Quilting, Croatia, and Harry Potter

Hoorah! Finally got back to quilting today. I pieced purple in yellow for my Stroop quilt and started trimming the template-cut fabric for my next I Spy (aiieee....!). I will post photos later this weekend -- right now my camera is still full of vacation photos, which I've downloaded into iPhoto but Picasa is now available for Macs and I want to see if I can put my photos there, too.

On vacation we stopped in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Here's a photo of the medieval city seen from a nearby hilltop. It's a beautiful city and has become a resort area in the past few years.
I have received two postcards from Dubrovnik in my life -- one in the early 70's from an uncle who was visiting there, and one in 1980 from a good friend who was there doing research for her disseration on Serbian nationalism. Both cards were essentially this same view. When my friend returned from her year in Dubrovnik, which was then still part of Yugoslavia, she was very despondent about what would happen if the iron grip of communism were to loosen. She predicted a bloodbath once there was no one to keep the various ethnic groups from fighting each other, and that is indeed what happened in the 1990's. Dubrovnik was severely damaged during the fighting, but the Croatians have worked very hard to repair it and make it a tourist attraction once again. I felt sad there knowing that just a few years ago the city was bombarded and bodies were lying in the streets -- and that these groups of people still hate each other.

On a lighter note, on the main street of the old city was a bookstore with a big Harry Potter sign -- in English -- in the window.

Tonight's the night! I have pre-reserved my copy and will pick it up tomorrow morning as I'm still too jet-lagged to go to the midnight release party. Coincidentally, when we were at the airport in Rome to return to the States, we ran into some friends from home who were on our flight. They are Italian and their daughter, who was born in the US, was reading her first big book in Italian -- Harry Potter e la Pietra Filosofale. They told us that volume 7 won't be available in Italian until November, but the English version will be released in Italy (and in Croatia and I guess all over the world) in English as soon as it comes out. Happy reading to all you HP fans!