Aside from the unfortunate lack of my mom & Caleb, the last bit of the trip was my favourite. From London we flew to Pula, which is on the West Coast of Croatia. We had prebooked our hostel, and they had sent someone to the airport to pick us up, so we felt really important when we walked out of the gate and there was someone holding a sign with our name on it. Everything else was in Croatian, and even all the other signs people were holding were strange names, so it was funny to see “BODY” in the middle of it all, haha.
The place we stayed was right on the beach, which was quite a nice contrast from big city London! Though, equally, it was a bit shocking to us how… erm, not conservative some of the beach goers were dressed. I s’pose that’s a European beach for you though, eh? Aside from the beach, Pula is known for it’s ancient Roman architecture. There was a massive ampitheater from like, 4 AD, and various other arches and such around the city. While I’m sure it’s not quite as impressive as what’s in Rome, we were saying we bet it’s run a lot less strictly. We were literally walking on the walls of an ancient ampitheater – I doubt they’d let you do that in Rome (whoa, I actually typed “Roma” there. I guess the language must have rubbed off a bit, ha)!
Elton John was playing a gig in the ampitheater later in the day we visited, so there was a bit of a clash with the excessive lighting equipment, obnoxious blue chairs, and beer serving stations. Because of this, the security was also a bit tighter. As we were going to leave, we headed towards the exit and ended up getting scolded in Croatian. I’m not really sure what happened, because we were pretty sure he had just motioned for us to go in that direction, until a couple of his backup friends showed up to block us and there was some loud Croatian talk going on, haha.
Another thing we noticed was the massive outdoor culture. There were cafes and ice cream places everywhere, and the patio tables and chairs literally filled the streets. Walking by in the afternoon, it seemed really excessive, but at night time the places were nearly all packed, it was crazy! Also, we found the best pizza in the history of ever. It was monumentally delicious, seriously.
We then caught a bus from Pula to Venice (we got to walk across the Slovenia border, too!). Venice was absolutely beautiful, but ridiculously overrun by tourists, which kind of diminished the awesomeness. Pretty much the entirety of the Venice economy is based on tourists, so it seems a lot less genuine in that respect. My dad was saying it was a lot like an amusement park or something, which is fairly true – you have to catch a special boat or bus to the island, there are mobs of people everywhere, and the prices are rather inflated. Those things considered, I still quite enjoyed it! Oh, oh, also, they are pretty much wifi fascists. Anytime we wanted to use the internet, they wanted a copy of our passports… really guys??
The “real” gondola rides were insanely expensive (something like 45euro for 30 minutes??), but because we had done our research, we knew about this short gondola ride across a certain point in the canal, which only set us back 50cent each – nice! I think there were maybe 6 of us on it, so not the same feel as you see on tv and such, but still a cool experience! One of the ladies on it with us was trying to get a photo of the people she was with, so she kept like backing up to get far enough away, and for a second I was a bit scared she was going to flip us, haha.
There was also this massive cathedral in the middle of Venice – it took us quite a while to find it, the maps of Venice we had were really dodgy and we kept getting lost, gr! We did eventually find it, though, and it was indeed beautiful – it’s called St. Mark’s Basilica, and was finished sometime in the 1600’s.
I know it’s cliche’, but even before we got there and saw the mass amounts of masks for sale, I had wanted to buy one. If you know me, you know I’m rather indecisive, so picking which one I wanted was a nightmare!! I actually waited until we were leaving and almost didn’t get one, but luckily there was this guy right on the edge of island as we were leaving who happened to have one like I wanted. For some reason he gave me a discount too, which was lovely – only 6 euro, hooray!
We left Venice and caught a train to Milan, which is the fashion capital of Italy. We didn’t stay long, but did get to see the main bits of the city, and we found some really amazing Italian food as well! It was some pasta in cream sauce with something in it, I don’t even remember, but it wasn’t like anything I’d had before and it was delicious!! Okay, enough about food, sorry…
The Duomo was Milan’s massive cathedral/church. We were actually able to go inside this one – the interior was stunning as well! Everything was shiny and really fancy. We quite like looking at the outside of it, and trying to figure out what all the statues and stuff represented. I literally don’t think there was any space not covered in some sort of sculpture – super ornate!
Clearly we’re not fashion-oriented people, as I somehow managed to not take any photos of the fashiony stores or people… haha, oops. What can I say, I was more impressed by the architecture than the 5000 euro handbags.
Our last stop was Parma, another small town in Italy (Ryanair likes small towns, we’ve discovered). Pretty much just more lovely old buildings & delicious Italian food! We did rent bikes one of the days here, which was cool. It’s always nice to be able to see more than just what’s walkable. From Parma we flew to London, where we something like a 9 hour overnight layover. Being London, we figured it would be cool to just stay up all night and do Londony things, except most things closed at like 11:30, so we were kind of stuck, haha. It was still really cool though, we hung out at Trafalgar Square for quite a bit. There was some sort of… I don’t know what it would be called. Basically every hour, people took turns getting on top of this massive pillar and doing arty things. One girl took photos for an hour, one spun yarn, one was kicking a soccer ball… We never really did figure out what it was for (I see a Google search in my future). Aside from that, being able to see the Londony sights without the Londony tourists was swell as well!
At like 4am we caught a bus back to the airport and flew to Dublin, where my dad departed back to the desert and I made it back to Belfast. Overall, the whole trip was really fantastic, and it was exciting to see my family again and show them a bit of the culture over here!
[This post concludes "The Catchup" series - hooray!]
