Shit got REAL weird last night.
As you may have noticed (all 6 of you who read these things), we did not post a daily update yesterday.This is because we were zombies. We also probably jumped the gun on posting at 8 PM our time on Monday, because ALL of the adventures happened after that.
Shortly after drinking a nice glass of Croatian wine from the local convenience store (I swear every European city I visit always has the most kickass wine to be found in the tiny convenience store where you’d least expect it), we headed out “early” to try to make it into Kiva Bar, which had been recommended to us, to squeeze in before the swarms that we experienced the night before. Still no luck. That place gets SLAMMED. It’s probably because they play the best mix of early 2000s American hits ever.
Being packed out of the bar once again, we returned to Lola, the scene of all of the glass-breaking from the night before. Off the bat, the waiter and bar tender-ess recognized us and said hi, which made us feel super cool and excited and then we struck up a casual friendship with the nice Norwegian couple next to us. We became best friends really fast, we now have an invitation and an address to visit them any time in Norway, and spent about 90 minutes telling terrifying ghost stories – I still can’t remember how we got on this track but it was a deep one.
Things took a turn for the worse when we fell out of our local bartender friends’ good graces because Nellie tried to get up to tell the waiter something and apparently nothing in that entire restaurant is nailed down and table went flying (again) and we broke even more glasses than the night before. We felt really bad and kept apologizing a and got the bartender a drink and then just as he was warming back up to us, our Swedish friend who lives in Norway went to get up to go to the bathroom and slammed the table and all of it’s contents down again. I really don’t see how this was our fault but in the immortal words of my friend Kathleen Quinn, we just asked for the check and said “we will see ourselves out.” That place really needs to invest in heavier tables.
At this point the night should have been over and we were both really tired from a full day of boating but Hvar is like a bizarro planet and no one apparently even starts to go out until midnight. I was already under the covers and Nellie saw a cool boat across the bay that was bringing a bunch of VERY excited people to a nearby island, and she got really excited and what I must say was a highly respectable 2nd wind, and against all of my stubborn refusals she bullied me into getting back up and going with her. First rule of international travel with friends is you “always stick together” even if it means “having to get on a weird boat at midnight with a bunch of really excited teens.”
I’ll give it to Nellie; it was the most amazing decision in all of life. The boat ended up taking us to Carpe Diem, which is exactly what everyone says it is – a giant party island where people hang out on purpose until sunrise. We unknowingly snuck on the boat and didn’t know we were supposed to pay and no one asked us to, which was the first win. Next, a bunch of amazingly wonderful Irish girls on break from University wanted to be our friends and didn’t believe us when we told them that we were 31 and they argued that we were definitely 22 – double win. The best part about the entire night besides literally getting on a boat to get home at sunrise (if you miss the 2:00 boat the only one you can go in after that is the 5:00 one, which is apparently totally the status quo and what everybody does) was that out of everyone we could have possibly made friends with, we also met a Croatian kid who has seen every episode ever of How I Met Your Mother and whose favorite literary character of all time is Ted Mosby. Big argument there. It was the most exciting hour long conversation of my life and probably my favorite memory from the trip so far. If you don’t understand why, then you need to watch all of How I Met Your Mother and get back to me.
Boating back to Hvar at sunrise was a horrible decision for our dispositions the next day, but it was one of the prettiest things we’ve ever seen and done, and it was so fun to be boating back with a bunch of wonderful new friends. I often get insecure travelling because it can feel sometimes like even though you’re surrounded by people you’re all alone with no connections to anyone around you, so when chance happenings open your world up to so many more people out there who are having the same experience you are and whom you never would have met otherwise, it’s always really exciting and so memorable. And this is coming from an awkward bubbly introvert.
End of this story is that if anyone is looking for a place to stay in Hvar, they should stay with our host mother Marija because not only is her rental view amazing, she woke us up saying “ladies, you will be late !” when we completely overslept and would have certainly missed our 9AM ferry to Hvar by about 4 hours. She is the only reason we got to Dubrovnik on schedule and in budget, and she’s also just the coolest. So lesson of the day is that if you decide to take a boat to Carpe Diem, do it on a day when you are prepared to sleep in. Otherwise it is the worst thing in the world in the morning.
More from Dubrovnik once we get our senses about us. Until then…