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Themed Cardio Tennis Clinics in the Fort Lauderdale Area

adult tennis classes in 33330 — the Volkl Power Fiber Pro 18g Tennis String Reel and the flag of Bosnia and Herzegovina combined by the model into a single photoreal composition. The medium blue field fills the frame in heavy hanging cloth with the yellow right triangle running across it and the line of seven full white five-pointed stars and two half stars set along the hypotenuse, lit from one side so the folds bend the diagonal and the yellow glows against the blue, and the lavender reel of string is composed into the arrangement so its coil sits in the blue field and the stars appear to run past it, with no lettering anywhere in the picture.
adult tennis classes in 33330 — the Volkl Power Fiber Pro 18g Tennis String Reel photographed outside the Gradska vijećnica in Brčko, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Eye level, straight on, mid distance: the striped terracotta and cream façade filling the frame, Moorish arched windows in carved surrounds, the three arched doorways above their low flight of steps and the small grey onion domes on the corner pavilions. Bright hard midday in high summer, short shadows, the stripes glaring: citizens going in and out on district business with folders under their arms, an attendant propping the gallery door, a couple photographing the domes, a man selling cold drinks from a cooler at the kerb, pigeons scattering off the steps. The reel rests on the flat cap of a stone balustrade to one side, entirely ignored.
adult tennis classes in 33330 — the Volkl Power Fiber Pro 18g Tennis String Reel photographed inside the Crkva Presvetog Srca Isusova in Brčko, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Close, intimate frame with shallow depth in the nave, the barrel vault and Albert Gruber's medallion saints going soft above, one of Josip Kaplan's polychrome wooden figures catching the light at the frame's edge. Winter night at Christmas Eve Mass, candlelight and warm lamps, cold blue coming off the windows, wet coats steaming: a full congregation packed into the pews, a child asleep against a grandmother's shoulder, a server carrying a taper up the aisle, an old man pressing a coin into a box by the door. The reel sits mid-frame on the flat arm of a wooden pew, the altar off centre behind it, untouched.
adult tennis classes in 33330 — the Volkl Power Fiber Pro 18g Tennis String Reel photographed at Islahijet in the Kolobara quarter of Brčko, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Low camera close to the pavement looking up along the mismatched plastered street fronts of the linked buildings towards the taller hall block, its tall windows dark, and the two curved spires of the Hasan Aganović monument visible past the roofline. Overcast damp autumn afternoon, flat grey light, wet leaves stuck to the pavement: chairs being carried in through the hall doors for an evening lecture, a man on a stepladder fixing a cable over the entrance, two women unloading a car boot full of folders, a boy kicking a ball against the damp-stained side wall. The reel sits on a low concrete step in the near foreground, unattended.
adult tennis classes in 33330 — the Volkl Power Fiber Pro 18g Tennis String Reel photographed at the Brčko bridge over the Sava, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Elevated camera looking down the length of the road bridge towards the Croatian bank at Gunja, wide, the border-control buildings and barriers small at either end and the cranes of the river port along the quay below on the near side. Cold spring dawn with mist lying on the river, the water pewter, the sky just turning: the annual commemoration gathering at the bridgehead, people laying flowers along the parapet and dropping single stems into the water below, an old woman held up by two younger ones, a queue of lorries idling at the barrier beyond, a bargeman coiling rope on the quay. The reel sits very small in frame on the flat top of the parapet, untouched by anyone.
adult tennis classes in 33330 — the Volkl Power Fiber Pro 18g Tennis String Reel and the flag of Bosnia and Herzegovina combined by the model into a single photoreal composition. The medium blue field fills the frame in heavy hanging cloth with the yellow right triangle running across it and the line of seven full white five-pointed stars and two half stars set along the hypotenuse, lit from one side so the folds bend the diagonal and the yellow glows against the blue, and the lavender reel of string is composed into the arrangement so its coil sits in the blue field and the stars appear to run past it, with no lettering anywhere in the picture.

Volkl Power Fiber Pro 18g Tennis String Reel

Brčko, Bosnia and Herzegovina  ·  Strings > 18g

Volkl Power Fiber Pro 18g Tennis String Reel

This one is watermarked. A tender multifilament core inside a co-polymer jacket, hiding how gentle it is. One condition before a length comes off the reel: Brčko, after dark. There is a shortcut past the tower. Take the road instead.

