Wednesday, June 17, 2015

Game of Thrones Tour in Dubrovnik, Croatia

We booked our Dubrovnik, Croatia Game of Thrones tour through the same company as yesterday’s for a small discount.

Our tour guide Ana seemed really well dressed to be a tour guide. She was fun because she’s been an extra for the two latest seasons of the show. She said the extras had like 12 hour work days and were only provided lunch and a small stipend. They weren’t allowed to speak to any of the actors or take pictures of the set or anything. I laughed when I heard those last two rules because that’s exactly how I passed my time on the set of the hit Japanese film Kanikosen.


Ana transformed into a King's Landing peasant.


We were planning on doing the tour yesterday but there were still three episodes that I hadn’t seen and even just comparing tours online I saw some spoilers so I couldn’t do it! I had to do some dark magic just to be able to stream the episodes into Europe. Anyway, I watched all three and was all caught up.

A chubby lady from Australia’s first words to the tour guide were “I’ve only seen up to season four so no spoilers please.” Rawr! Oh well.

At one point we had to pay a little extra to enter a castle and I asked if they would accept euros or credit cards and both answers were no. Our guide brattily informed me that “the euro is not our currency” and that the country’s currency is the kuna. No you didn’t.

  1. Euro were just fine when I booked these damn tours through your company for like $70 total.
  2. I’m sure Croatia wants to use the euro but your economy just hasn’t yet met the bar for joining.
  3. We change countries every two days so sorry if I don’t want your particular brand of Monopoly nickels rattling around my pockets.
  4. Get a damn credit card machine and this will cease being a problem!

So the tour went pretty well. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to picture the settings from memory so it was nice that Ana had brought plenty of screenshot print outs from the show. Lydia has only seen a couple of the episodes but she was a good sport about the whole thing. There surprisingly wasn’t that much overlap between the two tours so that was awesome. Our tour ended in a Game of Thrones themed gift shop complete with an iron throne replica.

Excuse me while I nerd out a bit...


This fountain was in the Purple Wedding, though it was pretty spruced up for taping.






Dubrovnik 09
This is from the scene where Joffrey gets hit in the face with mud and a riot ensues on the streets of King's Landing.






This guy in the corner had an interesting little business. He seems to be hand pressing coins with a giant vice thing.


Rocky road: The dock at King's Landing has seen a few attack attempts and escapes throughout the four series


The docks have been in the show multiple times. Everybody's trying to get outta town at some point.






Dubrovnik 15
Our guide didn't show us this one but one look at these little Hobbit holes in the side of a cliff made me think they deserved to be in the show. Sure enough they are in the scene where King Robert's bastards are being searched for and killed.




We checked out Joffrey's nameday venue.






What is real power?


This one is fun because while it is still in Dubrovnik, Croatia it plays a completely different place in Thrones called Qarth.


I also thought it was especially neat that the original statue over there looked so awesome that the show's producers just went with it.










Same staircase but with some major CGI behind it in the show.


This one they boarded up what is in real life clearly the entrance to a church.




More old sewing machines as cafe tables. Pretty fun idea I think.




We had a nice meal at a pasta place. I got a killer shrimp kind with pistachio pesto. At first I was a little annoyed that all of the food available in this touristy place all seemed to be Italian, but I guess that’s just the food style of Dalmatia, which is pretty darn close to Italy anyway. Dubrovnik and Venice used to be city-state rivals for a time.


I'm still wrapping my mind around the history but this is a map of Croatia with the area historically known as Dalmatia in blue.


According to Wikipedia, the Most Serene Republic of Venice was really taking some names in its day. I knew Venice used to be a city-state but for some reason I'd imagined them as the type that would mind their own business. I've been hearing a lot about them recently as I've been visiting lots of the little red spots on the map this month.








Hey buddy, what are you in for?







After a rest at the apartment we ventured out for a little stroll. We entered this building that said it had a free art exhibit, and the building turned out to also be a movie theatre. He said they were showing Jurassic World later that night so I signed us right up. I think a ticket was like $4 so it was hard to pass up.

The second the previous movie finished and the patrons left everyone just walked right in. There didn’t seem to be any cleaning happening in between shows. The room had light colored wooden flooring and reminded me of a school gymnasium. The movie was good though. Success!





The previous showing's guests were kind enough to share their snacks.


No comments:

Post a Comment