War Museum in Dubrovnik

I am in an internet cafe in the Old Town because it started pouring and I needed a place to hide out and Empire State of Mind just came on the radio in the cafe. I cannot escape that song. It is blarring everyday in Crown Heights and now it followed me to Croatia. Haha

I am renting this apartment while I am here from a woman, Zeljka, who is my age. Tonight she took me to the Dubrovnik War Museum. It is high above the city on the top of the mountain. She was 16 when the war was going on. It is hard to imagine being a teenager and having to live through a war. At the same time I was 15 and my biggest complaint was that my sisters would practice their cheerleading too loudly and it annoyed me. The road to get up to the museum was small, very windy and the "guardrail" was a 2 foot high stone wall. People are crazy drivers here. It makes the dollar cab drivers in Brooklyn seem like the safest drivers in the world. We get to the top (safely) and the museum is inside an old fort that the French built when France and Napoloean had control of Croatia. Inside they had old military weapons, bombs, and lots of pictures of the city after it was bombed by the Serbian forces. Everything in the museum was written in Croatian so Zeljka had to translate everything for me. There was also a video that showed the bombing of the city from 1991. Zeljka talked about how most people in Dubrovnik thought they would be safe from the war because the city is recognized a protected site by the United Nations. She also said that many people in Dubrovnik believe that the United States, England and other United Nations countries wanted Croatia to lose the war because they did not want Croatia to become its own country. They wanted Croatia to stay a part of Yugoslavia. She said that is why no one came to help them until much later. It was interesting to hear her talk about it. They had to live without water for months and hide in a house in the Old Town because they thought the walls surrounding the city would protect them.

Tourists used to visit the top of this mountain because the view is so spectacular, but during the war the cable car that brought people up there was destroyed. That was in 1991. In two weeks, they will finally reopen a new cable car. It took 20 years for that to happen. She seemed really excited about it happening. I guess recovering from a war physically takes a long time and it seems like there is still some emotional scars as well. Zeljka seems so much older than me and I am sure part of that is because of what she has lived through. Spending the last few hours with her made me feel pretty lucky for the life that I have had so far.

(on a lighter note, I just tried to spell check these paragraphs and almost all of the words came up as spelled wrong and then I realized I am using a Croatian computer so it thinks all of my English words are just Croatian words spelled wrong.)This picture is the view from the War museum. This crazy guy climbed out on the ledge while his buddy took this picture. It looked so awesome. I couldn't resist taking one too.