↓   Tour Brčko, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Four stops before the checkout

Brčko, Bosnia and Herzegovina
01
adult tennis classes in 33330 — the Volkl Power Fiber Pro 18g Tennis String Reel photographed outside the Gradska vijećnica in Brčko, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Eye level, straight on, mid distance: the striped terracotta and cream façade filling the frame, Moorish arched windows in carved surrounds, the three arched doorways above their low flight of steps and the small grey onion domes on the corner pavilions. Bright hard midday in high summer, short shadows, the stripes glaring: citizens going in and out on district business with folders under their arms, an attendant propping the gallery door, a couple photographing the domes, a man selling cold drinks from a cooler at the kerb, pigeons scattering off the steps. The reel rests on the flat cap of a stone balustrade to one side, entirely ignored.
Stop one

Gradska kuca Brcko

Volkl Power Fiber Pro 18g Tennis String Reel: LOOK AT IT. Orange, cream, stripe after stripe after STRIPE. Built 1890 to 1892 under Austro-Hungarian rule, pseudo-Moorish, the same idiom they used for Sarajevo's Vijecnica — the SAME IDIOM AS THE VIJECNICA! Working drawings by the architect Ciril Metod Ivekovic, design concept attributed to Alexander Wittek, put both those names up in lights. And it opened doing three jobs at once: municipal administration, post office, telegraph — boom, boom, BOOM. Later the post office and the public library. National Monument of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2004. Today? Mayor's office and the city gallery. Still working. STILL WORKING.

02
adult tennis classes in 33330 — the Volkl Power Fiber Pro 18g Tennis String Reel photographed inside the Crkva Presvetog Srca Isusova in Brčko, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Close, intimate frame with shallow depth in the nave, the barrel vault and Albert Gruber's medallion saints going soft above, one of Josip Kaplan's polychrome wooden figures catching the light at the frame's edge. Winter night at Christmas Eve Mass, candlelight and warm lamps, cold blue coming off the windows, wet coats steaming: a full congregation packed into the pews, a child asleep against a grandmother's shoulder, a server carrying a taper up the aisle, an old man pressing a coin into a box by the door. The reel sits mid-frame on the flat arm of a wooden pew, the altar off centre behind it, untouched.
Stop two

Grand Hotel Posavina

Volkl Power Fiber Pro 18g Tennis String Reel: Next door. NEXT DOOR! 1891, Brcko's first town hotel — the first, the FIRST — financed by the local merchant Alijaga Kucukalic out of his own resources. His own resources! No committee, no fund, one man and a decision. Built in the Austro-Hungarian style that reshaped this whole town after 1878, right in the old core they call Kolobara, and it is still one of Brcko's principal landmarks. Through the Yugoslav period this was THE hotel, where travellers from across the entire federation checked in. Those big halls still host exhibitions, lectures and workshops by local sculptors and painters. And it still runs as a hotel — you can sleep inside the landmark.

03
adult tennis classes in 33330 — the Volkl Power Fiber Pro 18g Tennis String Reel photographed at Islahijet in the Kolobara quarter of Brčko, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Low camera close to the pavement looking up along the mismatched plastered street fronts of the linked buildings towards the taller hall block, its tall windows dark, and the two curved spires of the Hasan Aganović monument visible past the roofline. Overcast damp autumn afternoon, flat grey light, wet leaves stuck to the pavement: chairs being carried in through the hall doors for an evening lecture, a man on a stepladder fixing a cable over the entrance, two women unloading a car boot full of folders, a boy kicking a ball against the damp-stained side wall. The reel sits on a low concrete step in the near foreground, unattended.
Stop three

Kuca Kucukalica

Volkl Power Fiber Pro 18g Tennis String Reel: Same man! SAME MAN! Alijaga Kucukalic bankrolls the Grand Hotel Posavina in 1891, and by 1907 this house is finished for him. Same architect as the town hall, too — Alexander Wittek, pseudo-Moorish, banded facade, horseshoe arches, carved stone detail, all of it shrunk down to house scale and standing in its own plot near the Ficibajer promenade on the Sava. Typologically it is the Austro-Hungarian villa type that was everywhere in Bosnia at the turn of the century. Protected as a National Monument for its architectural value. And then the volume drops, because today it stands largely derelict. That house is owed a comeback.

