Yesterday we went to the village of Čilipi
which is about 20 minutes south of Dubrovnik (it's close to Cavtat and the airport). Every Sunday, since 1967, folklore dancing sessions are held in the village square, and these sessions act like a magnet, drawing tourists from all over the Dubrovnik area.
Those that wish can attend the mass held in the church of St Nicholas, which faces the town square, and those that don't can wander around and look at the many stalls offering traditional Croatian embroidery.
The mass lasts for just over an hour and the dancing begins promptly at 11:15am. It's a well oiled presentation with a few overly repetitive dances danced by seven couples, accompanied with a bunch of local musicians playing well known string instruments such as the guitar, mandolin and double bass along with Croatian variations (one musician told me that the strange guitar that he was playing was a traditional Croatian instrument whose name I now forget, which has five strings and is tuned differently to a guitar).
One dance was accompanied by the traditional Croatian Lord of the Dance playing a lijerica; ears accompanied to Western sounds and harmonies are likely to go mad after about fifteen minutes of this, but we were treated to only about five minutes.
The dancing lasts one hour, which seems to be long enough for both the audience and the dancers themselves; then everyone is bused back to their hotels.
After our now traditional rest (in order to avoid the extreme lunchtime heat), we prepared to go down to the old city for our farewell dinner. By a neat coincidence, yesterday was also our 31st wedding anniversary. We chose a restaurant just outside the Pile Gate which was doing a roaring trade; we were lucky to get a table for two by the water's edge. For a change, we decided to eat pizza, which might have been easy on the wallet but wasn't too easy on our stomachs. I can't remember when I last ate pizza and after not managing to finish my tuna pizza, I could understand why I haven't bothered in recent years to eat this dish.
For desert, we ordered a banana split; when my wife was powdering her nose, I asked the waiter to put in a candle on the desert in honour of our anniversary. A different waiter brought the dish and placed it on our table; after a moment he apologised and said that he had brought the wrong dish (there was no candle, to my disappointment); a minute later he returned with the same dish, this time adorned with a lit candle. My wife confessed that she had spoken to the maitre d' before we had entered the restaurant; I confessed that I had spoken to our waiter!
At the end of the meal, the waiter gave us a 10% discount, again in honour of our anniversary!
I am writing these words in Vienna airport, where the plane from Dubrovnik has deposited us. We now have to wait a few hours before a connecting flight takes us home to Ben Gurion airport.
Here endeth the Dubrovnik holiday log.
Those that wish can attend the mass held in the church of St Nicholas, which faces the town square, and those that don't can wander around and look at the many stalls offering traditional Croatian embroidery.
One dance was accompanied by the traditional Croatian Lord of the Dance playing a lijerica; ears accompanied to Western sounds and harmonies are likely to go mad after about fifteen minutes of this, but we were treated to only about five minutes.
The dancing lasts one hour, which seems to be long enough for both the audience and the dancers themselves; then everyone is bused back to their hotels.
After our now traditional rest (in order to avoid the extreme lunchtime heat), we prepared to go down to the old city for our farewell dinner. By a neat coincidence, yesterday was also our 31st wedding anniversary. We chose a restaurant just outside the Pile Gate which was doing a roaring trade; we were lucky to get a table for two by the water's edge. For a change, we decided to eat pizza, which might have been easy on the wallet but wasn't too easy on our stomachs. I can't remember when I last ate pizza and after not managing to finish my tuna pizza, I could understand why I haven't bothered in recent years to eat this dish.
For desert, we ordered a banana split; when my wife was powdering her nose, I asked the waiter to put in a candle on the desert in honour of our anniversary. A different waiter brought the dish and placed it on our table; after a moment he apologised and said that he had brought the wrong dish (there was no candle, to my disappointment); a minute later he returned with the same dish, this time adorned with a lit candle. My wife confessed that she had spoken to the maitre d' before we had entered the restaurant; I confessed that I had spoken to our waiter!
At the end of the meal, the waiter gave us a 10% discount, again in honour of our anniversary!
I am writing these words in Vienna airport, where the plane from Dubrovnik has deposited us. We now have to wait a few hours before a connecting flight takes us home to Ben Gurion airport.
Here endeth the Dubrovnik holiday log.
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