TIME

Over the last fifteen years or so, the mid-to-late February period is when I typically repair a few things on my car to prepare it for the annual roadworthiness test. On February 14, 2023, I visited a repair shop and took the time to take a few photographs while waiting for the repairs to be completed.

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It wasn't a long time ago, but the year 2023 somehow looks like another era to me now.

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Here you can see a set of ten well-designed, probably expensive watches hidden near the center of a magazine I had never heard about before. I came across them after a quick trip across the pages. The time was stuck at 10 h and 8 min, can't tell you if it was after or before noon, in that segment of the magazine. It was a different place and time from the place and time I was in back then on the 14th of February 2023, early in the afternoon, that's for sure.

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The small waiting area in the repair shop's office had a table and three chairs. Displayed on the table there was one book and a bunch of magazines.

One of those magazines was completely new to me. It was an edition from the summer of 2021, and its name was On Time. Under the On Time nameplate that doesn't need translation, there was a slightly weird Croatian subtitle, "Vodič kroz satove i lijepe stvari," which means "A guide to watches and beautiful things." Now, maybe it's becouse I don't have much experience with magazines, but the combination of something so specific like watches and so extremely generic and hard to define as "beautiful things" to describe the content of a magazine looks pretty strange to me.

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After a bit of exploring, I had a sensation that two magazines were living on the pages of just one. One of them was dedicated to expensive banalities that one could summarize as "Rich man stuff to brag about," and the other, a better one, was there to show the viewer some cool ideas and designs. It didn't take me long to realize that On Time was a dissociatively disordered magazine.

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I skipped the boring stuff and photographed only some cool watches.

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In this photograph, the time is frozen at 10 h and 9 min. In the foreground of the following shot, which shows a good chunk of the office ...

... you can see the book that was sharing the table with the magazines.

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I found a completely different time encapsulated on those pages.

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It was a book about Pula, the city where I was repairing my car.

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The city is depicted in the book through old postcards from the early years of the 20th century.

A couple of hours later, when the car was repaired nd the bill was ready to be paid...

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... I photographed some stuff in Pula that still looks like what I saw in those postcards, but more about that later. When the right time comes.

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In the years shown in the postcards, Pula was a major military port of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.

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A postcard with some heavy weaponry on it is fairly unusual nowadays, I supose?

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I found quite a few battleships in the book.

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I saw some peaceful urban vistas as well ...

... while flipping through the pages.

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The iconic Roman Colosseum, which for the most part still looks the same, was also there.

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It was a fairly accomplished time-travel machine, that book.

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The fancy watch shown in this photograph also looks like something that could make a time traveler out of you.

This is the Grand Hotel Riviera ...

... a historic hotel built in 1909 ...

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... near the railway station.

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The railway station, on the other hand ...

... was built near the harbor ...

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... and has been here since 1876.

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Here you can see some other cool old buildings behind the railway infrastructure and near the hotel I mentioned before.

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They are from the same Austro-Hungarian period as the Riviera and the railway station. That's all I can tell you about them.

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In this shot, taken in the same area, you can see an Austro-Hungarian building next to a modernist condo from the seventies. Different times are posing together in the present of 2023, which is in the recent past right now.

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Time is a pretty wild thing if you think about it. It's crazy.

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Here, I zoomed in on the shipyard across the bay.

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An oil platform was under construction there.

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You can see a different part of the same shipyard in this shot.

Here you can see one of the entrances to the shipyard. I zoomed in a lot.

This photograph shows a building across the street from that entrance. I zoomed in even more here.

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This is the second oil platform that was being constructed in the shipyard back then in 2023.

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At some point, while I was observing the buildings around the railway station ...

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... a colorful train entered the scene.

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A few minutes later, the train stopped in front of the station.

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In this photograph, the train looks almost like the graffiti-decorated ground floor of the railway station's main building.

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I saw only one passenger through the windows of that train.

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When this and the following photographs were taken ...

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... the train was slowly departing.

This large building, situated about a hundred meters from the railway station, is an old industrial silo.

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That's all I can tell you about it. I don't know how old the silo is exactly.

This shot shows some very distant stuff across the bay. The tall cypress tree and the industrial tower behind it look pretty cool together.

Here you can take another look at one of the ornate, Austro-Hungarian buildings I introduced earlier in the post. However, this photograph brings something new to the table; you can see the entire building, not just parts of it like before.

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