Tiny Trotters and a Red Museum

It looks like we are spending 5 nights here in Dubrovnik. I am going to have to draft up some kind of truce with the resident felines. Current evidence suggests that Croatian domestic cats are at least twice the size of Greek cousins. I have big paws compared to my Greek cousins, but my tiny trotters are nothing beside the giant boots on the cats around here.  And the cats around here all seem to have regular human homes that they own and rule over.

Looking down the hill. We have a suitably cat sized windowsill to view from.

Our apartment is in a modernized old house on the edge of a park on a hill by the sea, so it has everything as far as my humans are concerned (except a sink plug). There are lots of explorable places around us. We are on a street with a name but which is in reality a block long set of stairs with about 5 or 6 properties on each side. All the ones on our side are intact and in good condition. On the other side most of the buildings are gone; what remains are what used to be called 'romantic ruins'. The grounds of all these ruins are being gardened, landscaped, enjoyed... we assume by the people living in the houses on our side.  The houses are, by the way, huge and all have large and well maintained gardens of their own.  The one at the bottom has a well stocked, terraced, vege garden and orchard of fruit (figs, citrus, olives, apples, grape vines, loquat, pomegranates and kiwifruit) and from our windows we can see that the top floor of the house is a plant nursery.

My humans wandered off and visited something called Red History Museum. Despite being conservative to the core there was something about 1960's Yugoslavia that F's Dad admired because F can remember him talking about it and expressing a degree of admiration for how they split with USSR and ploughed their own furrow (and that didn't just refer to their farming practices.)

F looked a bit thoughtful on return. From politically polar opposites, in material terms, her 1960s life and that of a child growing up here in parallel were remarkably similar. The things the museum apartment was fitted out with looked like modern homes in 1960s NZ. When she read about Jugokeramika being the only maker of household 'chinaware' in the country she laughed about memories of Crown Lynn dinner plates at home.  Kiwi readers did you have a Crown Lynn dinner set at home? Her Mum's was Autumn Leaves pattern.

In a corner of the children's bedroom of the exhibition, a black curtain covered the entry to The Dark Side. Whatever your views on People's Socialism, you have to question any ideology that can only maintain the implementation of its ideals by the exercise of violent oppression. People aren't one side or the other of Bourgeoisie and Proletariat; there are shades. Even low income, uneducated 'working' people (and pre-Communist education levels were frightfully low) who owned small shops had their businesses confiscated by the State. People could be assigned for 're-education' merely because someone reported them just to save their own skin. Instead of creating a social utopia, the dark side made everyone cautious,  distrustful and suspicious, and gave some of the less savory elements that every society has, scope to express their anti-social proclivities.

My humans don't 'do museums' but I get the impression that one was different - a sort of "happened in our lifetime" thing... 

Apparently there was no mention on the Museum of household pets! Oversight? Or no one enjoyed the company and household supervision provided by fur-friends? She didn't notice until I pointed out the lack of mention. I shall send her back to ask.

My eye on her.....