Costa Brava, 1976

Croatia may seem like a pretty cutting edge destination for Brits, but for the whole of Eastern Europe, it's Spain - somewhere hot by the sea where the food's not too weird and they sort of understand what you're saying. Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes and East Germans come here in their tens of thousands to drink beer, eat chips and meat and get sunburnt. It's just like holidays in the old days - people fall asleep drunk on the first day, get burnt, go and do it all again the next day. And don't care. This is their two weeks in the sun... The East European women are all slim, tall and beautiful; the men look like recently demobbed squaddies (and most actually are), fit, shaven, hard as nails. Until they get middle aged, when all the beer and meat fills out their bellies stupendously.
And it all sounds like Allo Allo. No-one speaks Croatian, and it's just different enough from Slovakian, etc that EVERYONE has to try and speak English, which they haven't spoken since school. We've been complimented twice on how good our English is, they assume everyone is speaking it as a second language. Vocabulary is a tricky thing, though - this morning I listened to a Dutch woman asking a Croatian shopkeeper, 'I need... the thing... for to make fire.' 'Ahh!' came the reply, and finger pointing at the matches.
Dubrovnik was beautiful in a kind of Venetian way - lovely buildings, lots of tourists. Got my first ever speeding fine from two dodgy cops in Bosnia - the coast road north of Dubrovnik passes through 20km of that country. Basically I bribed them to turn a blind eye with 50 Euros! Does that make me a proper traveller? Now we are in Trogir, which is also Venetian looking and full of tourists - with justification, as it's lovely. Internet access is great in Croatia, thanks to a recently privatised telecoms system (Italy and France, eat your heart out). Which means... more pictures! Hopefully these are all sort of self-explanatory, they go back to Italy after the wedding in Venice and bring us up to date.
Next we're heading inland to Plitvice Lakes National Park, which is meant to be spectacular though the surrounding hills are still full of landmines. I think this is day 48 of our holiday, almost 7 weeks in and only 6 weeks to go. Now if I can only come up with a sure-fire moneymaking scheme that means we can do this every year - we'd love to do a circuit of the Baltic next year. Any offers of large legacies gratefully received...

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