Dad had almost certainly booked this holiday from a bucket shop using whatever paltry savings he had left after shelling out for my Bar Mitzvah. I suspect he got good bang for his bucks on this one, holding out until the price became too tempting for him.
The diary sheds little light…
…but we do have some photos and cine. Not much – I think dad (and mum)’s enthusiasm for holiday photos and the like had waned by 1975. Still, we have a few prints, a short snippet of cine and a box of stereo photographs, all of which I have digitised but I have not yet (end 2025) turned the individual images from the stereo box into digital stereo images.
Also, we have my memories of the place – assisted by the pictures.
I communicated with a lot of the younger people (who were mostly East German, Yugoslavian or Russian) through chess and cards.
Please note the writing pad with a posh-looking floral cover. Dad had bought up a job lot of those, which he thought might serve me well as a budding scribbler for quite some time.
By this stage of my then short life (I was still not yet 13), I clearly fancied myself as a hand-held cinematographer, following in my father’s footsteps:
We have, from this holiday, four-and-a-half minutes of cine, all of which is either filmed in Dubrovnik itself (when we went there on the Wednesday) or in and around the hotel. It can be seen minutes 7’20 to 11’50 on this reel:
Confusingly, we had been to Dubrovnik at the end of our 1973 cruise, so you can also see Dubrovnik at the start of this reel.
Sadly, no film from the 1975 cruise survived. I know I shot some, but suspect that the film got spoilt by getting caught in the camera or inadvertently exposed to light prior to process. That used to happen sometimes.
I also have a few impressionistic memories from our week in the Hotel Argentina.
I really liked the place. It seemed really cool – especially the great big round leather chairs and ceiling lamps – that felt futuristic/Star Trek like to me at that time. It just looks quintessentially 1970s to me now.
There was a strange late middle-aged East German resident who used to walk around the hotel all day and would occasionally approach people who were talking, put his finger to his lips and say, with a thick German accent:
Shhhh – there is sickness here.
Dad thought he was probably on temporary respite release from a nut house. (Dad’s choice of phraseology – I am merely reporting it to you, dear reader, not approving my father’s choice of terms). I was fascinated by this bloke and used to look forward to his unexpected interventions.
For years afterwards, if I was making more noise than dad wanted to hear, he would put his finger to his lips and incant, “shhh, zer is sickness here” in his best mock-German accent.
You can see all of the scanned prints from this holiday through this Flickr link – here and below:
The unedited stereo slides (in their raw and multiple form) can be seen through the following Flickr link – here and below:
