Arena Blue Dream – Pula apartment review

I hardly ever do this – in fact, have I done this at all in the last decade? I’m going to review the apartment I stayed at in Pula. It was lovely. Actually, the apartment I stayed at in Dubrovnik was lovely as well and maybe I should have reviewed that too. Maybe I will. But this is about Arena Blue Dream apartment in Pula.

I chose it because of its proximity to the bus station. I travel with hand luggage and I travel by public transport and I knew I didn’t want to be forced to get off the airport shuttle bus and then walk a couple of miles carrying my luggage. Nor did I want to be up in the middle of the night to hike back to the bus station to go home at the end of the trip. Proximity to Pula Arena was a bonus but a good bonus. It was also more or less opposite one of Pula’s many small Studenac Markets, a chain of variable-quality convenience stores. In this case, I think it was one of the lower-quality ones but it was handy to have right there for juice and chocolate. It was also only about 150m from the Arena, although on the same side of the road – if you wanted to see it from the door, you had to cross the road and it was just there, towering over the city.

The outside of my apartment building in Pula. It's one of a terrace of houses, most of them with plaster peeling off to reveal brick underneath. Mine is the one in the middle, yellowish at the bottom, between the one that's orange at the top and the one that's orange at the bottom.

I booked it through booking.com as I usually do and received a response very quickly, which was that the hosts would add me to a WhatsApp group nearer the time. I was a bit dubious about “group” but it turned out to be made up of two owners, Igor and Kristijan. Around 24 hours before arrival, I was added to this group and sent a message with the apartment’s address, the fact that it was on the first floor and marked as apartment 1, a description of where the key box would be found and the code to open it. Similarly, 24 hours before checkout, I received another message asking me to return the keys to the key box and vacate the apartment before 10am. It meant I also had the option to contact them for anything – extra towels, arranging a taxi, any local advice or recommendations or any problems I had. As it happened, I didn’t but it’s nice to know it’s an option.

The apartment was easy to find – the buildings are numbered quite clearly, although the presence of a second key box, unmentioned in the message, took me by surprise. It was the top one, although my theory to test that was to just try the code until one of them opened. The front door isn’t locked although I presume one of the keys is to it. It’s a little dark inside – I’m sure there’s a light somewhere but I never found it. You go straight up the stairs in front of you and on the first landing, it’s the door directly in front. It was a bit disconcerting that the door was left open – I suppose you’re meant to realise that it’s right here but my instinct was to wonder if I was in the wrong place or if someone else was already in there or if someone was waiting to murder me. There’s a light switch to the left of the door so you can find your keys up here although please switch it off when you go into the apartment.

Right. We’re in. Close the door and lock it. It’s got an internal deadbolt and the lock itself consists of five separate bars. My previous experience with this kind of door, lots of bolts, turn the key several times, is that it makes a clunking noise like you’re locking a casino safe. Arena Blue Dream’s door is pretty much silent. Here in the hallway there’s a shoe cupboard behind the door and a shoe rack to the right and then you’re in the apartment.

The door - wood laminate, thicker than you expect, with five bolts going across when you lock it and another above it as a separate bolt. Behind it, you can just see the shoe cupboard in my hall.

It runs the full length of the building. The front room is the bedroom, which has sliding frosted glass double doors and the light switch outside above the shoe rack. There’s also a light switch by the bed on the far side, which I didn’t find until my last evening. The bedside lamps are great until you realise that the glowing LCD panel showing the date, time and temperature doesn’t stop glowing. Judging by the times on them being completely wrong, I suspect everyone eventually does what I did and unplugs them. Yes, I googled and read the instruction manual. Those panels do not switch off.

In the foreground is the bedroom, with a grey cover over the foot of the bed and frosted glass sliding doors showing a view through the apartment to the back door. Everything is very tasteful and neutral except that the ceiling is a mid-blue instead of the expected white.

The rest of the apartment is fairly open plan. There’s a living room with a sofa and two small armchairs, a wifi code in a frame, plenty of cupboards, enough glasses to furnish a party of 50 and a TV, which leads straight into the kitchen. There’s a microwave and a coffee machine on the right, a fridge on the left, built-in freezer above it and then kitchenwares are mostly kept in a big drawer underneath the fridge, with the cutlery drawer cunningly tucked away inside the big drawer. There’s a dishwasher, an oven and a hob and behind the microwave is a breakfast bar with more storage. This storage includes a toastie maker, a juicer and a smoothie maker. There are still more glasses in the kitchen and there’s a cupboard full of bits and pieces left over by previous guests – the last of the salt or the oil, the sort of things you often don’t think to buy when you’re shopping for your own dinner.

