EUROTRIP 2013 PULA 1/2

Last summer we had one of the best trips we (we = Evi, Herminica and Sabi) have ever made. There were few setbacks and complications, but what would a trip without any adventures and inconvenient flashbacks be? They make every trip memorable. Traveling there took us almost 24 hours. First we had to take a bus from Mikkeli to Helsinki in the middle of the night, since our flight to Stockholm was at 7 Am. Once we arrived to Stockholm we had to wait for the next flight for 9 hours. We were so tired and bored, and because of H's leg pain, we couldn't move around much. We all took a little nap on that same bench, but we were mostly all doped with caffeine and just barely kept our eyes open. Those nine hours felt like forever and we were so relieved when the plane finally took off!

However, that was not the end of training our buttocks... or discomfort. We had rented an apartment beforehand and had the address on our phones. On our behalf we were well prepared. However our taxi driver didn't tell us he didn't know where our apartment was before we were already driving. The taxi meter was racing up while he was just driving without any destination. He stopped few times to ask directions and ended up leaving us in the middle of nowhere and not even close to where we were supposed to be. Unfortunately we did not now that before we had already paid him and he had driven away. Lucky us! Those first couple of hours in Pula were spent on phone trying to find the number of the new landlord. Thankfully she was very nice woman and offered to come to pick us up and drive us to the apartment since it was already dark and we were completely lost... It smelled like a dog poop in the place we were at that moment (Local Youth Hostel - never go there!). It was not the best first impression I have to say. I remember us almost crying that we were going to stay there for that one night and leave somewhere else first thing in the morning. Hungry as three stray dogs that nice lady showed us where is the nearest bank machine, grocery store and pizzeria! Our first pizza in Pula was funghi... but it was definitely not the last one!

After a good night sleep and with full and round stomachs we managed to calm down a little bit. We decided to give another chance to Pula and check out the beaches before completely hating the place and leaving it and as a result we were super happy we did. It isn't the most traditional place to go on a beach holiday, because the beaches are mainly cliffs. Getting in the water (unless you wanted to jump) and getting out was a real challenge, but we had never seen as bright and clear sea as in Pula. Once you got in the water you didn't want to leave. (Take this from a person who doesn't really like swimming. Honestly I may even hate it. Usually I only go "swimming" when I need cooling down and mostly just took a dip and came right back. But in Pula the water was like magic. The color was so bright and turquoise that it felt like out of this world. Swimming there felt like flying, like I weighted nothing more than a feather and like you could swim forever and you would never get tired. - Evi )

The funniest thing ever was to see Sabina, who is absolutely ridiculously scared of fish. You could see fish swimming from more than six meters below you to few cm's from you. It looked like you could reach them with your toes and Sabina would just freak out. The other really weird thing was when you spit in the water, the fish came and tried to eat it. We used to just sit on those rocks and spit in the water and watch fish swimming between our legs. Other people must have thought we were insane...

Sunbathing on those rocks was not the most convenient unless you had really thick yoga mat. But the wind was just amazing up there and you could do so much other stuff beside just laying down and be boring! Snorkeling in those kind of a glassy waters is amazing and you could even do cliff jumping. The best part was that there were no kids screaming and crying and the beach was never crowded. Sounds to us like a paradise!

Pizza in Croatia and Bosnia is really good! We ate fungi and vegetarian pizzas every day- mostly because they were so damn good and it was almost impossible to find any other meat besides pork in Pula. Pork is something we do not tend to eat. All that amount of pastry made us feel really uncomfortable- like three little balloons floating on the beach. We usually never eat wheat that much normally!

Check out this little grumpy fellow below. She/He is the most hilarious cat we have ever seen! :D

We used to walk every night for two kilometers to the city center. The old part of the town was bigger than any other old town we've ever visited. It didn't take us long to find our stamping ground where they just made the best coffees in the world! Our regular night out in Pula consisted of coffee at our regular spot, eating (pizza), souvenir shopping and few times clubbing. 

We think that fish in a resort cities is ridiculously overpriced, but still we wanted to eat some sea food. It had to be cheap so we ended up tasting squid, and it remained only tasting, because it tasted awful! It was slimy, smelled like raw fish and just had a rotten taste to it. We were so embarrassed to leave all that food on our plates so we wrapped the squid in napkins and smuggled it out in Sabina's hand bag. Guess what we did next? We made some stray cats the happiest cats in the world! And Sabina's bag smelled like a dumpster of a typical fish restaurant for the rest of our journey. That night we ended up leaving home with a pizza box... again. 

- Evi and Herminica