Roughing it in Dubrovnik then splitting to Split

Ciao ragazzi! Wow, is it Monday already? Did the weekend really go by that fast?

In any case, I spent the last week or so in Croatia with Jon Atkins, a good friend who made the trip all the way out from New York.

After a few good meals in Bologna (not sure Jon's former cousin would have approved of all of the carbs...), we packed our bags and headed off, using various forms of transportation, i.e., train, taxi, overnight ferry and bus all the way to Split, but only for a brief stop before spending a night in Dubrovnik.

Since it was not high season in Croatia, we were lucky to find hotels with ample availability and reduced rates. As you can see, we were hardly roughing it in Dubrovnik, at the Imperial Hilton, a really nice place. The second picture is the view from our room on the third floor.

We must have been making up for the reasonably priced hotel on our meal at Proto, a seafood restaurant acclaimed by locals and guidebooks alike, as the BEST place to eat in the area. Though my seafood platter below was quite good, it was not worth the price tag, but proved much better than one of the more local places we found that evening.

Evidently, the vast majority of the restaurants are almost strictly for tourists, and no tourists in the off season means no customers. In more than a few of the places we ate, we were the only ones there for the entire meal.....

Dubrovnik itself, as was the case for the other two cities we visited (Split and Zadar) includes and old town with cobblestone streets and centuries old architecture, and a newer, more modern area like many other European cities.

As you can imagine, most of the tourist destinations are in the older parts of the city, and, in Dubrovnik, we had the opportunity to visit the oldest synagogue in Croatia (and quite possibly the smallest, covering roughly no more than 25 square meters).

After a day of sightseeing and a morning of walking along the coastline and through parts of the new city, we decided to hightail it out to Split.

Four hours later, we arrived, accommodation-less, to a very wet Split.

Consulting our guidebook, we tried a few different hotels, none of which were very good from a price to value ratio. We had found one decent place, but after learning that we would have to share a bed, opted to look elsewhere. Fortunately, the guy working at the front desk understood our predicament, and was happy to call a few other places on our behalf.

In the end, we were able to find a very nice, reasonably priced room right in the heart of the old city. Even better, we awoke the next morning to a (mostly) dry city, despite our (mostly) wet clothing and luggage. Below are a few pics in front of our hotel in the old city, with the same smooth cobblestone streets as we found in Dubrovnik.

In Split, we had an opportunity to check out another synagogue (trying to balance our time between so many churches!), not the oldest or smallest in Croatia, but very cool nonetheless.

Our guide, a Jewish Croatian in his mid fifties was more than happy to give us a full account of the history of the synagogue, which was originally built in the 1500s, and restored several times, most recently in 1996 through money provided by the Croatian government. Since there is no rabbi in Split, services are only formally held when one visits from Zagreb, the capital located in the interior of the country.

Neighboring the synagogue is the former Jewish ghetto, which contains many houses with mezzuzah (mezzuzot?), or holes in the place of where they used to be. Also not far away was this swastika, spray-painted on the wall of a local business. A stupid act of vandalism, but also a reminder that there is still hatred and misunderstanding out there...