Pula - Saturday, June 15

Today we walked out to the square near our apartment for breakfast (at a very common ‘sit outside under an awning while the waiter runs back and forth into the (usually quite small) restaurant -in today’s case, across a street). It sprinkled a little before we went out, and again while we ate breakfast, but not even enough to get the sidewalks wet.

I also put a picture of a Tisak (tee-sock) here - these things are everywhere, and while we’ve mostly used them to buy lots and lots of water, Natalie tells us you can do a ton from a Tisak - pay bills, send mail, and purchase a wide variety of things like SIM cards, beverages, magazines, tram tickets, etc.

After breakfast, we walked (up hills and stairs, of course!) to the Venetian Fortress and looked around.

We then walked to the amphitheater, called the Arena, which was built by the Romans 27 BC - 68 AD and is among the six largest surviving Roman arenas in the world. It was pretty amazing.

Since we were then hot and tired of walking, we decided to go check out the beach. Although our apartment is steps from the water, it is not a swimming area, so we had to select a beach and we chose to take an Uber rather than walk to our car, then deal with driving and parking, etc. We had many options, but chose the one that said “sandy” - as you can see, their definition is quite different than ours - and also said cliffs. When we arrived, we enjoyed this area for awhile, thinking this was all there was (it was in a bay)....

But then we got curious about why the description we found said “cliffs” so we went walking through woods and rocks, and found an amazing hidden (well, from the number of people there, maybe only hidden to us?) gem... WOW, SO beautiful!! I took tons of photos and will put a few right here, but feel free to look through the photo gallery if you want to see more. Both kids took the jump off the highest cliff (after watching others first) - that’s Nickin the pics - he did it 3 times! We estimate it was 60 feet or so....?? Terri then found a smaller one (an “old lady” one) and also jumped, just so she could say she went cliff jumping

When we returned from the beach, we got cleaned up and went to Zerostrasse, the underground tunnels, as our apartment owner told us about an exhibit going on there, with music and local craft beer & snacks. The exhibit was about the history of the Pula tram, which was dismantled in 1934.

After Zerostrasse, we went to dinner (outside again) near our apartment, then called it a night as we have an early morning tomorrow - driving back to Rijeka to return our rental car and take a ferry to Zadar, further down the coast, then on to Split.