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Dubrovnik
Tuesday, July 7 2026
location: room 115, M.S. Monet near Dubrovnik, Croatia
This morning for some reason I had the song "Black Betty" in my head, and I kept singing it out loud to Gretchen just because it is so ridiculous. "Oh Black Betty / Bambalam / Oh Black Betty / From Birmingham / Bambalam / Way down in Alabam / Bambalam / Black Betty had a child / Bambalam / Damn thing gone wild / Bambalam." So then Gretchen was singing it too. She remembered it being sampled on a Moby album, but what I was quoting was actually a classic rock cover by Ram Jam.
This morning at breakfast, there was vegan bacon for what was to be the only time on this cruise. We sat with a nice mother-daughter pair from Hawaii named Deborah (the mother) and Ariel. We ended up mostly talking about the cultural differences between the various Hawaiian islands. They preferred Oahu, the island they were from, but had things to say about the others. The big island, for example, is mostly wilderness.
Gretchen was in a hurry to get to today's destination, the storied old city of Dubrovnik, before the other tourists arriving in much bigger cruise ships than ours. So we made haste through the security arrangements set up on the pier and started walking from there to the old city, which was about 20 minutes away by foot. We had to cross over a saddle between two land masses that would've been separate islands had the sea risen 150 feet or so. It was a hot, sunny day and we tried to mostly walk in the shade. But we also had to keep out of the road, and there weren't really pedestrian sidewalks. But eventually we made it to the old city, which was already mobbed with tourists. We paid for our admission to walk around the old city atop its outer wall and then began our hike, walking counter-clockwise (which is the only way that seems to be permitted).
One of the things that makes these old medieval cities so charming is how narrow the color palette is that they draw from. In Dubrovnik, there's the oatmeal color of the limestone blocks and the terracotta red of the roofs, and that's mostly all there is. When you look out across the old city, with its sea of terracotta roofs interrupted by pinacles, domes, and towers, it looks so perfect it is as if it was something created by CGI. This accounts for why it was used for establishing shots of King's Landing in Game of Thrones and probably many other television series and movies.
The problem with walking up on that city wall was that there was very little shade, and Gretchen was getting miserable in the heat. She'd also failed to bring enough water. (Water is much less important to me, and I rarely bother bringing it.) Making matters worse was seeing people swimming in the sea outside the southeast wall without any obvious way to get down to join them. Eventually, though, we passed some workers on the wall who were doing something with a hose, and Gretchen convinced one of them to squirt her. She said that changed the whole experience for the better.
Somewhere along the wall was a little museum for the art of Ðuro Pulitika, an artist who viewed Dubrovnik through a post-impressionist lens up until he died not all that long ago. The museum is actually in his old studio right there along the city wall, and parts of it had been left as it had been presumably when he died. The museum actually costs money to get into, though once we were in there, the woman running the place said we didn't have to pay. Gretchen ended up buying a postcard.
From there, the wall climbed surprisingly far up the wall of mountain that we'd been seeing since landing in Split, and we did the whole thing. After that, we drank heartily from the public fountain (which featured its own oculus) and then made our way across the city to where we'd seen people swimming, avoiding the main streets, which were now congested with the lumbering beasts who had been disgorged from massive cruise ships). As we walked, we tried to avoid streets that consisted runs of steep steps even if they were going in the direction we needed to go, and for the most part we were able to avoid both hills and crowds.
After exiting the city through a small passageway, we found the place where the people were swimming. It was not a beach, as there was no sand at all. Instead it was just the reef of bedrock that the city had been built on top of, with perches here and there for people to sit. Gretchen gave me her bag and immediately went for a swim, and I found some shade among the rocks in a place that could've used a little tidying up visa-vis the accumulation of trash.
After that, we made our way back towards the center of the old city in hopes of finding me a place to poop. Eventually we found a café sprawling out onto the narrow street and took a seat. We ordered drinks, which were noticeably more expensive than normal in Croatia, and I was able to take care of business in the bathroom. Meanwhile, I was also trying to get an eSim working on an old unlocked cellphone. I'd bought it with the Airalo app and it was supposedly installed, but it wasn't coming up in my list of eSims. And now I was in a chat with a supposedly human representative. But Gretchen was irritated I was focusing on that instead of Dubrovnik, so I shelved that chat for the time being.
Gretchen figured out how to take a bus back to the cruise ship pier, and that sped up the process of getting back to our boat even though our bus insisted on dropping us off near a massive cruise ship instead, which took some walking to get away from.
Back on the boat, we had our lunch at a table with a gaggle of Asians comprising about a seventh of the passenger manifest. We got to talking with them and it turned out that they were mostly Americans from Silicon Valley, though a few were from other parts of America. They were all drinking non-alcoholic beer, which made Gretchen wonder if perhaps they were part of a Buddhist sect that preached veganism. [It later turned out that this was a correct hypothesis; they were part of a religious group recently founded by Ching Hai, "the Supreme Master," who founded the Loving Hut vegan restaurant chain and has a number of philosophies that range from peculiar to sensible, at least to fellow vegans like us.]
