A funny thing happened on the way to the Forum

The day after our respective diving adventures, we spent the day indulging in some of Punta Verudela's local entertainment. During the day we basked in the sun down on the rocky beach with our Teutonic neighbours; in the evening we ate at the local Russian mafia pizzeria (as evidenced by a Russian-sounding gent who monopolized a corner table, barking occasional orders down his cellphone and eschewing food for vodka) and rounded the day off with a nightcap at a deserted sports centre/bar hybrid with WWF Smackdown playing on the big screen. Back at the flat, we were serenaded to sleep by some German-accented karaoke from a nearby apartment. "Killing Me Zoftly," indeed.

On Sunday we packed up and caught the local bus into the town centre. Pula has ping-ponged from empire to empire since the Romans, and there's an impression of peeling off the skins of an onion as you travel in. You get Communist-era apartment blocks on the outskirts, petering out the further in you get, then baroque Austro-Hungarian façades, the odd angular Venetian edifice and finally, nestled among them all, scattered Roman monuments.

Our apartment was within spitting distance of the Arena, a mini-me colosseum parked on the edge of the town centre, and we wandered past it and around the circular Kandlerova Ulica which seems designed to entrap disorientated tourists in a never-ending parade of ice-cream parlours and shoe shops. James Joyce taught English here at the turn of the century (which might account for some of the indecipherable menu items) and at the end of Kandlerova we sat with his statue at Café Uliks for a spot of people watching. I came to the conclusion that Pula might only be a couple of miles north of Punta Verudela, but it's about ten years ahead in sartorial terms.

I wanted to do some roman' around the next day, so in the morning I took the camera and popped next door to the Arena. It's certainly impressive that it's still standing after a couple of millennia, but there was precious little context to all of it. I know next to nothing about the Romans (well, enough to feel slightly uneasy about the divers' signal meaning 'descend') and there were no information boards or the like, so I snapped some pseudo-arty shots of the Adriatic framed by the colonnades and wandered back to pick up Ash. We duly saw the sights - the Cathedral, the Temple of Augustus, the Venetian fort on the hill in the centre of town - but none of them really caught my imagination, and not one of them deigned to explain anything about themselves. Odd.

Despite being underwhelmed by what should have been historic marvels and instead were just ordered piles of rocks, after a couple of days pottering around I felt thoroughly at home. There's a nice bit of cheerfulness to the place (probably down to everyone getting plenty of vitamin B); it isn't too crowded, and the ability to sit outside to eat, drink or read any time of the day made me think that maybe Joyce wasn't far wrong in coming here for a while.*

* Actually, had he been staying in our apartment he'd probably have hated the damn place. The attic bedroom was too hot to sleep in, and downstairs the mosquitoes absolutely plagued us all night. In a delirious rage at about 4.30am, I swatted a particularly bloated one leaving a massive bloody streak against the wallpaper that I had to swab off with a kitchen towel. Urgh.