DECEMBER MORNING IN BALE

It was a lovely December morning. Cold and sunny. After buying some stuff in the city of Pula, I drove to the small town called Bale, to take a walk and be a tourist for an hour or two.

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In this post, I'll show you some of the stuff I saw there.

I left the car in the small parking lot just outside the compact old town with narrow streets. Among a bunch of ordinary modern vehicles parked there, there was this red Citroen that caught my attention. I don't know much about cars besides driving them, so I can't tell you how old this one is, but it looked like something old enough to be cool and out of the ordinary nowadays.

Soon I passed by a high wall with a long row of flower pots on its top. The curry plants were growing in those pots.

A bit further, I entered a narrow dead-end street.

Clusters of dried-out sunflowers were hanging on the ropes above my head.

This is the door to one of the gardens at the street's dead end. In the following photograph ...

... the focus is on the small detail of that door.

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Before entering another narrow street, I saw a tractor on the crossroad near the parking lot in which I left my car.

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I liked the scene, so I took these two photographs.

A man with a poodle passed that way a minute or two later, and the dog ended up in this post.

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Quite a few people can be seen walking their dogs early in the morning, all around the world, I suppose. In this photograph, you can see the friend who was there with me talking to two early risers from Bale.

I visited this town a couple of times in 2022 and published a couple of posts about it. Each post is slightly different. This time, on the 19th of December, when all these morning photographs were taken, I was rambling around a neighborhood on the edge of the old town. A neighborhood I haven't explored before. Soon I passed by the houses shown in the above photograph ...

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... and reached an interesting green arena ...

... surrounded by old buildings.

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It's an interesting rounded depression in the terrain. It looks like an unofficial park, a lovely free area to walk or run around.

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Here you can take a look at some tall decorative grass that grows there.

While I was photographing near one of the houses on the edge of that green area, a local cat came to see what's going on in its territory.

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As long as I was near that house, the friendly cat followed me around ...

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... and became an important part of the post that way.

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You can see the cat playing and monkeying around in most of these shots.

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It's like an unwritten rule that each of my posts about small towns or villages in Istra must have at least one cat to be complete.

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A magpie built a nest on the top of a nearby tree. When the nest is in function, during the warm part of the year, the eggs and fledgling are hidden by the foliage. Now, when the branches are barren, the abandoned nest is on display. Some of the nests get repaired in the springtime, and the life cycle continues.

Here you can take another look at the buildings around me.

In this photograph, I zoomed in on an interesting parasol mechanism that I have never seen before.

After taking this shot, I left the cat & the park ...

... and walked back to the car.

This climbing Santa Claus was a clear sign that Christmas is near.

AND THAT'S IT. SOON I WAS DRIVING BACK HOME, SO THE POST ENDS HERE. HOPE YOU ENJOYED THE TOUR. AS ALWAYS IN THESE POSTS ON HIVE, THE PHOTOGRAPHS ARE MY WORK.

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