July 6th, Kojak, Pebble Beach

7/6       Saturday

            Watching a little TV before we start our day. Croatian TV is pretty funny, at least what we get in our rental apartments. Of course you can see the infomercials for Aah Bra, X-hose and Bullet Blenders. We surf past melodramatic Italian soap operas and Croatian detective series. Then there are odd movies and shows in English with subtitles. We found an old Cary Grant film, and lots of 70’s - 80’s sitcoms: episodes of Full House, Judging Amy, Gilmore Girls, Little House on the Prairie, and best of all - Kojak! There were some really cool looking 1960’s or so black and white Japanese westerns, but in Japanese with Croatian subtitles. There are music video channels, showing the popularity of country western style here. Croatian Cowboys, who knew? The videos are generally old-fashioned and sort of charming in their pre-computer simplicity, usually some old crooner with his band in vests or cummerbunds, quasi-traditional, with angled single-camera shots, young women dancing slowly, wistful looks, more angled shots, shadowy lighting, old crooner singing to the sky, more like so. We’d love to find a sports channel with the Tour de France, but that’s probably paid cable.

            We walk down to a new beach today, popular with the local people. It’s along a tree-lined path by a sea wall, with a pebbly beach close to the water’s edge. The water is very clear, and drops off quickly to become too deep to see the bottom. It’s roped off to keep the ski-doos and boats away. Very nice. We realize that we haven’t heard any English spoken at the beaches in Omiš at all. We like that about Omiš.

            We rent a couple plastic lounges from a beach hut guy, who wants to keep them on his cement terrace, while we want them in the shade next to the water. “Big problem, big problem” he mutters, although we can’t see why. He seems to suggest that the chairs will break if they are mired in the stones as the small waves push into them. He lets us have our way, and we manage to keep them safe through the afternoon.

            We get our salad supplies for dinner and make the climb up the stairs to our place. It’s a daily workout to climb the six or eight floors’ worth of stairs to get up the steep hill. But we booked the place for the fabulous view, and every night on the terrace, we do enjoy it. This night, there’s a wild, warm wind coming off the mountain, making rippled designs on the water’s surface below us as the clouds fill in and turn all pink and purple from the sunset.