same general direction and said they're near the post office, but we can't find the post office either. Eventually we found a phone, got some change for the phone, and then realized that the phones only take prepaid phone cards. Shane was about ready to firebomb Croatia by this point; his anger somehow made me super calm about the situation, which probably just irritated him more (sorry, Shane). We found a kiosk and bought a phone card, but with country codes, city codes, and zeros in between, it took about ten different tries and we nearly gave up before I got the call through. But we finally made the reservation and the place is great. It even has nice art on the walls.

Dubrovnik's old city isn't really old anymore. The Yugoslav army pretty much destroyed the city in 1990-91 and it's since all been rebuilt. (Could whoever managed that project please help with La Sagrada Familia?) You can walk on top of the city walls and tell the new terracotta roofs from the old ones--a lot more new than old.

And it is just so, so beautiful here. I'm an absolute sucker for beaches and mountains together, and this is pretty much paradise. Except for the other tourists.