The month of March has been very intense emotionally. Every time I start with a new post on the blog, I write down all the things that happened during the month. This time, after reading it all as a whole, I feel fortunate, melancholic, exhausted, overwhelmed, nostalgic… All in all, a cumulus of emotions that I couldn’t describe in one word.
March started sleeping at Jan’s van somewhere on our way to Czech and cooking some eggs with bacon (Alberto, if you are reading this, we added some onions too) in a camping gas during a windy -and very cold- morning. To be honest, I’m a bit tired of crowded cities which are full of tourists like Prague. Although, meeting three of my best friends during my past years in Granada made me enthusiastic about going there for the 4th time in my life. The trip was very nice, especially the day in which I invited Veronika and Jan (Slovenian friends) to join us in a bar where we could serve beers to ourselves. It was very fun because it just took 3mins to Veronika to start singing HSM songs with my Spanish friends. Sometimes I get worried about the situation of mixing groups of friends, but when I see everything is good and everybody is ok, it makes me happy.
Right after the trip to Prague, the 8th of March arrived and Clara and I decided to not to work and go to Ljubljana to protest and ask for women’s rights. I was expecting more people on the manifestation, more sound, more shouts and the event to be more mediatic, but apparently in Slovenia they are used to give flowers to women as a present to celebrate this day. I got one in a bar, and I left it there because “I can buy myself flowers”, and because I’m not celebrating anything on the 8th of March. There’s still inequality, less rights, violence against women and a lot of sexism in every corner in the world. Anyways, as I didn’t have too many feelings of having been heard, I decided to miss the last bus back home and attend another protest that started in Metelkova. In this one, we did shout, we did walk and we did stop the traffic of bigger streets. Definitely, it was a good decision to stay longer.
Still in the second week of March, we had Alberto’s bye bye dinner and Alberto’s bye bye party. It was the longest farewell ever. In my mind, Alberto had been leaving since the beginning of February, and I also had the feeling that I would meet him again after he left the apartment and went to Hungary. That’s why I thought I was ready to say bye to him, but on the first second he left my tears started to appear and that was the first time I cried in front of Clara (to be clair, I’m not a person who cries in front of people, so this was a goal achieved and also a proof that my relation with Clara is quite confident). So… Alberto left one day around 21h, and on the next day at noon Ibon was already here.
The days were passing by as we were having the theatre play in Piran, visiting Caffe Galeria for some pizzas, watering my babies, see them growing and shouting to the kids every time they were throwing a ball towards the garden, playing with the frisbee, complaining because the 99% of my friends who are ESC volunteers had the Mid-Term together and I wasn’t invited to go in March… I have good news. There is one thing that happened, and only once, but at least once. After OctoberNovemberDecemberJanuaryFebruaryand13ofMarch, I could finally break with the rule nº1 in EPI Piran every time The Queen plays Wizards. This one, and beating Alberto at ping pong, were the only reasons why I was waking up with stress every time that I had to go to Piran to work (once a week, not too much). Now my name is in the short list of people who beat Anka at Wizards. You can see the proof and do the Maths if you don’t believe in my calculus.
Now I will open a parenthesis and I will go back to February just for a moment. I forgot to write in the last post that, on the 22nd of February, Clara finally accepted my offer to make her tea. I’ve been hearing her favourite sentence: “no thanks, I’m fine” thousands of times that I wasn’t expecting a “yes” as an answer to my offer. That’s another goal achieved that I will include in my Youth Pass once I will have to write it. Btw, if you don’t know Clara, she hates when people do things for her. Parenthesis closed.
In this month I also had an exhausting weekend with two hikes in which one was the hardest I’ve ever done, and I also spent another weekend which was the best -for now- during my time in Slovenia. I will write about both because I don’t want to forget any of those days. At this moment, you can stop reading the post if you want (or continue gossiping about my life in Slovenia).
<< Once upon a time, there was a woman -called Ana- who woke up one Saturday morning and went for a walk with her coworkers. Nothing important happened during that walk, just the fact that she picked her first (and only) asparagus of the year. After this 2 hour walk, she arrived home and due to the fact that the weather was nice, she decided to go for a swim in the sea in a quiet place called Fiesa. What was unexpected was the amount of jellyfish that were in the water, so she got afraid of getting into the water. However, she was with a friend who told her that they didn’t sting, so she finally went into the water and swam while pushing and touching a lot of jelly living beings. After the bath, she went home and ate as fast as possible because she had to take a bus to go to a big city called Ljubljana. There, she hung out with two friends, played pinball, darts and had some drinks. It was time to leave, but she was enjoying it so much with her friends that she decided to stay two more hours and take the next bus to Loka where another friend -called Štěpán- was waiting for her. It was around 22h when she arrived at her friend’s house and ten minutes later both were hiking to a mountain called Lubnik. It was the first hike she hiked during the night, with headlights. She could see the stars and a deer. The hike was hard because she had to follow her friend’s rhythm which was quite fast for her, but she didn’t want to slow down either because she didn’t want to go to bed late. They were back after 3h, and went to bed around 2am.
On the next day, after 5 hours of sleep, Štěpán and Ana met Léa and the three of them travelled to Mojstrana to do another hike. First of all, they went to the “Slovenski planinski muzej” to ask for a stamp for what they called the “Slovenian passport”. Once there, the worker of the museum advised them that they would need to have some crampons -which they didn’t have- to reach the peak of the mountain. Of course they were stupid and they didn’t want to believe the advice of an expert, so they decided to start the ascent instead of changing plans. At the beginning, Léa and Ana started to complain about their clothes: they took winter jackets and thermal shirts that they were just carrying because it was too hot. However, after 1000m of positive elevation in a small distance, the snowy landscape started to appear. They stopped in a cottage which was closed but at least they could protect from the wind. They got dressed with the winter clothes they were carrying, they ate and went up the last 200m (not length, but altitude) to reach the peak of Dovška Baba. They could see the views to both Austria and Triglav National Park (and maybe also Italy?) at the same time that they were surrounded by snow and a cold wind. The idea was to take another path to come back, but there weren’t any footprints on the way back and the land looked very dangerous. To be precise, they didn’t know where they were standing.
Luckily, the way down was easier and they could arrive safely and in time to take the bus back to Ljubljana. At the end, the three friends -actually, “siblings in law”- took their own way home and they were exhausted ever after. >>
At this point of the post, I’m thinking that Anka and Varja will have a meeting with me to tell me to make the posts shorter. Anyways, if you are reading this: “¡Oleee!” Thanks for wasting your time reading my stories. But I haven’t finished yet… The best is for the last.
On the last weekend of March, two ESC volunteers from France celebrated their birthday in Idrija. We were around 15 people, but the number doesn’t matter. It matters the fact that almost all of my friends around Slovenia attended the event. We didn’t do anything special: a little walk, a costume party, a karaoke, a dance in the morning, cleaning, cooking… And during Sunday -sunny day-, we were chilling while talking, eating, doing slackline and playing frisbee. What we did wasn’t something special, but the fact of being with all our friends was the best part. In fact, a few hours before we were leaving, I was already a bit sad because I wanted the weekend to be longer. I love my friends and every day I’m very grateful that I chose to come here as an ESC volunteer. It’s not just the fact of working with “my people” -which is great- and playing with kids, but also my life after work and “my people” here in Slovenia.
As you can imagine, I’m mostly busy every time because I choose to spend my time doing things that I love with people that I like. I think this is my way of charging my battery after a routine week, and I hope it will continue like that. April is waiting for me with nice plans and also good weather to spend more time on the coast. Se vidimo!
