Diary of a Fifty-something First-time Buyer

Saturday, 21st October 2023: Dubrovnik Part 3

Looking back over the symmetries in the last post, the Game of Thrones schtick gives me pause for thought. I wonder how it really sits with locals, though it provides an income to many. It’s a faux-historical mirror-narrative that floats over the real. I can conceive an interest in the technical staging of epic dramatic scenes. I can also understand how the fictional stories and characters are more alive to fans than those of classical history. But the industry offers tours of GoT locations as if they were ancient Roman sites (and indeed some of them were).

I’m sure people are capable of holding in their heads the actual history of a place and its fictional jumping-off point into flights of fancy. Plus, a literary feat that has captured the imaginations of so many deserves to be celebrated. Would it be so very wide of the mark to draw a correlation with Joyce’s Dublin? I’m no highbrow snob about these things.

I suppose what bothered me is really my own discomfort at being a comfortable tourist in a place that was torn apart by war within my lifetime. I felt I owed it to Dubrovnik to find the bullet-holes, see the photographs. I also owed myself a holiday and the people of the city deserve to move forward - a chance to forget if they so wish. But the march of capitalism has advanced there so rapidly that, as with other cities in Europe (and around the globe), a place that is now comfortably - if expensively - touristic has become unliveable for those that call it home.

So I didn’t just go looking for the bullet-holes. I went looking for the parts where ordinary people live - between the beaches, small duplex estates with playgrounds and many parked cars - local shops where everyone knows everyone and no one speaks English. I didn’t do anything there, just wanted to briefly witness the real life of the place. And I always like to do this. I have wandered the back streets behind the Vatican in Rome, looking at pot plants on verandas and washing lines. Neighbourhood caffs where old men drank espressos and snifters of vino in the dust of morning.

I also like to seek out the veiled entrenchments of the richy-rich. Just like the cornpokes, they’re everywhere. But these days they like to hide their lights behind battlements of ornamental trees and foliage, in houses tethered onto hillsides by architectural struts and invisible buttresses, deceiving the eyes with glass reflections, sinking their wealth into sunken gardens and swimming pools. Not so much the storied street grandeur of yesteryear. They desire both security and seclusion, which I find interesting because these two things are not socially synonymous, unless you trust nobody. And if you trust nobody in a pretty law-abiding place like Dubrovnik, maybe you’ve got some shit that in your heart of hearts you feel you shouldn’t have.

Don’t get me wrong, people can be assholes and there are plenty of built-up places where I feel my shit isn’t safe. But when it comes to choosing a home, especially if you’re fortunate enough to be able to build it, if you choose to make it as hostile/inaccessible as possible and you’re not by nature a hermit, you’ve got to have some stocks and bonds Stockholm Syndrome going on. Or you’re a criminal. Or both.

Of course we do make assumptions about each other and I’m wary of this. Maybe there are some benevolent and hermitical uber-rich people that I would adore if I met but never will meet. The staff in a cafe outside the Ploče gate of Dubrovnik old town on my last morning in the city certainly seemed to make some sort of assumption about me.

I wandered in looking for some shelter from the morning sun and the tables outside were full in any case. A waiter passed me at the door and the interior was empty, so I seated myself at a table near the service door at the back. I just wanted a small breakfast, maybe a coffee. The same waiter passed again, came back, cast me a look and went into the kitchen without a word. A few moments later another man, who may have been the manager, came out and stood over me. I looked up at him smiling and asked, “Is this alright?”, meaning the table. In a dipped voice he said, “No. This is reserved.” He waved his arm across the entirely empty restaurant toward the tables by the window in the sun and said, “Why don’t you sit…” but I was already rising from my seat at that point. As I left wordlessly he asked loudly, “What is the problem?”

The problem was I felt more commonality with the rude wait staff in that restaurant than the tourist hordes outside and I just wanted to sit quietly for a bit in the shade. The problem was the moue of contempt I was met with for merely sitting down. The problem was the ugly othering of a customer. What can you do about that other than walk away? The entire empty interior it seems was reserved for invisible locals. My takeaway... How dare this tourist bitch think she can sit inside our restaurant where we serve real people. We’d take her money though, if she was gullible enough to be spoken to this way and still spend it.

I wasn't, I didn’t.

I went to another bistro in the upper lanes of the town lined with eateries and paid eleven euros for two splindles of toast spread with mushed avocado and a couple of soft-poached eggs. The young waiter was very nice and I was mortified that they couldn't accept tips on a visa, though he was genuinely forgiving.

I went back to the apartment, collected my case from the outside table where the woman cleaning the place had deposited it, exchanged a greeting with her, snarfled the still damp swimming cozzie and towel from the air-dryer into a bag and left. I sweated to the bus stop, up roads and steps, burdened by my bloody over-packed case. At the top I met an Irish couple who assured me I was in the right place. To our left, near the cable-car entrance, swayed an extraordinarily drunk man who pulled face-mugs at the children of awaiting passengers and danced to the music of a couple of buskers plying their trade there. He looked deliriously happy. The buskers looked annoyed. Drunk people, it seems, are pretty much the same everywhere.

I dried the swimming stuff on a grassy island outside the airport terminal, stuffed it in my case, went through security and a few hours later was back in Ireland. Dublin to be precise, where not so long ago I was comfortably far enough away from the exploding ordnances and incendiaries north of the country to feel secure.

My sister collected me from the airport. What a nice thing, to be collected. I had left my car at her house, near enough to the airport, and been granted a taxi service, lucky duck. Missed the kids, old enough to be doing their own thing of a Friday night, mwahed the dogs-in-law and set off back to Wexford.

I wasn't going to write about that stuff in the Ploče gate restaurant but it has stayed with me as a particularly sour end-note to my trip. I'm not sure I've conveyed how horrible it felt. I'm certain I did nothing to engender such an unwelcoming response. It was, essentially, two big blokes bullying a woman on her own. I'm not so easily bullied though, especially when there's a crowd to fall back into. I melted into the anonymous masses. And then I went, circuitously, home.

One shitty experience does not a holiday make though. And if you can buy slag and plasma in the corner store, it's gotta be worth a return trip.