Doing the holiday thing [Croatia, Day 3]

Unfortunately, I'm not yet out of the woods in terms of wrist recovery. Annoying symptoms began even before we left home, and have come and gone since we got here (it's to do mostly with sensations of tingling and numbness in my fingertips and continuing difficulty bending the fingers in towards my palm, but my entire hand is also badly swollen). Pharmacies close at lunchtime on Saturdays and do not open at all on Sundays, so I had to wait until this morning to try for medication which might help relieve things. That meant a third morning in a row of early rising, so we already promised ourselves a lie-on on Tuesday to compensate. Anyway, a very helpful pharmacist pooh-poohed the prescription I'd been given by the hospital at home. He said what I'd been told was an anti-inflammatory was actually a painkiller, and that the dosage prescribed was far too small to be provided in Croatia. All he did was give me serious Panadol, along with an 'Eggsercizer' to help restore flexibility.

After my pharmacy adventure we met Zana, our holiday rep, and booked an island excursion for Friday, after which we had breakfast and got ourselves organised for our first sunning session of the trip. The weather had changed a bit, becoming windy and adding occasional clouds to the previously clear blue sky, but we still spent a pleasant couple of hours working on the beginnings of a tan. Carl took the plunge and had his first dip in the Adriatic, but I got no further than standing ankle-deep at the edge of the beach, feeling the chilly numbness spread up my legs. Zana had warned us against the touts who go around offering boat trips around the harbour and along the beaches. She told us here excursions were top-notch (Friday's is by hydrofoil to Hvar island), but that the boats which the touts are connected with are unsafe and have dirty toilets. Despite her warnings, we were quite taken by a guy who approached us while we soaked up the sun, especially when he suggested that we take a look at the boat later on. 'Drop by after 8.00. I'll give you a drink on board and you can see if you like what you see. We took him up his offer later on and were very impressed with what we saw: the Calypso is a fine-looking timber-framed boat, the toilets are excellent, and the home-made brandy was very nice. So we made a booking with our friend for another boat trip on Wednesday.

We consulted our Rough Guide and the local City Guide for restaurant recommendations for the evening, and liked the sound of one in particular which is in the picturesque old town. It's one a street which in typical Croat style has loads of consonants in its name and is very poorly provided with vowels, so it was just as well that Carl was fully confident of finding it without needing to ask a local where it was. We'd enjoyed our food on Saturday and Sunday, but tonight's experience was a big disappointment. What we presumed was the owner took our order and was not at all happy for Carl to have what he'd asked for. 'May I recommend' was how she prefaced what she had to say, but here attitude was very authoritarian, and here 'you will enjoy it' was more an order than a promise. The food was not great, the prices were outlandish by the standards we'd seen elsewhere (which are generally excellent value for money), mi-lady's attitude was hugely objectionable, and we left in a cloud of bad feeling on both sides.

Fortunately, we ended the night on a great high. We did a bit of a bar crawl, went on an abortive search for a nightclub which the guide book recommends largely because it's in a cave, continued our crawl in a couple of little places along the tourist strip close to home, and ended up being entertained by a wonderful group of German close-harmony singers.

p.s. I'm posting this on Tuesday morning, and Carl doesn't yet know which pic I've chosen. It's just possible that he'll ask for this to be replaced.