ALL AROUND THE ROUNDABOUT

I spent some time around the roundabout that day. It happened last year, the bearish 2024. In winter. In the mildly cold and deeply boring January of southern Istria.

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I had to do some work in the city, and I had an hour or so of free time in between whatever I was doing, and what isn't relevant for this post. Anyway, I decided to take a walk around one of the neighborhoods on the outskirts of Pula, the city in question.

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Pula, it's a small city, only about fifty to sixty thousand souls are eating, shitting, and crawling there, and it is the nearest city to the lovely, tourism-oriented hotel town where I live, a nice sunny place that is getting cleaner and more boring with each new year.

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The neiberhood I'm showcasing here is called Shiana. I mean, you won't see the entire thing, Shiana covers a pretty large chunk of the city's suburbs. Both residential and industrial architecture can be found there.

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In this post, the focus is on the area around one of the road junctions in Shiana.

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That intersection is the largest roundabout in the city; no other roundabout in Pula comes close to its size. In the above photograph, you can see the massive rail around it.

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It's a nice example of contemporary urban design.

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The barrier around the roundabout resembles a modern geometric sculpture.

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This is a photograph I took on the way to the roundabout, about a kilometer from it. It shows the trees in the forest park Shiana.

With this shot, we are near the roundabout again.

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This is an area I often drive through. The day these photographs were taken was the first time I stopped to explore the place through the lens of my camera.

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There is a pretty large park there.

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A park I have never visited before.

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It's a new park, so the trees are still small. The roundabout was ready in 2017. I think the park was finished some years later.

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This is one of the few plants that are abundantly present in the park.

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Lavender.

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This wide shot shows how the plant looks in its suburban habitat, surrounded by roads, cars, and billboards.

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The fragrant twigs were covered with dew.

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Here you can see the giant poppies that grow along the roads all around the roundabout.

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These street lamps are meant to be stylized versions of poppies that glow in the dark.

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Here you can see a bit of traffic around the roundabout.

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In this shot, I zoomed in on some block buildings of Shiana and the fairly tall tower of one of the local supermarkets. You can find quite a few of those in the area near the roundabout.

Here you can take a look at some of the much smaller houses situated behind the park. In the following photograph ...

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... I zoomed in on one of the buildings in that area. The small, fairly recent metal addition to an old, gray house makes it stand out from neighboring ones.

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Here you can see a detail from a more vivid facade.

You can see plenty of contrast and architectural diversity in this neiberhood.

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This is the park again. I don't know what the circular thing, shown in the foreground of this photograph, is. It looks like a large pipe. Or more like a large but short section of a pipe.

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Here you can see it from a different angle.

This is a detail from the garbage can.

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One of the five or six black metal garbage cans in the park.

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The ashtray looks like a pocket.

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Here you can see it from above.

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Here you can see two more houses behind the park.

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These chimneys are from the same area.

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Here you can see one of the more distant houses. It's a bigger building with more apartments, but the shape of the house isn't much different.

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This photograph shows one of the side streets taht lead deeper into the area behind the park.

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At some point, while wandering around, I came across this recently constructed blocky building. Between it and another just slightly less blocky big house ...

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... there was this disheveled litlle ruin that evokes a different period.

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Contrasts always look great in a photograph.

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Yep, they do, there's no doubt about it.

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You can take another look down the street in this shot. I included the morning sun in the picture, so the camera settings had to be quite different. The result is a photograph that stands out from most of the stuff you've seen in this post so far.

These flower buds belong to one of the Oxalis debilis plants ...

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... that were growing at the base of one of the garden walls by the side of the road.

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Here you can take a better look at the dew-covered leaves.

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If you take time to explore the details in this shot, you'll surely notice an aphid posing on one of the two flower buds.

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Here, I zoomed in on some houses and bigger buildings further down the street, and then, less than a minute later ...

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... my camera caught the only human being out in the street in that moment in that part of the neiberhood.

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This chimney was taller than any chimney I saw that morning. That's why it ended up in today's post.

Here you can see some ordinary garbage cans.

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Green, blue, and yellow. They look a bit like the colored fields in a flag, or something similar. The green one holds the general garbage. The blue one is for paper only. The yellow is for plastic. In the following photograph ...

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... you can see them posing in the suburban scenery. I find those garbage cans quite decorative.

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This is just another ordinary facade from that area.

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This scene was photographed much closer to the roundabout.

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And that's it. The post ends here. As always on Hive, the photographs are my work.