As you get away from the coast, there are large sections that are sparsely populated.
Every village has a caffe - a place to sit and chat and have tea or coffee. The "to go" concept has not yet caught on.
Gardeners are either over achieves or benign neglectors. I did not see much in between.
Peanut butter is not eaten much and is hard to find. We found a small jar in a natural food store in Dubrovnik but nothing in Orebic.
They take soccer quite seriously. There are lots of Euro cup games right now and they are on the TVs in all the bars and many of the restaurants.
All of the Motorcycles have mufflers that are very quiet.
The ancient and the new are side by side. Sometimes the ancient buildings have be restored and modernized sometimes it is a ruin but adjacent to a new building. Sometimes the new is build on an ancient foundation.
Almost all of the towns we have visited or driven past have an "old" section that is quite beautiful. All of the old sections had ruins and areas where families lived.
As with most resort areas, property on the coast is being purchased for vacation homes. In a country that depends on tourism, the downside is these homes are not lived in much and when they are, the owners are not spending much locally.
Croatian wines are delicious.
Croatian olive oil is delicious.
Croatian roads are well maintained and their highway system is excellent except where a small section of Bosnia separates Croatia into two sections.
Most of the restaurants in a town have about the same menu. It is almost like they all went to the "what tourists like to eat" conference. For a vegetarian, it is grilled vegetables. The vegetarian pizza has corn on it. The good news is gelato shops are about as frequent as Starbucks in the US.
Toilets have small flush and large flush options. The bathrooms in the more recently built hotels all had floor drains.
Many Croatians smoke. Smoking is allowed in outdoor restaurants. It is like the US 20 years ago.
When you enter a town, there is a sign to announce it. When you leave town , the sign shows the town name with a diagonal line though it. Ursula explained that on entering a town the speed limit drops and on leaving the town the speed limit increases, so the signs are very helpful.
There were interesting power-saving devices: an escalator that only moves when people are on it and only for going up; hotel rooms where the lights can only be on if you insert a key in a slot just inside the door ... when the key is removed the lights go off.
It is possible to make mistakes that make in the US: it diesel in a gasoline engine; go to the international terminal including through passport control when we were actually on a domestic flight (we had to have the stamps on our passports canceled and were escorted to the correct terminal when we left Dubrovnik).
No comments:
Post a Comment