The Beginning of the End

Author’s note: This post covers the day of July 23rd. I wrote it while relaxing on the terrace overlooking the Zaton Bay on the morning of the 27th.

On Monday morning, we again got up at 7. Again we were tired. Again we were waking up in a new place. But at least Matteo’s parents’ house is beautiful.

We met Matteo’s mother who made us breakfast of “brioche” (the Italian word for croissant), coffee, and juice. We also met Matteo’s father briefly before getting in the car to leave.

Matteo drove ahead of us until we reached the highway, and after that we were on our own again. We drove through Italy first, making a wrong turn that led us into the heart of Trieste rather than into Slovenia, but that was easily fixed with a quick u-turn once we got off the highway. We passed through Slovenia without incident. Entering Croatia was easy, they just waved us on through, but going the opposite direction was backed up for a looooooooong way. Border security is a much bigger issue when you’re an EU member nation.

So we entered Croatia, the last leg of the tour. Once we got into Croatia, everything was quick and easy, because Istria is so small an area. We drove down to Porec first. We had an amazing lunch, probably the best meal we’ve had yet. We had a sampler with three different types of homemade pasta, one with olive oil and Istrian ham, one with a tomato-pork sauce, and a linguine with truffle-cream sauce. Then Smith had squids cooked in wine, and I had a similar dish with pork. The wine was great, a Malvazija from Istria.

After lunch we saw the local church, renowned for its, I wanna say 6^th century, mosaics.  We also climbed up to the bell tower for some great views of the city.

We then headed back to the car for a quick drive to Pula.  On the way we stopped off at the Limska Draga Fjord.  It was pretty, but rather uneventful.  Although I am pretty sure that I recognize this as a spot that Anthony Bourdain went to on his Croatia show.

 

We had to go buy tickets to see the Roman Amphitheater there to get change to pay the parking meter (this would be a recurring problem).  We toured the amphitheater that they were setting up to screen a movie.  Pula is having a film festival now with movies being shown at multiple outdoor venues around the city.  Most of the films are low budget, independent, but the following night they were going to show the new Spiderman movie in the amphitheater.  It would have been really awesome to experience that, but it wasn’t quite worth staying a whole other day.

After touring the amphitheater, we walked around the city to see some more Roman and Venetian ruins.  Then we settled down to trying to find a place to sleep, because we still had not booked a hotel room.  The tourist information office was incredibly unhelpful.  All they did was give us a list of hotels and tell us to call them to find out if they had space.  But we couldn’t figure out how to make a Croatian phone call on Smith’s phone, so we just walked to a somewhat nearby hotel that was listed in Lonely Planet as the best budget option.

Fortunately they had one room left, so we dropped our things and walked off in search of dinner.  But unfortunately, the place we wanted to go closes at 5 (not mentioned in Lonely Planet), so we headed back to the city center and went to a pizza place with solid pizza (I got peppers and about 4 kinds of pig meat on mine, Smith got a spinach and something else) and a great atmosphere on a very cool terrace.

We grabbed ice cream on the way back to our hotel room and went to sleep at around midnight, our earliest night in a long time.  We were able to catch up on sleep, a little bit.