Day 12 - Monday, Sept 1- Vukova, Croatia

 We are making a short stop about 7am just across the border into Croatia for customs checks.

A bright sunny morning with temperatures around 65 and swans swimming along the bank of the Danube.

Our cabin attendant thanked me for the tips and asked me if we knew that the suite came with unlimited free laundry service. I wish we had known sooner as we had been washing a few things out each day. We put out about $100 of laundry service this morning - not many things as it is quite expensive. It would be cheaper to buy new underwear than to have it cleaned.

This section of the Danube is very flat, extending as far as the eye can see. It also meanders back and forth with many turns.

We had an interesting conversation with one of the Russian women on our cruise. She and 3 of her family members came to the US in 1979 with only $400 for the family, the most they could take out of the Soviet Union. She was 15 at the time. Her father was a dissident journalist and lost his job. Her mother also lost her job and she would have no opportunity to go to the university. They weren't allowed to leave but after publicity by international journalist organizations, her family was finally allowed to leave. She didn't speak any English and started in the 10th grade as an ESL student - fortunately she was very good in math and the sciences. She wondered what it was like when I was in Moscow in 2019.

I had been in Moscow in 1996 when it was still very repressive. We felt that we were being watched all the time. I managed to go out by myself early one morning and a man caught up to me and wanted to share with me how difficult life was at the time, living in a cold and crowded apartment with a shared kitchen and bathroom and no hot water. I hoped he was ok. We went to the huge GUM department store but it was glum with not much on the shelves.

When I went back in 2019, it looked physically the same but a bit brighter. The big shock was the GUM department store which has like a high-end mall with Gucci, Prada and all the very expensive top brands. It was very light and airy with happy families strolling around.

After lunch we drove through Vukova which was the site of one of the worst atrocities of the 1991 war. After 3 months of shelling Vukova, Yugoslavian Army (Serbian) troops occupied the city. They rounded up the 260 ethnic Croatian doctors, staff and patients of the hospital, men, women and children, took them to field and shot them all. This was publicized worldwide and led to much greater condemnation of the conflict.

From there we drove through the countryside to Osijek where we spent some time at an eco-tourism farm where we had some snacks and could see the small backyard farm. The owner told us about his experience of the conflict from when he was 5 years old. His family had to leave in a matter of minutes and just let the gates open to free the cattle and sheep - they don't know what happened to them. They fled to the city where they spent the next 7 years living in a basement under constant fear of the regular bombardment. In 1998 they returned and worked to restore their property and build the facility they have now as a way of making money - it was quite a struggle. It is hard to imagine how people survived and recovered from this.

We drove back to a Roman Catholic church from the mid-1700s. It is a baroque church elaborately decorated with gold, many statues and intricate carvings. We heard a performance by a young woman who brought me to tears when she sang Amazing Grace - even in her language it was very emotional.

We had a short tour of the Osijek Fortress area which is now largely museums and official buildings. While most of the buildings have been restored - hard to imagine - there are still bullet holes and artillery damage on some of the walls and some buildings are just empty shells. The "old" cobblestone streets are actually completely new. Croatia is fortunate as a EU member, it gets considerable funding for restoration which Serbia does not.

I asked the tour guide why the license designation for Croatia is HR - the country name is actually Hrvatska.

When we came back to the port in Vukova, I walked to a building which is famous for an iconic photo in National Geographic. It is an empty shell but people have planted geraniums in window boxes that stream down below the empty windows.

Bombed out house in Vukovar

Osijek Fortress