Moments after I finished my previous blog post, I went to take a shower in the cramped bathroom of our apartment. If you've been to Europe, you know that most hot water heaters are not centralized like in the US, but rather in the bathroom directly above the shower. I was shampooing my hair, and accidentally hit the faucet to the left. It took me a couple seconds to realize that I had just launched a stream of near-boiling water onto the left side of my body. The pain and redness only lasted a night, but I now have a fear of European showers.
I hope that you'll continue reading, because if you can't handle me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my best.
Yesterday was our final day in Makarska. We downloaded the Makarska Beaches app (this is a real thing), and took a quick trip up the coast toward a beach that was at the base of a deserted hospital for children with asthma. It was definitely a creepy structure, with broken windows and graffiti, but it was reassuring that these kids just had asthma (no offense to asthma) and not something more lethal and ghost-inducing.
Shoutout Crash Bandicoot on PS1.
The beach itself was nice, but we continued to be haunted by the weather. We stuck it out on the cloudy bank for a few hours before the rain began to fall, and we had a quick cup of coffee at a nearby beach bar before returning home. I then took the nap of the vacation: a two-hour, dream-filled nap from which I awoke disoriented. If you don't know where you are when you wake up, that means you had a great nap.
We then followed that up with our best dinner of the vacation (the bar is really low in this neck of the woods) on a small square off the beaten path in Makarska. This experience was neutralized by a vicious stray cat-on-leashed-dog attack that I saw unfold like I was watching a lion hunt on safari. To be fair, the momma cat was instinctually protetcing her nearby kitten, but the dog she went after is probably served kibble in a golden bowl.
Anyway, with a pretty uneventful Makarska behind us, we said our goodbyes and made our way south toward Kotor, Montenegro. About 40 minutes from town, we once again stopped at the secret beach, where we finally got a few hours of sun. Our new favorite term is "FKK friendly," which means a beach is down with nudity. FKK stands for Freikörperkultur, which is a German word that translates to Free Body Culture. Today, there was a little Russian boy who was as FKK friendly as he was loud. He spent about 20 minutes yelling "NYET!" at his mom while standing on the shore with nothing on but his water wings.
"Take a picture of me reading."
Our bodies toasted, we began the ~4 hour drive toward Kotor. The drive went by pretty quickly with the help of a This American Life podcast that made us both tear up. When we got near Kotor, we realized that there was a ferry across the Bay of Kotor that would save us nearly an hour of driving. We took it for four Euro, and got a really beautiful view of the new country.
The view from the Kotor ferry.
We just wrapped up dinner in Muo, the small town in which we are staying. It's about a 15 minute walk from Old Town Kotor, but it is right next to the water. Our hostess offered to make us crepes with the honey harvested from her husband's bees, so I am going to turn up tomorrow at 8 a.m.