Traveling With Maya Doolittle Miles

See photo stream at end of BLOG 2.
We had a scheduled trip to the tiny country of Montenegro on Saturday, but ran into problems crossing the border.  We had a van with 8 students and a rental car with Maya, Bill and myself. But one of my students is from India, and despite trying to have all the proper papers, they would not let her cross for the day. So Bill, Maya, and myself drove her back to Dubrovnik, and sent the students ahead to Montenegro.  We will have to go there for a day trip later. It was kind of cloudy anyway, so we stopped on the way back and drove up to the fort on Mount Srg. Maya was happy to find a herd of horses to tame. Everywhere we go, that child finds animals. Mount Srg is the big mountain behind Dubrovnik, there is a fort on the top that was used in both WWII and the recent 1991 war. From Mount Srg you can see Bosnia (only 4 miles away) and Dubrovnik. Dubrovnik was very hard hit during the war, and most people left for Canada, Germany, and the US. Some have returned. My landlord, Dado and Katja, spent 5 years in London. Most people I meet have been in the US or Canada and returned here.  The people who stayed all had a rough time. They lived in the hotels without running water. The soldiers who stayed and fought from the fort on Mount Srg are called the Defenders of Dubrovnik. If you saw a map of this area with the number of bomb hits you would cry, over 300 bombs hit the Olde Town directly.

Today Bill had a bad cold so Maya and I went to the island of Lokrum, which is just off shore from olde town.  The island has a botanical garden, a fort, monastery ruins, and wild peacocks (which Maya fed her lunch to). Croatia is a kid's playground. There are no rules, lots of rocks, ruins, and walls to climb on, and Croatians are fairly tolerant of children. Zoran, the culture teacher at the college, warned my students; "Croatia does not have litigation, people expect you to use common sense."  Unfortunately Maya has not made any Croatian friends yet, I will have to help her connect with some, perhaps she will need to go to the local school for a visit. She has found a kitten she is quite attached to and feeds every morning. It lives in some bushes near our apartment, she has named him, he is very tiny. She tried to sneak him into our apartment in my purse.  Trouble.