Usually on these cruises, the lunch is served as a buffet and is augmented by one or more main courses one can order. On this cruise, the main course would always just be pizza, and it wouldn't exactly be cooked in a brick-fired oven. We ordered a pizza and it proved it bit much for two people to eat.
Back in our cabin, jet lag got to me and I ended up taking a nice long nap. I then went back to trying to get the Airalo eSim to work again, though I'm such a klutz with cellphones that I couldn't even do the basic things the woman in the chat was trying to get me to do to help her debug the problem. In the process, I learned how to take screen shots and paste them into the chat. But it was all pointless; the eSim, though installed, was not showing up in the list of eSims. After struggling with this for over an hour, I got fed up with the whole thing and demanded a refund. The Airalo person had tried their best to avoid this, but when I insisted on it and threatened to cancel the charge through my credit card company, she eventually refunded my money. But it wasn't a complete refund because I was already a day or so into the "plan" I'd bought. Fuckers!
Before dinner tonight, we had a belated "start of the cruise" ceremony, with everyone handed flutes of champagne and captain's crew making short speeches. Well, that would've been the usual protocol. But things got hijacked by our ship's captain Josef, who was himself Croatian. He nattered on endlessly in not-great English about the members of his staff, sometimes talking about his or their childhoods. Josef's rambling seemed indicative of narcisism, though he might've also been drunk. (Later Dave, the Scottish veterinarian, would divide Europe into three categories: Northern Europeans, who get wasted on the weekend but are fairly competent in the week, Southern Europeans, who are always a little bit drunk but also functional, and people from the Balkans, who are hopelessly wasted all the time. Josef seemed like he might've been in that latter category.) When Dirk, the guy who owns the cruise company, tried to get Josef to wrap things up, Josef insisted that he needed to say all that he was saying and then asked the crowd if he should be allowed to continue. The crowd, naturally, told him to carry on. But things were tense in a way that one never expects in a cruise kickoff ceremony.
At dinner tonight, Gretchen and I sat with Kelly and Brian and an older British couple who now live in France. The woman half of the couple told us about a evil prank played by a teenager who convinced her to get on the wrong train, and this led into a discussion about why young people do the evil things they do. This then led to some confessions, with Gretchen admitting to opening the car doors of random cars with her friends back when they were teenagers. Then our new older British friend admitted that, when she was younger, she used to delight in flirting with random men in the presence of their wives or girlfriends in hopes of precipitating conflict. Then I told the tale of how I used to be a huge bicycle thief back in college. Even Brian had a story of misspent youth, admitting to setting off fireworks on people's porches. The only angel among us was Kelly, who couldn't think of a single bad thing she'd done back when she was young.
I didn't like the food options presented in the dinner menu, but the food ended up being great anyway.
After dinner, Gretchen and I went up to the jacuzzi on the front deck of the boat and had a little soak while we chatted with Kelly and Brian. The water in the jacuzzi had been left cold, as there was no desire in this heat wave for anyone to climb into hot water.
A gorgeous sailboat in the sea off Dubrovnik. Click to enlarge.
Gretchen walking on the wall early in our hike. Click to enlarge.
Looking down at the public fountain with its distinctive oculus. Click to enlarge.
A keep along the coast. The birds are that species of swift. Click to enlarge.
People with kayaks in the rocks at the base of that tower. Click to enlarge.
Gretchen with a sloping aqueduct. Click to enlarge.
Pigeons perching in the sloped aqueduct. Click to enlarge.
Dubrovnik's rooves. Click to enlarge.
A set of bells. Click to enlarge.
An island and boats to the east. Click to enlarge.
The museum of the art of Ðuro Pulitika set in his old studio along the Dubrovnik wall. Click to enlarge.
Dubrovnik from the highest section of walls on the side of the mountain to the north. Click to enlarge.
Dubrovnik's red terracotta rooves. Click to enlarge.
Dubrovnik's towers and a dome. Click to enlarge.
A woman playing with her dog in the surf, viewed through my telephoto lens from the Dubrovnik walls. Click to enlarge.
That dog grabs a toy in the surf. Click to enlarge.
A gorgeous stone stairway. Click to enlarge.
The moon with a church spire. In Dubrovnik, spires tend to have permanent ladders attached to them. Click to enlarge.
Foundation bedrock with the city wall atop it, viewed from the swimming location southeast of the wall. Click to enlarge.
Gretchen swimming in the sea southeast of the Dubrovnik walls. Click to enlarge.
A stone dog on Dubrovnik's public fountain. Click to enlarge.
A cat in front of the café where I drank a beer and pooped. Click to enlarge.
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