My Birthday Week

So I must have a pretty incredible girlfriend. A couple of months ago Emily told me that she was taking me somewhere for my birthday and that it was a surprise. Of course I was completely OK with this and so for the past couple months I have known that I would be flying somewhere on my birthday but would not know until we left. So this past Tuesday after work we drove to the airport to catch the mysterious 6:35 flight. It wasn't until right before we checked in to get our tickets that Emily revealed to me where we would be spending the next five nights....Dubrovnik, Croatia. What can I say except for Awesome! Emily did not know this, but I actually really wanted to go to Dubrovnik after google searching best places to go in Europe and happened to fall upon a website that had Dubrovnik listed as one of them and I thought that it looked really cool. So I was pretty excited when she told me it was where we were going.

The famous part of Debrovnik is their old town which is completely surrounded by high walls that you can walk on to get a good view of the city. It is also right on the Adriatic coast, and I love water, so this was perfect. High rocky cliffs and beautiful blue waters. It is pretty touristy because of all the cruise ships that stop their, but it was still nice to walk around. Very picturesque. We spent our first day exploring the old town and kind of got our barrings.

The great thing about the location of Dubrovnik is that it is very close to a couple of other countries. So our second day we took an excursion through a local tour company into Bosnia-Herzegovina. Our end location was the city of Mostar which was described to us as the unofficial capital of the Herzegovina region. We were not super impressed with the tour, but Mostar seemed nice. Unfortunately because we were with the tour company we were on a stricter time schedule and didn't have very much free time to explore the town. We had a great seafood lunch though which is always a plus I guess. And, the male waiter told me that he loved me after I ordered, so I guess you could say that the locals are really friendly.

Our third day was Friday, which all of you know was my birthday of course. The forecast said that it was suppose to be cloudy and rainy all day, but it actually only rained for about 20 minutes or so and then was completely sunny! After getting some tasty gelato, we decided to pay to walk the city walls (a huge rip-off, but I'm glad we did it anyways). The wall is about 1 mile long and took us about an hour after all the various stops and picture taking. After the wall we wanted to go swimming and found this little cove that was pretty much made for swimming because they had build all these cement platforms into the cliff walls. But we had the entire cove to ourselves. I loved it. To finish up the day we ate dinner at this nice seafood restaurant right on water not too far away from our apartment. Emily and I actually ended up being a little bit disappointed with food, but it was still a beautiful setting and we had a good time, so no worries. My birthday was great.

Saturday we did another excursion through the same tour company, but this one was to Montenegro. Our first stop was the city of Kotor. Also a walled city right along the water but not as big as Dubrovnik. After a 30 minute walking tour, we had roughly 50 minutes of free time. Emily and I were both very hungry and craving pizza for some reason, so we went back to a pizzeria that we had seen along the walking tour. We each ordered a pizza for ourselves, ordered a bottle of wine (wine is cheap here), and a crepe for desert. Although we were crossing our fingers that the waiter would bring out the cork with the wine, we were not so lucky. So we had to share a bottle of wine in 35 minutes. Now some of you might say to yourselves," Well why didn't you just ask for the cork to the wine after he brought the wine out?" And my response to you would be that you do not understand European service. In Europe, waiters don't come back to check on you to see how you are doing once they have brought you something. In fact at the end of the meal you practically have to go search them out to get the bill. It is as if they want you to dine and dash. Anyways, we were not drunk, but it did make for a more humorous run back to the van, and Emily bit her tongue really hard trying to eat the crepe. We are not sure if that was from the alcohol or not, but we are leaning towards yes. After Kotor, we drove for a little bit longer to reach Budva, another coastal city, and with yet another walled in old town. We didn't do much here except walk around and explore ourselves. There is a really nice hotel that is on it's own island there, but other than that, I wouldn't be able to tell you much about Budva, except that apparently rich Russians are buying up a lot of land and building hotels there. But anyways, Montenegro was fun. It would be nice to explore on our own sometime.

That pretty much sums up most of the trip. Our flight left early Sunday morning to get back to Garmisch. We had a great trip though, it was an awesome surprise. Thanks again Emily!