I visited Rome during a Navy port visit in late 2005 (same deployment as the visit to Split).
One of my vivid memories was all the stray cats ‘roaming’ the city. Three years later, we moved to Naples with the Navy. I was excited to sightsee in Rome again but when we got there, the cats were gone. Completely. I’m sure the city’s health commissioner and animal control chief considered this progress, but I thought it was step backwards. Those cats had added a lot of character to this ancient city.
Croatia thankfully has not reached that moment of feline reckoning and urban development. During our month here, we have seen lots of stray cats and lots of pet dogs. It’s difficult and perhaps rude to photograph dogs and their owners, but stray cats have no sense of privacy so we have had fun taking pictures and capturing a different aspect of the Croatian experience.
On several occasions, we saw people putting out bowls of cat food and even reaching into their grocery bags to give a stray cat a treat. Croatians not only seem to tolerate cats but they embrace them. In addition to feeding cats, Croatians routinely will stop to interact, and even pet, stray cats. Seeing this natural human-feline relationship in public every day does a lot to explain how cats probably became domesticated in the first place. The only losers in this relationship are the birds and rodents.
I especially like the cat with excellent taste in cars snoozing away on the Mercedes. The photo of Lyn includes a cat that was scurrying up the narrow street as I took the picture.
Cats
Dogs
I only included two dog picture. One is the ONLY Dalmatian we saw in Dalmatia. The other is an example of another very common scene which is people leaving their dogs on a leash tied to the railing outside of the local grocery store. Sometimes the dogs are patient and adorable. Sometimes you can hear them barking for their owner to come back from two blocks away.
Laundry
A lot of homes and apartments have washing machines but they don’t have many dryers because you see laundry hanging out to dry all over the place in Croatia. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve always had kind of a romantic reaction to laundry drying on a line. It has some kind of wonder years appeal and is one of those chores that is done the same way now as it was 1,000 years ago.
