25 Jun 2014 Dubrovnik

25 Jun 2014 Dubrovnik
At our pension there are lemon and orange trees.  Apparently in this part of the Mediterranean/ Adriatic, it never freezes, so you can grow citrus.  Inland, on top of the nearby mountains, is another story.  There was a Winter Olympics at Sarajevo in 1984, and it was plenty cold and snowy on the mountains surrounding Sarajevo.
No breakfast at the pension, but there is a great pastry shop on the main street, Pope John Paul II Str.  We walk down to the bus station and get our bus tickets to Sarajevo for tomorrow morning at 8 am.  There is a small plaza by the alleyway near our pension. It contains several businesses, including a coffee shop populated by locals.  It has started to drizzle, and coffee seems to be a great idea.  By the time our coffee is finished, the rain has let up.  As Edna suggested, there is a small early morning farmers market. Items are expensive by our Romanian/ Serbian standards, but the fresh figs (4 kuna for a reasonably large ripe green fig), are tasty.  1 to go.  There also is an adjacent indoor fish market with some of today's haul still for sale.
Off we go on the city bus (we are using the day card today) to the old city.  The rain starts up again.  We walk up one of the cross sidewalks to the east.  Dubrovnik is rather set into a small cliff; to the east of the main street everything is UPHILL.  We ascend on the next north south street, which is apx 50 feet higher than the tourist main street and is next to the city walls. This is a more residential area, with hanging wash and resident cats. We walk along, looking down each cross sidewalk and out to the rest of the city. 
Eventually, we get to the east gate of the walled city. Just before we walk out toward a bus stop, a little stall offers a taste of local specialty, candied orange peel. Delicious, but at 39 kuna for a plastic bag holding just an ounce or two, not for us. 
Our immediate goal is to use this rainy interlude to see the city beyond the gates by bus.  Four buses later, we have seen some of the coast just to the south, the large bridge just to the north of the town, and some of the non-tourist parts of Dubrovnik across the bridge to the north. We are now back at the old city.
At 2 pm we are back at the old city, and the sky seems to be clearing a little.  It is time to splurge and walk the city wall that encircles Dubrovnik.  This tourist attraction now costs 100 kuna, or about $19, each.  Given the crowds, the ups and downs of the wall, and the normal stops for photo ops, you can expect to take 2 hours to do the whole walk. 
And so we are off.  The standard direction starts from the north gate, walking counter-clockwise.  The first thing you walk toward is the west wall, overlooking the Adriatic.  Then south, overlooking the small boats all tied up in the harbor.  Then east, overlooking the city, then north and descend off the wall. 
On the east wall we caught up with an English-language tour.  The tour guide was explaining how the siege of Dubrovnik, where the Serbs and Montenegrins shelled the city from the hills to the east that tower over the city, was the greatest atrocity of the breakup of Yugoslavia.  He said: look out at the old city.  Old roofs are brownish yellow, the color of tiles that are hundreds of years old.  New roofs, replaced since 1992, are orange brown.  Sure enough, almost every roof is new, with a few old roofs here and there.  The maps confirm that the areas not hit are mostly clustered along the west wall, overlooking the Adriatic, and the east and center of the town were badly hit. Fish in a barrel.
Stephen Colbert has defined the word "truthiness" as being 'the truth as one believes it to be.'  One would then state: "The truthiness of the matter is . . ." and then one could state anything one wanted, without regard for the truth of the matter.  Later in Mostar (in Bosnia), Mike picked up a summary of the breakup of Yugoslavia. It stated that 10 % of the walls in Dubrovnik were destroyed in the siege and shelling.  I suppose it can be simultaneously true that 75% of the roofs (tile) and 10% of the walls (stone) could be destroyed, but it is hard to imagine such an outcome. Asserting that the siege of Dubrovnik was "the greatest atrocity of the breakup of Yugoslavia" is a bit of Croatian truthiness. 
We saw and heard a whole lot of unresolved differences of fact as we traveled through Bosnia and the Dubrovnik section of Croatia.
As we progressed a little farther on the east wall, we stopped and talked for a while with a charming Korean couple who were also walking the wall.  We had seen very few Asian tourists throughout Romania, but here in Dubrovnik there were lots of Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, and others from all over southeast Asia.
We wandered around some of the streets we had not seen before, and then back to the pension.  We passed lot of fair-skinned tourists who had managed to get first-class sunburns. Others were clearly determined to get some beach time - rain be damned.
Dinner at Gabrielle again - this time spaghetti and another pasta dish.
After dinner, we go into the tourist hotel peninsula just to look around.  Finally, it is dark and time to go to bed.