Zadar

Classic old city centre surrounded by modern urban city. Sort of town you could actually see in most countries nowadays. Hard exterior with a chewy Roman centre, as they pretty well conquered and settled in most parts of Europe at some time. The old square is testament to this with examples of stone columns and remains kept under glass.The narrow streets are both a delight and welcome shade from the unusually hot May sun, and refuge at a bistro provides food and drink in the form of pizza and beer...see I told you there was a Roman influence here. Much of the old town is taken over by cafes, bars and restaurants as one would expect and the local specialty for souvenir shops appears to be bags of lavender.I have made the trip in by bus to see, or rather hear the sea organ, which is a hefty musical instrument made of marble some 70 metres long and kept in constant harmony (sort of) by the motion of the ocean. It is not exactly Handel's water music, more random and dare I say organic organ music. Still it pulls in the punters and every organ pipe has its very own Chinese tourist posing for a picture of an attraction that is principally auditory.The monument to sun is also located here which is a huge bank of solar cells that absorb energy by day and come to life at dusk. I am unable to attach a video, but look it up on YouTube. The bus station so called as it has two bus shelters is the origin of the expression organised chaos, despite all the buses having numbers they pull in at any point along the pathway and you have to search for your bus by constantly searching up and down a line of up to 8 buses, some have numbers on the front some on the side and some on pieces of card. I miss my bus as I can't find it and an hour later almost miss it again. Home at last, not quite I have a 2 km cycle ahead of me and it has just started to rain. There have been a lot of spectacular thunderstorms in the region lately and this is a doozy! ...still miss the worst of it.Read more