The Magic Bells of Sukosan (and stayed tuned below for the WTF #7 Answer)
Tuesday night, a quick walk around the harbor to recon the two pizzerias in town for dinner. We choose the 'green chair' Mjav and share a plain with onions vowing to make the next few days a bit lower key for food. I even goes sans alcohol before we head home (which we can see from our dinner table) and fall asleep, setting the alarm for seven am.
Sleeping like a dead person, as usual, Steve wakes me at two am to the sound of the church bells, only 100 meters away, ringing loud and clear and non-stop. We step outside to lots of lightening and thunder and the bells keep ringing. We have no idea what is going on. We think perhaps there is an emergency, a fire, or another Balkan revolution, but the baker next door is hard at work on his bread and pastry for the morning, so we figure nothing is really amiss. And the bells keep ringing and ringing and ringing, so LOUDLY that I am not sure how we actually fall asleep, but we do.
Early morning brings sunshine and blue skies, a real unexpected treat after the storm and the dreary forecast on weather.com. We shower and head out to Caffe Fortuna for our morning cappuccino/macchiato, just fifty meters across the road. 
As we sit there, Ana, who owns the apartment we are staying in, pops out of her bright pink house, attached to the Cafe, to sit with us and settle our bill. We figure out at that point that she and her family must be the Sokusan real estate moguls, owning the Dijan Apartmani, the Caffe and the biggest nicest house on the water.
Before she leaves, we must ask her about the bells that rang out all night. Aha, she says, I thought you would be wondering about that, and you might be confused or concerned! She explains that the farmers of Sukosan believe that when a storm approaches, if they ring the tower bells loud and long, the perfect and beautiful sound of their bells pushes the storm clouds away, so no hail will fall and ruin their crops. This is not religious or spiritual or even superstitious to them; this is, in their opinion, a physiological result of the sounds waves they create. And since we are sitting there under blue skies and puffy white clouds, when the forecast was for clouds and rain, we can only believe there really are Magic Bells of Sukosan.
The clear morning sky, forecast for thunderstorms....???
The Bell Tower in Sukosan
We take advantage of the weather, pack and load the car, and head to Zadar for the day. This is a great stop. The town is a bit bigger, full of Roman ruins you can still walk on,
St. Donats, the round Roman church sitting atop an older Roman Forum
and THE Sea Organ of Zadar. Not a conventional organ, but a unique series of pipes set into a man made concrete bank along the water, with openings above the water. As the Sea ebbs and flows or as boats go by creating wakes, air and water are pushed and pulled through the pipes, emitting soft to loud, deep to high and long to short sounds.
Everyone sits on the concrete terraced promenade, listening to this unique organ, while dogs splash in the water and a few braver souls shed their shoes and dip their toes.
Knowing our next two nights are rustic and more camping/glamping like, we treat ourselves to a very citified lunch with designer salads and some great rose wine (the first really good wine we've had since we got to Croatia) in 'the' hip boutique design hotel in Zadar before we start our drive to Plitvice Lakes, from where I am currently doing my daily blog composing.
Apologies for the long post today, but I am figuring that I will have much to share from our day tomorrow in Plitvice (PLEET-veet-seh) and it really messes me up when I get backed up. So today's post is both our travel blog and the WTF#7 Answer.
We saw it in Bol on Zlatni Rat beach. We saw it on Brac Island on a tiny semi-sandy beach on the north of the island. We saw it in Rogoznica and in Sukosan and in Zaton. We are sure it happens on every beach in Croatia. We cannot tell if it is indigenous only to Croatians or to anyone on a Croatian beach. It may be anywhere you swim, even a pool, we would not know. We've never seen it in the US or Mexico, not in the Caribbean or the coast of Italy.
The Croatians love to swim. They swim from sandy or pebbly or rocky beaches. They swim young and old. They swim day and night. But they must HATE to be wet! We have observed this with grown men and women, children and babies. How can we tell? The first thing they do when they come out of the water? They put on a dry swimsuit. We have watched with fascination as they change maybe four times in one day, hanging their wet suits on their sunbeds and whipping out a new dry suit. We have even seen someone change into the exact same suit, but dry.
So how do they do this you might wonder. There are lots of ways, but the answer to the WTF#7 is one of them. At every beach, even the smallest ones, there are these little changing stations, nothing more than a metal stand with a fabric screen, dividing the area in two kinda sorta private stalls with no hooks and just enough room to wiggle out of one wet and into one dry suit. So kudos to the three correct guessers (BL, SS and KP) and congrats to the winner, KP.
Changing Station
Though the semi private changing station is probably a bit too immodest for our American sensibilities, when you come to Croatia, you may choose another one of the unique dry to wet techniques we have seen.
Changing Station
The Towel Technique, by far the most popular
Stand up and wrap your beach towel around you. Pull off each piece of your suit and slip on the new dry one.
The Sunbed Technique
Lay on your Sunbed or pad and cover yourself with a towel. Wiggle off your wet suit and pull on a dry one.
The Easy Technique
Dry yourself with a towel. Sit on your towel. Strip off your suit and put on a new one. Although this is most often seen with babies and children, it has also been seen with adults, more men than women.
The Kids Only Technique
Strip to go swimming, go nudie, then when done swimming, put on a dry suit but, bottoms only, girls and boys.
And here is the ultimate example of just how much the Croatians hate to wear a wet suit. In the small town of Sokusan, where we were staying, one of the smaller harbor/docks houses the local water polo field, not much more than a roped off square with two goals. After work, the young guys bike over and gather for a match. As soon as the winner is declared, they hop out, strip down and put on dry clothes before they hop on their bicycles to pedal the one or two kilometers home! The lesson of the day-if you are considering moving to sunny, beautiful Croatia, better stock up on bathing suits.
Comments
Post a Comment