New Thing #86 - Balkans Trip - Day 8 (Split, Croatia)

June 20, 2015

We had a leisurely morning today, taking our time to change for the beach and grabbing breakfast. Brenda and Nikki headed down the street to get some assorted pastries called bureks filled with meats, cheeses or potatoes. Definitely more savory than sweet, and equally delicious. Because B's car was nestled securely in its spot, we didn't want to drive anywhere. Luckily, a beach wasn't a far walk down the coastline, so we packed up a few things and headed that direction.

A little overcast this morning.

Small model of Split.

Today would be a nice, relaxing day with little to do but sun it up on the beach. We had fantastic weather, with partly cloudy blue skies to start us off. It's not very often I get lazy days on vacation, so we took every opportunity to be as lazy as possible.

Apparently Croatians don't head to the beach before 11am, because it was fairly empty when we got here.

Sunshine!

These guys were playing Picigin: a ball game played in shallow waters where players batted the ball around, trying to keep it out of the water. Some of them were really diving for the ball.

Water playground extravaganza!

NOBODY here!

For a few Kuna, we were able to rent these chairs to stay off the sand. It was pretty dirty. :(

As the afternoon went by, more people took up residence on the sand. They clearly didn't mind if it was gross.

This was a group of "mature" men playing water soccer. In speedos. And let's just say those speedos were a bit on the saggy side.

Lemon beer. Basically like a shandy. Delicious.

This guy was trying to get Nikki to go on a pub crawl tonight. We didn't bite.

Lunch: a doner kebap: a pita filled with shaved seasoned meat, tomatoes, corn, green salad (lettuce) and a mildly spicy sauce. SO GOOD!!! Unfortunately, I couldn't keep it all in the pita without losing pieces of it, and the damn sky rats kept waiting for me to drop more for them eat. You'd think they were dogs waiting for table scraps.

It's amazing how quickly a day will go by when you're doing absolutely nothing! We followed up our beach trip with some shopping in some of the little shops near the shoreline. Some of them were pretty touristy, but we found a few to pick up little souvenirs of our time in Croatia. I ended up with an olive wood serving board, some spices, and a cool reproduction of an old Italian map of the area. It's also hanging up in my living room now. :)

Just. What?

Eventually, we all needed to shower, and decide on a place for dinner, which took about as long as the night before. We should have taken the time to Yelp a suggestion, because we just kept wandering around forever. Finally, our stomachs dictated our stop until we found a cute little donkey restaurant with a terrace. Okay, it wasn't actually a restaurant where they served donkey (at least I hope not), but they had a donkey on their menu. The food wasn't write-home good, but we were all starving after our day of fun in the sun, and to me, it was better than the night before.

Beautiful.

Travel buds.

Blue team! We did not plan the matchy-matchy outfits. I swear. (What you can kind of see is the incredibly stupid sunburn I got. I swear I slathered on sunscreen like nobody's business, but it clearly didn't go on evenly.)

Black team! And a cat.

This smoothie place was hopping at all hours of the day. At night they cranked up the techno beats and put on their own little dance party in the square.

These super drunk people wanted their photo with the guy in costume.

See, told you there was a donkey on it.

My hair is on point.

Action shot.

Spaghetti Bolognese.

Shortly before we finished dinner, it started to pour down rain. And not just a little, it was coming down in buckets. Luckily we were covered at our table, but the stairs getting down from the terrace and the side streets were not covered. I'm not sure if you've ever discovered this, but Old Navy flip flops are not safe to wear on slick surfaces. Trust me. Thousands of years of wear and tear on those damn stone sidewalks, and I could barely walk. I'm amazed I didn't kill myself at least twice.

We found a little bar that had a bit of room inside, though most people had the same thought we did to ride out the storm with booze. We packed in where we could find standing room, and only anticipated getting a drink or two before moving on. We definitely hadn't anticipated staying the entire night, but that's exactly what we did, dancing our hearts out and chatting up a group of baby Scots who were there celebrating a bachelor party.

Dark bar selfie.

One of the Scots from the bachelor party. I kept trying to get him to give me his shirt, but he refused. Oh, and he also kept sternly calling me HYEAAATHER! all night. (You have to say this with a thick Scottish brogue to fully grasp it.)

Success! Okay, not really. I only got to wear it for the photo before I gave it back to him. I'm a sweetheart.

Nikki REALLY wanted a crepe on the way back to our room. But so did a half dozen or so other people. And it took the crepe guy around 15-20 minutes to make one, so she eventually gave up.

Quotes of the day: "Drying Machine" and "No stress."
Quote of the night: "I've never felt that much chest hair on my chest."