STRANGE SHORE:
Dubrovnik
SUNDRY LAND: Croatia
WANDERING WAY:
King’s Landing, Westeros in “Real Life”
Yes! Dubrovnik IS where the
brilliant creators of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” shoot all the scenes located in
King’s Landing! Joy! Is there a more amusing activity than eavesdropping
on an excited Italian tourist pointing out the exact spot where they displayed
Ned Stark’s chopped-off head?
I was so thrilled, but then
several stark realities came to light…
After my painful experience in
Sydney, Australia this past winter, I take warnings about sunburns in deadly
earnest. So when my little “Eyewitness Travel Dubrovnik” guidebook commented, “Sunstroke,
sunburn, or dehydration can spoil a holiday,” I took special note. Keeping in
mind that this advisory was intended for an average human who doesn’t burst
into flame as soon as a sunbeam touches her vampyric skin, I slathered copious
amount of 70 proof sunscreen over my healing mosquito bites every single
morning. Despite this preparation, I still couldn’t stay outside for over an
hour. At first, I didn’t particularly mind, given the clamoring masses stuffing
the streets with their body odor, crass remarks, and ugly clothing – whew,
Dubrovnik’s tourists really put tourists anywhere else to shame in their, um, “happiness”
– but I did want to see the sights. How was this sightseeing to be
accomplished?
Dubrovnik is beautiful. Fact.
But how can a fair-skinned introvert, such as I, enjoy its gorgeous ramparts
given the hot air ripening with human stench and noise
pollution? Hmmmm.
Four-Part Solution:
1)I awoke at 5:30am this morning
to walk the around the inner-streets as the sun rose, and then…
2) I waited at the entrance of
the “City Walls” or “Ramparts”, which open at 8am so that I could be first in
line, and then…
3) I quickly climbed the stairs
and gained a good quarter of a mile on any other tourist so I could take
amazing early-morning photographs without a soul in sight,
and then…
4) I finished this
circumlocutory tour in time to catch a cable car up the mountain and take
panoramic photographs of the city before 10am. Ha!
Brilliant plan. Thank you.
Please reserve your round of applause until after you see the snaps.
Given that one must be swift of
foot and sturdy of leg to accomplish these physical feats of photographic
ingenuity, I’m happy to share my pictorial booty with the dear readers of “Strange
and Sundry,” who may enjoy the medieval extravagances of Dubrovnik without
having to climb hundreds of steep steps in the early morning. I fully admit you
could also watch “Game of Thrones” to glean this same experience, but my
photographs do not involve multiple beheadings, which might be an incentive or
deterrent depending your own penchant for morbidity.
TWO MORE REALITY CHECKS:
1) Given my incapacity to stroll
around Dubrovnik for any length of time, you may be wondering how I spent the
other forty-three hours of my visit. Some hours were spent sleeping and eating,
yes, but I also learned a bit more about Dubrovnik’s real history (as
unfiltered through the recent fictional occurrences in Westeros). Reading about
1991/1992’s “The Siege of Dubrovnik” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Dubrovnik)
makes me wonder how in the world Dubrovnik is still standing. It’s one tough
city! There’s still shrapnel in the walls – everywhere in the walls. Moreover, “Eyewitness
Travel” casually comments,
“Most of Dalmatia
has for years been clear of landmines laid in the war of the early 1990s, but they
do still exist. Around Skradin, Krka National Park, and the border area with
Bosnia, fields and even whole villages still have signs warning of landmines.
Walkers heading off the beaten track should use a recent map, stick to trails,
and seek local advice about the possibility of mines.”
Even if I had been able to walk
“off the beaten track” outside Dubrovnik’s city limits without my skin
igniting, this little caution might’ve encouraged an alternative indoors
activity.
Yes, the recent history of
Croatia is fascinating and tragic. For further reading, I’ve been turning to
Christopher Hitchens’s introduction to Rebecca West’s “Black Lamb and Grey
Falcon”(https://www.amazon.com/Black-Lamb-Falcon-Penguin-Classics/dp/014310490X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1471633029&sr=8-1&keywords=Black+Lamb+Grey+Falcon),
and I just bought “The Bridge Over the River Drina” by Ivo Andrić (who won the
Nobel Prize for Literature) for more information on the area before WWI(https://www.amazon.com/Bridge-Drina-Phoenix-Fiction/dp/0226020452/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1471633081&sr=8-1&keywords=Bridge+Over+the+River+Drina).
There’s so much to know about Dubrovnik, which you wouldn’t guess if you only judged
the city from its partying tourists from the US, Britain, Italy, and France.
2) My morning walk made me
acutely aware of how hard the average worker in Dubrovnik is toiling every
single day in the service of these tourists scuttling through every crevice and crevasse of the city.
In my observations, a Croatian working in the Old City of Dubrovnik must be
rising by 5am to 6am and going to bed around midnight, and who knows how far
any of these workers are commuting? As the sun rose, I watched the locals
collect garbage from every conceivable corner, set up tables, make food, and
open shops – all of this preparation began a day devoted to the backbreaking service
of fulfilling the tourists’ every whim.
