A week in Dubrovnik, Croatia: Day 1

Hi! In the few upcoming posts I'll tell you all about my experience in Dubrovnik. Me and my two cousins flew from Finland to Croatia on the 18th of May and came back on the 22nd, so we had about five days to explore the city.

Day 1.

- We landed in Dubrovnik around 10-11 in the morning. Instead of a hotel, we had made a reservation to stay at a private apartment which turned out to be great. Our apartment was located on a very high hill, so you could see basically all of the famous Old Town from our balcony. The view was breathtaking.

                                                   The view from the balcony of our apartment.

After settling in we decided to head straight to the Old Town. The first day was definitely the warmest, around +27 degrees Celsius. First we walked down the insane amount of stairs to get to the Old Town (seriously, I've never walked so many stairs in one go, and we had to go up and down multiple times during our stay - it was some good exercise though...). Once we got inside the walls, we had some lunch at a restaurant near the entrance to the Old Town. In the picture above you can see the big city wall that goes all around the Old Town. If there's one thing you absolutely have to do in Dubrovnik, it's to walk the city walls. We bought tickets and climbed up the stairs to the wall. With the same ticket you can also visit the fortress of Lovrijenac. I think it took about an hour or so to complete the tour, but we took our time and walked slowly. Here are a few pictures:

                                                           Here you can see the main street, Stradun. 

    The fortress of Lovrijenac, which can be entered from the area of Lapad, right

 next to the Old Town.

                                                                Aaaand here's Lapad :D

                           We figured that you can actually rent a boat and go kayaking. There were multiple different                           routes from Lapad and some of those went to a nearby island called Lokrum, which we visited on the third day.

                             On the right you can see Banje Beach, which is the nearest beach around the Old Town.

                             This was taken from a tower near the end of the tour, and it was the highest place on the wall. 
                                                                                          All those red roofs...

After walking the walls, we just walked around the streets and had some coffee. I had read in a tourist guide book that it's not easy to get ice-coffee in Dubrovnik, but luckily I managed to get one in every café. Later we had dinner in a restaurant called Taj Mahal, located in the middle of the Old Town. We decided to try a traditional local dish, "cevapi". It wasn't bad, but not exactly the kind of dish I would have wanted on a boiling hot day. It was basically some bread-shaped dough along with meat sticks, red onion and some cheese on the side - no vegetables besides the onion. I'm sure that the dish would be a success with men, but we didn't like it that much and only managed to eat about half of it. Whoops. Luckily the appetizer we had was good.

After dinner we wanted to check out Banje Beach. Now let me tell you something - for some reason I have extremely sensitive feet, and if I have to walk on a surface that is not just stable ground, I will get horrible cramps on my toes and on the bottoms of my feet. Not very fun. If you're looking for sandy beaches, I'm sorry but you won't really find any in Dubrovnik. Almost all the beaches are full of stones. Don't get me wrong, the stones are very smooth and nice and they won't scratch you but they killed my feet, so I had a really hard time walking around the beach, not to mention actually going into the sea to swim. Stupid cramps. Some places sold shoes for swimming but I didn't feel like spending my money on getting a pair, so I just had to suck up the pain.

                                                               My worst enemy.

                                                                  You can see the island of Lokrum from Banje Beach.

After Banje Beach we went shopping for some groceries since we had to prepare the breakfast ourselves. The currency in Croatia is called "kuna", and one kuna is about 7,59 euros. I suck at math so the calculator in my phone really came in handy during my trip. Anyways, after shopping we were exhausted and headed back to our apartment. For the rest of the night we just relaxed, had some drinks on the balcony and planned what we would do the next day. The Old Town looked amazing at night when all the lights lit up, but unfortunately it was impossible to capture the view on camera without it looking quite crappy - but I'll share the photo with you anyways.

                                       
So, that was our first day! The next post will probably be days 2&3 , and then 4&5. Thanks for reading and have a great day!