Excellent video

There is a man in our branch who came to "game night" with a nice HD video camera with a pro handle and multiple levels.  I tried to ask why he needed levels on it, but his English is nearly as bad as my Croatian.  Finally he got one of the young missionaries to translate.  He said he likes to make semi-professional movies of things he sees.  Recently he completed one about Osijek and he showed it to me on his camera viewer.  He was very proud of it when he showed it to me, and I have to admit I was impressed.  I hope you enjoy it.

https://www.facebook.com/krunoslav.jagorinac/videos/187574842419476/

Today, Liz and I got our new sofa and bed.  Getting it in and the old stuff out was a big chore.  Afterwards we decided to take a nice walk and find a place to have lunch.  The food here is great and even the small stands make excellent fare.
  The street we live on is one-way and we always turn off before the end, but today we made a discovery.  We have noticed that there is a grand catholic Cathedral of Peter and Paul not too far away, but we've never gotten close to it.  Today we found out that it's at the end of our street as it curves to the north.

It is so big I couldn't get it all in with my cellphone camera.

So there is a lot of space around it.  All around are up-scale businesses: shops, restaurants, hotels, electronics stores, etc.  And traffic is not allowed in the square, which is why we've never driven by it.

  Liz got a phone call as we walked around it, so I had a lot of time to look at it, and as always I noticed details, which I won't go into here except for a few.

  This is what's above the pic above:

I love clocks, and it has a nice one up there.  Also the bells are in this tower.  They ring the quarter hours and ring out the hours.

  When we walked around the corner, we were surprised to see scaffolding.  They are busy cleaning the brick and stone and repairing it.

You can see cleaned brick and stone to the right, and still-dirty stone and brick to the left.  It looks amazingly better clean.  There are gargoyles at this end of the building, but nowhere else.

What is the point of gargoyles, anyway?

It seems like the main door is on the cleaned side, below an immense rose window.  I'm sure Dan Brown (The DaVinci Code) would have lots to say about it.

Curiously they didn't clean the tops of some of the spikey spires, and they seemed to have missed the concrete rain caps, although the ones where we first came around are shiny bright.  Maybe they are refining their technique as they go.

Below is a closeup of the doorway so Dan can get a good look at all the secret codes.

Actually, I am enthralled by stone carving like this.  Did you know that my great, great, grandfather went to my home town to carve stone for the State Capitol?  Of course not, but he did.  He worked one year in his profession and then had to become a farmer.  Anyway, can you imagine working on a big chunk of  marble with those intricate cuts and delicate flower petals, and making a slight mistake as work is nearly done, and breaking it in two?  Doh!

And then there are the bullet holes.  I'm glad they are fixing those in the cathedral as they clean it.  But I noticed this little house at the corner of the cathedral.

It's not too surprising the army took pot shots at the cathedral - it's too tempting a target.  But why shoot up this little cottage?  Hundreds of snipers in there?  Maybe it had "Serbs go home" spray painted on it?  In any case, a lot of ammo went into that wall.