The living room - the wall on the right is lots of cabinets including a long low one holding the TV, with shelves above it. You can't see the sofa on the left hand wall but you can see back through to the bedroom.

The kitchen, seen from the corner behind the breakfast bar. The cabinets are a shiny grey, concealing firdge, freezer and dishwasher. There's an oven and on the breakfast bar is a fruit bowl and a glass of peach juice.

Beyond the kitchen is the terrace, which is half-covered with plastic panels and cotton sheets to keep both the rain and the sun off you. There are six chairs around this table, so you can bring friends round to drink out of those many glasses. The terrace overlooks an open space at the back of the other side of the building and if you’re tall enough, you might be able to peer over the metal ductwork to see into the next door neighbour’s.

A table with placemats and six chairs set out on a terrace. Above the table is a wooden structure covered with plastic and then hung on the inside with white cloth to keep off both sun and rain. At the far end of the terrace, it's open to the sky. There's vegetation growing on the back wall and also in the yard next to and below the terrace, reaching up to above the terrace's level.

Last is the bathroom, which is just off the kitchen. The toilet is in its own little alcove in the corner of the bathroom and has its own light. The shower is operated by two buttons – one to switch the rainfall shower head on and one to switch the handheld shower on. There’s no adjusting the power on either of these, they’re either on or off. The bad news is that these are powered by a water boiler and I never mastered this. In Dubrovnik I was told to switch the boiler on an hour or so before I wanted a shower. In Pula they never said such a thing but I tried it… and it didn’t work. I ran out of hot water as I washing the conditioner out of my hair. Before that, not knowing which switch was which, I just left it, which meant the poor thing never had any idea when it was supposed to be heating water… and it just ran out as I was washing the conditioner out of my hair. I’m putting that down to a skill issue rather than any inherent fault in the system. The shower has a little stone seat in the corner, out of reach of the water so it’s no good if you need to sit down in the shower but it’s quite good for washing the day’s filth off your feet if you’ve been wearing sandals.

The shower. The control unit is set into a little thick shelf and consists of two buttons set right into the shelf and a temperature dial. The shower is mostly tiled in marble-effect white tiles but the shower is on a made to look like very narrow wooden slats.

There’s also a washing machine in the bathroom and a little cupboard containing soap, washing liquid and an inexplicable large bottle of contact lens solution. Outside, there’s a little cupboard behind the bathroom door with the small bottles of body wash and some cleaning products.

The rest of the bathroom - a big sink with three drawers underneath it (one cut out to fit around the pipes), a tall cabinet and a washing machine.

Last, the patio doors out to the terrace and the bedroom door have electric blinds that roll down and completely block the light out. However, the window outside the bathroom door doesn’t – it just has a weird blind in stripes of see-through/not see-through that you align to your desired level of privacy and darkness. That’s fine in the evening but early in the morning, it lets in a lot of light and the bedroom door is only frosted glass, so despite the blackout blinds at the window, you’re still going to get woken up early by sunlight.

The outside of the building isn’t too promising – it’s typical Mediterranean stone overlaid with peeling plaster and a wooden door that looks like it’s been kicked in a couple of times. The apartment itself is glorious, though – an Instagram creation of grey and blue, with a grey-blue ceiling and teal-blue lights set into the arches between living room and hall, and living room and kitchen. I believe these can be changed with a remote control I found next to the microwave, which had four coloured dots on it but I couldn’t get it to work. I could work the heating/air conditioning, though – it was set to 28°C when I arrived (82.4°F), so the very first thing I did was turn that right down. That’s the right temperature for proving dough, not for enjoying an Adriatic apartment!

The grey-blue living room. Now you can see the sofa opposite the TV, as well as the blue-grey ceiling and wall.

I’ve already suggested it was a good location. The bus station is a five minute walk away, the Arena two and once you’re at the Arena, you’re pretty much at the start of the circular walk around town, or a two minute walk from the harbour. Honestly, the more time I spent exploring Pula, the more I felt like Arena Blue Dream couldn’t have been better situated for me.

At the moment, I don’t have any plans to go back to Pula (maybe in the summer to do some of the things I mentioned in the last post!) but if I did, I’d absolutely go back to Arena Blue Dream, no hesitation. Other than perhaps a toaster and a bath, I can’t think of anything that could have made that apartment any better.