I
have no doubt you'll find similar working circumstances in New York, London, Paris,
Prague, Budapest, or any other tourist destination, but Dubrovnik traps
everyone together in a small space
encompassed by thick medieval walls.
These close quarters make the imbalanced tourist-server dynamic especially
apparent.
Forgive
the long quotation, but I couldn’t help recalling George Orwell’s commentary
about working as a plongeur (translation:
the guy who cleans all the dishes in a hotel or restaurant) in his
autobiographical Down and Out in Paris
and London as I watched the workers of Dubrovnik get ready for a long, hot,
summer day:
“FOR what they are worth I want to give my
opinions about the life of a Paris plongeur. When one comes to think of
it, it is strange that thousands of people in a great modem city should spend
their waking hours swabbing dishes in hot dens underground. The question I am
raising is why this life goes on—what purpose it serves, and who wants it to
continue, and why I am not taking the merely rebellious, fainéant
attitude. I am trying to consider the social significance of a plongeur’s
life.
I think one
should start by saying that a plongeur is one of the slaves of the
modern world. Not that there is any need to whine over him, for he is better
off than many manual workers, but still, he is no freer than if he were bought
and sold. His work is servile and without art; he is paid just enough to keep
him alive; his only holiday is the sack. He is cut off from marriage, or, if he
marries, his wife must work too. Except by a lucky chance, he has no escape
from this life, save into prison. At this moment there are men with university
degrees scrubbing dishes in Paris for ten or fifteen hours a day. One cannot
say that it is mere idleness on their part, for an idle man cannot be a plongeur;
they have simply been trapped by a routine which makes thought impossible. If plongeurs
thought at all, they would long ago have formed a union and gone on strike for
better treatment. But they do not think, because they have no leisure for it;
their life has made slaves of them.
The question
is, why does this slavery continue? People have a way of taking it for granted
that all work is done for a sound purpose. They see somebody else doing a
disagreeable job, and think that they have solved things by saying that the job
is necessary. Coal-mining, for example, is hard work, but it is necessary—we
must have coal. Working in the sewers is unpleasant, but somebody must work in
the sewers. And similarly with a plongeur’s work. Some people must feed
in restaurants, and so other people must swab dishes for eighty hours a week.
It is the work of civilization, therefore unquestionable. This point is worth
considering.”(Orwell, Ch.22, https://www.amazon.com/Down-Paris-London-George-Orwell/dp/015626224X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1471633342&sr=8-1&keywords=Down+and+Out+in+Paris+and+London).
I reconsidered the futile, wasted work of Orwell’s plongeur as I watched the Dubrovnik locals catering to the bustling, braying tourists as they bought
silver, drank wine, and gobbled lobster. I’m a tourist, too…I bought a little bracelet, drank some wine, and ate a lobster tail. It’s a “tourist economy,” but is
it right? Ethically speaking?
So
yes, walking around Dubrovnik this morning made me feel really, really guilty
even as I enjoyed the spectacular view. Every time I smiled and said "good
morning" to a shopkeeper, food-seller, or cleaner starting the day – a
greeting seemed natural enough since we were the only two people standing on a high
medieval wall – the shopkeeper, food-seller, or cleaner inevitably beamed with
surprise and gratitude. Oh man.
Having
occasion to observe the crowds from shady indoor windows away from the sun, I began
to wonder about the tourists, too. What makes tourists so awful? You may have
heard people tell of the "Ugly American” tourist (http://www.businessinsider.com/worst-behaved-tourists-2013-5),
but it’s my opinion that this ugliness has nothing to do with a particular
nationality. (Possibly a self-serving view since I’m American…)
No,
it's tourism itself, or the fact of an otherwise unremarkable, average, and
essentially normal human being going on vacation to “escape” life/work for a
week or two, that causes reasonable adults to transform into ugly, terrible,
demanding monsters. In “escaping,” it seems the regular codes of
conduct are null and void. An obvious point? Maybe, but why is this behavior indulged? Even if the tourists are pouring money into another country's economy, does money always excuse bad behavior?
After
living in the tourist destination of Naples, FL for four years (shudder), I've
observed that anyone who can rightly be called "on vacation" or
"a tourist" is awful. (I'm not excepting myself -- I always try to be polite, but it's inevitable that my own Freudian
"id" should crawl to the murky surface, particularly when I’ve been
waiting to pay a bill for over thirty minutes.)
Anybody
who has the task of bartending, waiting tables, keeping shop in a tourist
community is called upon to augment the “escape experience” by offering a
pleasant demeanor even while coping with obnoxious adults who've regressed to
their disgruntled or drunk teenage selves. It makes me wonder... As I walked the walls, did the workers return my "good morning" because they felt coerced by the prevailing manners of a bustling tourist economy, or were those greetings genuine "good
