Chapter 4: First travels
Hello and welcome to a new chapter!
As the covid situation started to improve in Slovenia, we were finally able to do some travelling. It was weird that we have been living here for half a year but didn’t really see anything apart from the coastal region.
We first wanted to visit Ljubljana because we were both in the mood for a city. Both of our home towns have more inhabitants than Ljubljana, so it’s safe to say that living in Lucija was quite a change.
Ljubljana is a really pretty city but the historic city center is pretty small so you can definitely see the most important sights within a day (but I´m happy to be proven wrong, Slovenians!). We decided to go for a walk along the river, climb up the hill to the castle and in the afternoon, we did some thrift shopping and went to one of the city´s malls. We did also choose to park our car in the most expensive car park in the whole of Ljubljana, but all in all it was nice to finally do something again!
A few weeks later, we went on a little road trip to Lake Bled with the volunteers from Koper. Where we live, it was already spring and Ilse and I had even been for a swim already, so it was a bit of a shock when it started snowing heavily in Bled. For the whole of the 2 hours it took us to walk around the lake, it was snowing. Even though it was pretty cold, it was nice to finally see some snow (even though I would have preferred it around Christmas) and I won our snowball fight, so the trip was definitely worth it. When you look Slovenia up on Google, the first pictures that come up will probably be of Lake Bled. While it is definitely really beautiful and worth a visit, we preferred Lake Bohinj, which is about a 30 minute drive from Bled in the Triglav national park. The lake is way more natural and “wild” than Bled.
In march, Epi finally re-opened for a few weeks. Especially Ilse had only been working in Epi for about 3 weeks before it had to close, so it was so nice to see the kids again and to get to know all of them. Even though we had been volunteering for half a year by now, we hadn’t really got the chance to interact with the kids and finally being able to play games, have our language clubs and just talk in person again definitely showed us why we decided to volunteer in youth work in the first place. Sadly, there was another short lockdown over Easter because of the british variant but (surprisingly) it really only lasted for 2 weeks so we were back in Epi shortly after.
We spent Easter Sunday on the beach at Moon Bay with the volunteers from Koper and then made pizza at our place. All in all, it was quite a different celebration than at home but we had an amazing day! The only not-so-happy memory was that Ilse managed to fall off my bike so spectacularly that a woman came running out of her house to check on her. Luckily, Ilse just suffered a few scratches and hopefully learned that you should not be on your phone while biking. I repeat: it´s a really bad idea.
