It happened in February of 2024.
In front of one of the best bakeries in the city. The city in question is Pula, the nearest one to the place where I live. There were only two unoccupied parking spaces by the side of the road across the bakery. One of them was marked with thick yellow lines, which signal that the space is reserved for people with disabilities. Less than a minute after I took the ordinary parking space marked with blue lines, a relatively big, slick car, a Mercedes of sorts, parked in the accessible parking space marked in yellow. I haven't thought much of it, barely noticed the fact like any other mundane occurrence around me, but since that detail will play an important role later in the post, I think it is more than worth mentioning now, at the beginning.
Here you can see a shot I took a second before entering the bakery. A nice, warm fragrance was spreading from various types of bread and pastries. There was a bit of vanilla in the air as well. I love vanilla a lot. Mostly becouse it has a soothing effect on me, somehow. Maybe it is having an amnesiac impact too, at least sometimes, becouse I can't remember which of the two doors I used to enter.
This wide shot shows almost everything you could see or buy in the bakery on that winter morning in the bearish year of 2024. I tried a few things in the last decade or so, not many things becouse I don't eat much bread and pastries. I mean, the fact that I don't eat much of that stuff doesn't give the right idea about how much I love bakery products. I adore them. I could feed on fresh, warm bread only. But there is a but. But I also like being relatively healthy and in good shape to ramble around in search of insects and other macro-related stuff in nature. I would also like to live long and get a decade or two of intense long-distance traveling after getting wealthy with crypto. If I do get wealthy with crypto, of course. There is a possibility, it looks at hand more than ever, but it could be all going to shit becouse of some stupid mistake or a similar human factor.
Anyway, the first thing I think of when I see a bakery or just think about one is burek. The king of all pastries in my book. Many bakeries here in the area have excellent bread, but only a few have a good, juicy burek, not too greasy but greasy enough for the right feeling of a burek without digestion problems.
I bought a burek with fresh cheese, which some may argue isn't a burek at all, and two or three bakery pizzas for some friends I planned to meet later.
Now, a burek filled with fresh cheese may or may not be a real burek, depending on what type of burek lover you ask for an opinion, and which burek-eating region the aforementioned burekivore comes from, but a pizza from a local bakery isn't a real pizza, that's for sure. It's just some kind of thin bread-like thing covered with edible pieces one usually associates with pizza. Despite being a fake, the thing tastes fairly good in a good bakery like the one I'm showing in this post. In many places, it is the worst a bakery has to offer. Only the so-called tortillas can be crapier. They are pure shit, almost inedible, in all bakeries all around the city and the surroundings. The following shot ...
... shows the burek in my lap. I was back inside the car when the photograph was taken. The crisp, golden crust looks quite inviting, don't you think? The grease is also visible, and although it may look a bit excessive to some, it's not. A minute ot two after entering the car, I was getting ready to drive away, but ...
... but as my hand was holding the key inserted into the ignition cylinder, a tow-away service suddenly appeared on the scene, so I decided to stay a bit more and enjoy the free show. I live in a neat litlle town where pretty much nothing happens in winter, so watching a car being lifted was like sitting in the front row of a circus - it was so much fun!
Being able to eat some good, greasy stuff and watch a Mercedes get higher in front of your very eyes is one of the greatest gifts chance, fate, or the universe can grant you. Maybe it's a reward for something good I've done in one of my past lives.
Of course, seeing a hippopotamus or a small dinosaur in the same situation would have been even better, but I'm very happy with what I got without even asking for it. The Mercedes was more than fine.
A friend who was there with me was watching the situation like a tense B-movie presented in a drive-in cinema. By the way, I've only seen drive-ins in American movies. That type of movie theater never existed here, as far as I know.
But I have seen quite a few low-budget movies and exploitation flicks that were often offered to drive-in audiences. I love many bad movies. I love shallow genre movies and products of charming ineptitude. I love seeing something good or mildly intelligent shining in a pile of cinematic shit. I definitively prefer extremely cheap, bad movies over the mediocre but highly expensive mainstream crap that's presented like some product filled with value while being dumb and boring like any B, C, or Z exploitation flick.
It seems that the Mercedes parked in the accessible parking space didn't have the disability-related sticker that gives it the right to park there. That's the whole story. Without my ramblings, it would have been a very short one. But I like to publish long posts no matter what. If I don't have enough material to publish something genuinely extensive, be sure I won't create good short content, nope, not me, I'll do whatever I can to assemble some sprawling nonsense.
Later that evening, I was exploring the internet in the good company of cats. But that's another story. This one ends here. THE END.
AS ALWAYS, ON HIVE THE PHOTOGRAPHS ARE MY WORK.