Dobar Dan! (Hello in Croatian)
- Date: 2015/10/3
- Port Name: Dubrovnik
- Country: Croatia
- First time there?: Second time in Croatia but first time in Dubrovnik!
- What did I do?: Interpreted for a half day tour in the morning and got to spend the afternoon with some colleagues exploring the beautiful and ancient city walls! Although the morning tour was short, I remember it was one of the most stressful tours for me to interpret because there was an intimidating lady (whom I admire a lot) in my group and she would correct me every time I used “katakana” Japanese. For example, when I said “piru” or katakana for pill, she would tell me the correct Japanese word, 錠剤 (jyouzai), in front of everyone. In hindsight it was a good lesson for me and I learned not to be so sketchy in my interpreting. I will also forever remember words like 錠剤 (pills)、遺骨 (remains) or 遺物 (relics) などなど。
Post-stress Sheng on the city fortification. I think you had to pay to go up the wall but totally worth it! You can spend around 1 to 2 hours up here circling the old city and just taking in the view of the city and the awesome, awesome, Mediterranean Sea.
When I visited Croatia for the first time (Split and Hvar back in 2012) , to me, it was an exotic country with impressive European architecture and stone buildings plus a really breathtaking Lake Plitvice. But I learned on this trip with Peace Boat that Croatia is actually one of the seven countries of the Ex-Yugoslavia and that Croatia fought a war of independence in the early 90s. In fact, although the old town of Dubrovnik was a UNESCO world heritage site at that time, it was the target of a siege by the Yugoslavian government and more than half of the city was destroyed by bombs. A part of the city that we see today is actually careful and loyal reconstructions done using materials as close as possible to the original materials used.
Another trivia, Dubrovnik is one of the cities that inspired the fictional city of the Ghibli Studios animated movie “Kiki’s Delivery Service”. We were playing the soundtrack of the movie while walking along the walls when we saw JIJI!! Can you see the black spot in the picture? (For those who don’t know, Jiji is the talking black pet cat of Kiki, the lead character in the movie. And please watch it if you haven’t seen it yet! Highly recommended.)
I enjoyed this city so much I decided to recreate it for my sketch homework for school:
Postcard for the family:
Postcard for le bf:
Next port: Kotor, Montenegro!
stlim 