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Published: August 19th 2008
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final destination
the name of the house we're staying in. the nearby bar is also referred to by locals as "uljak" so noticing this brought a smile to my face. Just chilling out at the moment.. have to be up in 4 hours time (like I'm going to get any sleep anyway) to leave for the airport, since it's at another city about 4 hours drive away and i'm flying at midday. My time in Stara Novalja has been like a period of integration, I've been really not doing very much, spending a lot of time working on music and catching up with my cyber-life, chilling down at the bar and going for the odd short excursion.
I totally forgot to mention that the day I arrived there were some serious business thunderstorms, which were incredible for a short time because we could see really heavy lightning from miles around, but at first couldn't hear it, and there were no clouds above our heads or of course any rain... but alas, later on in the night they did catch up with us. Henceforth though, it's just been stupidly hot. On my first day here we drove to a village called Jakišnica across the other side of the bay from Stara Novalja, which sports Pag's most renowned hotel (apparently) so we stopped for a drink there, wasn't really my cup of
tea, too package-deal.. but it was definitely the right day for it. Yesterday I went for a walk in the mountains with my laptop, something I did last year as well, sat down on one peak where there are supposed to be no snakes and worked on tunes for a while, attracting funny looks from other walkers going past, of course 😊 Then yesterday evening me and my uncle cycled into the city of Novalja, about 5km and one killer of a hill away, to find my grandmother birthday presents (it was her 75th birthday today), then had a few drinks and cycled back home.
This afternoon we went into the city of Zadar, a place whose only part I've seen before is the airport, from when I came here last year. It was a lovely city, with quite a few roman ruins, one section of which seemed to be being dug up at the moment, no doubt archaeologists looking for artefacts. Had a look round the market, which showed the two things I love most about Croatian cities in great supply - old men selling plastic bottles full of home made rakia which looks strong enough to floor
zadar
just like tábor, but shinier a stone golem, and old women selling sheets and sheets of lace cloths which they seem to churn out by the mile. After buying a few things from some of the shops, me and my two uncles braved climbing one of the towers, took lots of pictures, then we all went for a meal to celebrate my grandmother's birthday.
Full of čevapčići, I followed the crowd to this harbour (there were a fair few in Zadar) where this absolutely ridiculous boat was moored, some cruise ship styling itself with the name "The World", which was about the size of the ministry of defence, probably including all the bits lower down which the eye don't see. The guy guarding the entrance to the boat was happy to answer our questions, and told us the thing could hold no more than 150 people on it (or about the population of an apartment block a tenth its size), that it had no fixed schedule but next they were going to Venice ("good luck finding somewhere to park that in Venice", said my italian-citizen uncle) and that a ticket on this cruise cost "5 million" of an undefined currency, presumably USD.
In
the shadow of this thing we enjoyed the Zadar light show, which we had been told to go and see - it wasn't really a show, just a lot of lights on the floor which light up.. there was still good atmosphere there, lots of people out to see it, and there was this weird wave-powered sea organ which was humming away like whalesong in the background. After breathing in for a few minutes we went to get some ice cream, then headed back to Stara Novalja.. I'm off home in 3 hours now, I'm clearly not sleeping. This is also clearly going to be the last blog on here til the next time I hit the iron road, so yeah, nashledanou/dovidenja/whatev, get back to reading my rubbish on livejournal!
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