Supporting the Local Economy

Day 3: Dubrovnik

In our family, it wouldn't be a vacation without the first day including a walking tour--or two. Our day began with such a tour guided by an incredibly intelligent, articulate young Croatian woman, whose name I found to be unpronounceable. In fact, with this language, the spoken word does not seem to be have all that much in common with what it looks like on paper.  She had us practice a few words--and the diction of the whole lot of us was woefully inadequate. In a short time, I have come to believe that in order to master this, and for that matter, any Slavic language, you have to do a lot of teeth gritting. This is a problem for me, as I have been chastised on multiple occasions by my dentist for my nocturnal dental overuse. I feel thankful that many Dubrovnik citizens have a mastery of the English language. If I had to try speaking Croatian, I can't imagine the chronic headache I would have     because of the constant gritting.

I am a firm believer in supporting the local economy of the country I am visiting.  I also celebrate when tourism helps reduce the unemployment rate in that country. But for the life of me, I cannot understand the benefit of employing public restroom matrons. Like many European countries, you have to pay to use the public bathrooms in Dubrovnik. In the past, our public bathroom experiences have usually included an old woman sitting in front of the bathroom at a dilapidated card table with a whole lot of change. Not today.

There was a woman (and not even old) and there was a bathroom but that is where the similarities ended. There was no table, but more importantly, there was no change. We of course, had none and this became a problem because we had just completed a two hour walking tour and had drank a lot of water.  Unfortunately, our matron was not one of the Dubrovnik citizens who had a mastery of the English language and this added to out angst. She began to point to a young man selling soda and ice cream and shooed us towards him, in what we assumed to mean someone who could give us change. Of course, in order to get change, we had to buy something.  The cynic in me thought that this was a scam and the young man was probably the matron's son. Well, we walked away from the young man with a Coke Zero and a fistful of change.

As far as I can tell, what happened next was the sole reason for her employment. She took our change and then put it in a machine and then opened the bathroom door. I consider myself a moderately intelligent person who has been opening bathroom doors for more than 55 years. I think I could have handled this without the matron' assistance. Oh well, when in Rome......

Knee update--ehhh.

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