Post Industrial Brambles

I had a really hard time leaving Cres this time. We stayed for more than a month and I had so much fun. I also managed to get some of my thesis work done. Best of all, the kids had a chance to spend time with people who love them.

On to a few more adventures and then back home…

I was walking around in Cres the other day when I saw a poster advertising “4th Annual Sheep Exhibition” in Orlec. I had not heard of this event previously, but now that I have, I was not going to miss it. The poster promised tasting of sheep delicacies and “Harmonijada” (Accordian-fest) in the evening hours. It invited us to come and be entertained and I was instantly interested.

Orlec is the first town up the hill from Cres. We decided to take the regular bus line to get there which was all we needed to get Trevor interested in the trip.

Trevor in the bus

The twenty minute bus ride was so exciting, Trev fell asleep. He missed seeing the Renault 4 on the right

I might or might have not been to Orlec previously but I had no expectations of it except to see some abandoned houses and a few old ladies stubbornly holding onto their routines and evading their children’s attempts to put them into nursing homes. Well, I was to have my prejudices of small island villages overturned! Orlec seemed to be booming. Maybe it is the vacationers that make it busy in the summer, but there were more newly renovated houses than houses falling into disrepair.

Orlec

Orlec seems to be the magnet for the few Renault 4 cars remaining in the world. I think I saw at least three. The town also seems to support agricultural community of sorts. Sheep, a horse, some veggie gardens and a kiwi tree were to be spotted.

Sheep

Kiwi

The sheep exhibition was small but vibrant. There were 10 sheep pens with four sheep each competing for the best specimen. There was to be a a sheep shearing with traditional (non-motorized) scissors, but we missed it because we had to catch the last bus back to Cres.

Trevor was quite tired and a bit weary of sheep so we got some jams, honey and rakija (grappa) at the stands, had a nice meal of tripe and roast lamb and headed home.

Tripe was actually very tasty though it is the kind of meal I would have on very few occasions this being the second time in my life that I tried it.

The first time I had tripe was in a fancy New York restaurant and then it was beef, rather than lamb. I was talking to my great uncle, zio Peppi, about it a few years ago and he told me how, when he was younger, you could only find tripe in small hole-in-the-wall-working-man’s eateries.

Lovely Bicycle! is a blog about pretty and vintage bikes.

As far as bicycle design goes, nothing is more dear to me than the old Pony bike. These classics are not so much bicycles as they are kitchen chairs on wheels. This is possibly why they are so omnipresent and timeless. I believe they are still being manufactured and sold.

Ours are, of course, equipped with child seats. The orange pony has a vintage hand made seat, wound with kitchen rag. Very posh.

I was going to go around Cres taking pictures of ponies but I am too occupied with my thesis to catch many good ones.

There was one pony in particular that is our favorite and we managed to discretely take a picture of it.

Despite the fact that it probably has not been ridden in ten years, it is still a great bike for two.

Sandra Juto writes an arts blog

Fika

A Cup of Joe is a lifestyle blog.

Fire alarm

Fire engineer

How cute is this wooden vintage toy? I want to make a bunch more pieces for my favourite little builder to play with.

An Ambitious Project Collapsing is an art blog.

A knitted hat on a wire

Camilla Engman writes an art blog

Medicinal herbs exhibit at the Cres Museum

Copenhagenize is a blog about citizen cycling.

Locals have always been cycling in Cres, but, apart from those tiny foldy bikes that fit on yachts, I don’t remember many tourists riding bikes. Even our family did not always cycle. Up until the mid 80?s we used the personal boat to get about. We still have the boat, but chances of it leaving the garage are dismal. In 1990, to my surprise, my dad put the two pony bikes on the top of the car and brought them to Cres for good. For a while we were one of few vacationing families that used the bikes. On the beach, we used to leave them in a little nook which drove the diving instructor whose nook it was crazy. Well, a year or so ago, someone installed bike racks in front of the nook and boy, are there a lot of bikes now!

There is at least one more bike rack here, in front of the diving nook, that did not fit into the picture.

I was just about to blog about my new mini project of doing little blog tributes to blogs I read on regular basis when a tourist passed by my window saying (in English) “We went to the new part of Cres where they have a big grocery store. We bought some water.”

I know a lot of people buy bottled water, and I never get it. Why??? The tap water is free (cheaper by glass than bottled water anyway) and it is just as clean as if it was in a bottle. Plus, bottled water usually has more minerals and it is less of a burden on environment to use tap water. In Cres of all places the water comes from the lake Vrana which is a very special lake and stupid tourists should feel privileged to drink tap water here.

I am flabbergasted.

I can’t walk through Cres without thinking how much it has changed over the last thirty years. For one thing, the old ladies are different. I am trying to remember if there ever were the black-clad widows in Cres, there must have been when I was young. The Italian-speaking-patterned-tunic nonas of my grandmother’s vintage are almost gone too. There are a few seniors still hanging out on the benches in front of the post office now and then, but if I didn’t see “udruga-penzionera” (retirees-union) secured wireless web when I selected my wireless connection from the cafe I am sitting in right now, I would not even know they are here.

The communist slogans written in cheap red paint on town walls half way through the last Century are pretty much all gone and the remaining ones are so washed out they can only be found if you know what you’re looking for. Structurally, Cres is very well taken care of. Houses that I remember always having been boarded up have been renovated and show happy signs of life. Most year-round residents now live in the “suburbs” and the old town center now seems to be mostly cottage country. The “suburbs” have at least quadrupled over the last thirty years but with exception of one or two questionable architectural choices, they look very spiffy and I don’t blame the locals for moving there.

Despite existence of people not picking up after their dogs, the town is very clean. There are two guys with street grade vacuum cleaners walking around. Last year they were always together (one vacuuming up what the other had missed?), but they must have gotten sick of each other and this time I have seen them an entire street apart.

With the growth of the suburbs and revitalization of downtown, the summer season is now busier and it starts earlier. Being spoiled and snobby as we are, we don’t bother going to the beach before 5PM as it is too crowded. The beach is wonderful after 5 so it is well worth to use the “afternoon shift”.

My favourite description of our vacations in Cres is that it is like camping in a really old tent. I am continuously amazed at how good a shape our house is in and how bad a shape our house is in. This is the only location I have been “living in” pretty much continuously throughout my life so it is in a sense a second home. Unlike vacations where you rent a room, I don’t mind staying indoors and it is not unusual or unpleasant to stay in the house for as much as a third of the day. I would really like to know more about our house from historical perspective such as when was it built and what kind of family would have lived in a house like this. I know for a fact that this house is listed in the archives in Rijeka, but as I don’t know the last name of my grandmother’s cousin I can’t look it up.

One thing that I really didn’t care for as a kid but have gained appreciation for now that I am older are personal wooden boats. I had not realised how well a wooden boat can withstand time. There are still some wooden boats in the harbour that were “old” when I was a kid. Back then they looked like they were relics about to be replaced by the new plastic boats. Today, with their slick lines and fresh, gleaming, white paint they looks so much more vibrant than their plastic brethren. Not to say anything bad about plastic boats, they are still floating about, which is more than you can say about the cars from the same era.

Mosquitoes, which have been absent for the last 15 years, have returned. With them around the population of swallows has increased as well. Both seem to be the most active at around 4 in the morning. Note the swallow feeding her young and the other little swallows looking out for their moms in the photo above.