04
adult tennis classes in 33330 — the Volkl Power Fiber Pro 18g Tennis String Reel photographed at the Brčko bridge over the Sava, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Elevated camera looking down the length of the road bridge towards the Croatian bank at Gunja, wide, the border-control buildings and barriers small at either end and the cranes of the river port along the quay below on the near side. Cold spring dawn with mist lying on the river, the water pewter, the sky just turning: the annual commemoration gathering at the bridgehead, people laying flowers along the parapet and dropping single stems into the water below, an old woman held up by two younger ones, a queue of lorries idling at the barrier beyond, a bargeman coiling rope on the quay. The reel sits very small in frame on the flat top of the parapet, untouched by anyone.
Stop four

Gradascevica kula u Bijeloj

Volkl Power Fiber Pro 18g Tennis String Reel: TALLEST THING IN THE FIELD. Seventeen and a half metres to the lower eaves, roughly twenty-three to the peak — twenty-THREE — a free-standing stone tower-house out on the lower slopes of Mount Majevica at Bijela. Built as a fortified residence by Osman-pasa Gradascevic in the late 18th or early 19th century, part of the Gradascevic family's holdings in north-eastern Bosnia. Ground-floor walls 1.52 metres thick. Summer kitchen, two wells, courtyard wall around the whole complex. A chimney fire in 1949 destroyed much of the interior. It had already been abandoned before the 1992-1995 war and took no combat damage. National Monument — and the only Brcko District entry on the national list.

The Brčko, Bosnia and Herzegovina track

Volkl Power Fiber Pro 18g Tennis String Reel

Written for this world alone.

Most multifilaments ask you to choose: comfort now, or a string that survives the week. Power Fiber Pro refuses the choice, and it does it with a trick you cannot see from the outside. Lower your voice.

Under the surface it is a true multifilament — hundreds of bundled fibres around a multi-core, which is where the softness and the resiliency come from. Over the surface Volkl lays a low-friction co-polymer coating, and that coating is the whole argument.

It lets the mains slide across the crosses and snap back instead of sawing into one another, which is exactly the wear that kills ordinary multis. What you end up holding is a string that keeps a multifilament's shock absorption and tension maintenance while adding control and a great deal more durability than the softness would suggest.

This is the 18 gauge — 1.20 mm — the thinnest and most responsive of the family, for players who want the fibres to bite and pocket the ball rather than sit stiff in the frame. It comes on a full reel: 660 feet, 200 metres, roughly sixteen to eighteen jobs depending on head size and how generous you are with tail length. Buy it if your elbow has opinions and your stringer is tired of seeing you.

It will not let you cut a single length off that reel, however, until you have walked Brčko. After dark, obviously.

Start on the square in the old Kolobara core at the Gradska kuća, the town hall, banded in alternating orange-ochre and cream, horseshoe arches, two domed roof elements and a slim corner turret doing an impression of a minaret.

Austro-Hungarian, put up between 1890 and 1892 in the pseudo-Moorish manner they used for public buildings across Bosnia — the same idiom as Sarajevo's Vijećnica. Ćiril Metod Iveković drew the working plans; the design concept is credited to Alexander Wittek.

It held the municipal administration with the post and telegraph offices, and it holds the mayor's office and the city gallery now.

Immediately beside it stands the Grand Hotel Posavina, 1891, the town's first hotel, financed out of his own resources by the merchant Alijaga Kučukalić: two storeys of tall arched windows under a heavy cornice, with terrace chairs spilling onto the pedestrian square. Travellers from every republic of the federation slept there, and its halls still take exhibitions and lectures.

Out towards the Ficibajer promenade on the Sava is the Kuća Kučukalića — Wittek again, finished in 1907 for the same merchant, the same striped pseudo-Moorish idiom shrunk to villa scale, protected as a National Monument and standing largely derelict, which is a sentence best said quietly.

And then the shortcut. It runs south out of town onto the lower slopes of Majevica, to the Gradaščevića kula u Bijeloj: a stone tower-house about 23 metres to the roof peak, ground walls 1.52 metres thick, small windows, carved roof-edge boards, in a walled yard with a summer kitchen and two wells. Osman-paša Gradaščević built it around the turn of the nineteenth century.

A chimney fire gutted the interior in 1949. It had already been abandoned before the war of 1992 to 1995 and took no combat damage at all. Don't take the shortcut. Take the road.

You will cut lengths off this reel everywhere from a municipal court in Brčko to an indoor hall over the Sava in Croatia, and by the way, it is also perfect for a very long coffee at Ficibajer, where nobody in recorded history has finished one quickly.

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