From Lake Plivtice we drove west over the coastal mountains and down to the Dalmatian seaside where the highway hugs the shore and fantastic views of the Adriatic Sea and nearby islands come rolling around with every point and harbor of the shoreline.

From the road I watched the cobalt seas specked occasionally with a yacht or fishing boat and forming a stark contrast with the red roof tiles of small villages and seaside hamlets such that, after a while, I had the sensation of having played too long with a color wheel, much the same way that staring at a word for too long can make one question the spelling. Eventually, after a four or five hour drive, we arrived at the seaside village of Dubrovnik.

A walled trading city whose origins can be traced as far back as the 7th century and variously controlled by the Byzantines, Venetians and Turks, Dubrovnik is encircled by high walls and filled with narrow cobblestones streets and looks from above like an endless sea of mottled red and orange roof tiles.

Owing to a curious set of circumstances our original hotel was overbooked and we were forced to go to a nicer one which also gave me a private room (I hate it when that happens). The Argentinean was very typically European, small rooms heavy draperies and most importantly an old and heavy cherry wood desk, the sort of desk where you could say sit down and get a bit of writing done. I am picky about only two things when it comes to writing, the desk my laptop sits on and/or, as the case may be, the pen I use. The wrong equipment often produces the wrong words, these things are important. Trust me.

The downside to the Argentinean was its location, a bit of a walk from the old walled city, but after getting settled we set out for a stroll through old town. Dubrovnik’s old town area feels a bit like stepping back in time several centuries.

Most of the still standing buildings date from about 1468, though some were destroyed in the great earthquake of 1667, which leveled nearly everything on the Adriatic Sea. There are the remains of a monastery and nunnery, now merely crumbling walls and piled stones, which date from much early than the rest of the city, but by and large the city looks as it did in the fifteenth century. Long known as the Pearl of the Adriatic, many people think Dubrovnik is the most beautiful city in Europe and from what I’ve seen I believe them. The downside of course is the resulting crowds, but most tourists seemed to be a bit older than me and for the most part headed home around ten. Insomniacs can have the place to themselves late at night and that’s when the city looks its best anyway, the polished stone streets reflect the glittering lamplight and no one is around.

Dubrovnik is famous for its red tiled roofs. Apparently the tiles were unique, or perhaps just older than the other towns in the area, whatever the case nearly every photograph you’re likely to see of the city is from above looking out over the roofs. Regrettably Dubrovnik was heavily shelled during the Bosnian conflict and roughly 65 percent of its buildings were hit, thus Dubrovnik’s roofscape is not quite what it used to be. But to my eye it looked better with the new and slightly different tiles mottled together with older slightly yellower tiles. The contrast between the colors made the roofs look less a postcard perfect vision and more of an actual city. After all fairy tales are myth, reality looks a little more like someone parked a howitzer on the nearby hilltop and started lobbing injustice down on the world.

The next day we paid the rather exorbitant admission and set out to walk to walls. Dubrovnik’s walls range from a thickness of about four meters to as much as ten in some spots and comprise a distance of roughly two kilometers as they zigzag around the city. Walking the walls seemed a bit surreal to me. It would be more proper to say I staggered about the walls in a sort of trance owing to the fact that I had never actually seen a fairy tale city. As with most things that overwhelm me I found myself staring at the often mundane details instead, stockings hanging from a clothesline, a row of potted plants on a windowsill, an olive tree growing over a crumbling stone wall, a garden of lupines and morningbells growing out of an old tile roof. Perhaps the most surreal thing about Dubrovnik is that it still a functioning city and even as we tourists walked about the walls staring down at the narrow streets running off in all directions, the people of Dubrovnik were tending their gardens and hanging out the days laundry or heading off to work. The sights from the walls looked like something out of a European children’s story and any given window may well have contained a princess I simply overlooked.

To the best of my knowledge she was not a princess, but I did meet a lovely Croatia woman one night who, along with a couple of her friends attempted to explain the Bosnia-Croatia-Serbian conflict to me. However, about half way through both Martina and her friend Marco seemed to lose track of the thread. It may have been the beer, it may have been simply that there are better things to do, but halfway through Marco kind of shrugged and said roughly ‘I don’t know, a bunch of assholes shot at us and we shot at them and then it stopped and now it’s history,’ which more or less covers it I believe.