A good week.

We spent the week going to the mission office every day, where Liz works hard and I do whatever little jobs need doing.  The normal drill is we park in an underground parking garage, which costs us ten kuna (about $1.50) per hour.  But the earthquake made everybody nervous about parking along the streets, so they've found other solutions like parking in the city parks.  But after a couple of days and the aftershocks were mild, we started parking there.  We don't have a permit to park there, but we figure nobody is checking parking.  Besides, the parking ticket is 60 kuna, and the parking garage is 80 kuna if we only work 8 hours.  So it's win-win.  In fact, we haven't gotten any tickets.  Yippee!
  We got a treat on Thursday.  The fire department brought in some huge ladder trucks to check chimneys and rubble on the big buildings downtown.  It was fun seeing the big ladders going up and the firemen walking over the rooftops, but the treat was the spectacular helmets they wear.

The chiefs have silver helmets.  The next level down wear golden helmets.  They look like a cross between Darth Vader's and a Roman Centurion's.   It's very snappy when they salute each other.
  And then the drivers and crane operators wear ordinary plastic/fiberglass helmets.

Friday the office seemed in pretty good shape.  The bills were paid and all the fires were out.  So we all decided to take Saturday off.
  Liz and I decided to go up the mountain and see Medvedgrad castle.  We can see it from the Mission Home, but it's not even clear it's a castle from here.  So we grabbed some water and walking sticks and headed up the mountain.

This was the view as we got close.  Still just looks like a square tower.  But the drive through the trees was great.  The air was clean, the sun was shining, birds were singing.  And there was one surprising thing.  Lots of people were parking down the mountain and walking up to the castle through the woods.  In town nobody will meet your eyes or speak to you.  But hikers all say hello and engage.  Oh, happy day!  I loved that.

  We parked fairly close to the castle and walked up the hill.  

This bit of wall is the outer wall, and there are only a few traces of it left.  Just beyond Liz is a huge ditch, which is also part of the fortification.  And she is looking up the hill we have to walk up.

   The castle is being renovated, so the gates were closed, but we could walk around it.    Below is a sign by the locked gate.

So, it's 700 years old, and some parts of it look it.  But the renovation of the big tower is modern bricks and doesn't even pretend to be the old castle.

  

Here Liz is looking at the second wall.  Then the inner wall is the newer looking wall above that.  And then the tower, or "keep" is the last line of defence.   The place is too big to get a good single photo that shows it all, but I used the iphone to take a "pano" shot.  The wall is probably more than 300 yards long and fairly straight, but the pano shot made it look curved.

The original Keep is at the end on the right, but that is a ruin.  The church is the one with the conical roof. And the big tower we can see from town is the newest part of the castle.

  We found a hole in the fence and Liz surprised me by slipping right in to take a look around.  So I HAD to follow her.  It was cool.

This is inside the castle, looking up the street towards the church.  We had to take this photo through the bars of a big gate/

This one if from the same spot, but showing the other side of the street, including some bifurcated windows.  I think the Catholic church has built this, because those bricks look newer than 14th century.  The old Keep is the ruin just beyond the red bricks.

And finally, as we walked back down the hill, we stopped to rest for a bit and I noticed that some of the trees have very unusual branches.

They have clubs, sometimes along a branch and some of them at the end of a branch.  The trees look like an ash or something similar, based only on the bark.  Only a few of this kind of tree were there and they all had clubs.  It's hard to see, but some of the clubbed branches are very short.  Kind of weird.

  So we had a nice, relaxing afternoon.