It’s beginning of February now, and you are about to read the second part of my winter-spring blog. One thing I’ve really been learning since writing these blogs is to set myself limits and to get things finished. When I decided to regularly write these blogs, I knew I was challenging myself, as I’m a person who usually does things best under pressure…When it comes to my blogs, nobody else puts limits, I do it myself because I enjoy writing. And I can proudly tell you now, it’s working better than expected. So if you should not read anything from me in a while, you’ll know that my little bottom is shirking again;). But what he can’t avoid is another high school presentation coming up, at a school in Piran. For me, it’s always funny and a bit strange at the same time, because when people used to present something at our school, they were usually mature, experienced older people. Here, however, most of the students were older than us or the same age, which was nice, even if it sometimes felt a bit ridiculous. However, I think it’s actually quite a good thing because we’re the same age and we can tell the students about an opportunity that affects them right now. To hear from us what it’s like to do a year abroad straight after leaving school (as it’s not very common here in the area, unlike in Belgium and other regions) has aroused interest among the students. Begin of February also brought us a new volunteer, Aljaž, who is from Ljubljana and stays with us for 2 months. The first night we went together to bon café to present him their bon burger and get to know each other a little bit. Oh and before I forget – in Epi Piran after months we finally attached the last piece of the puzzle!!!
Shortly after, my sister also came to visit, which is why I unfortunately couldn’t experience the carnival in Ptuj and wasn’t chased by any kurentovanje. But the following days were almost crazier than the Ptujers. When we cycled to Izola one day with the bikes and came back to unlock them, the end of the (also wrong) key suddenly got stuck.
Instead of having to worry about our bikes being stolen, we now had a completely different problem. We tried everything – without success. Of course this had to happen on a public holiday, meaning no locksmith or anything else was open.
A nice gentleman, who noticed us desperate girls, put down his wood and set to work. After not too long, a second person came by and then a third and fourth until at some point 6 people were knocking, sawing and hammering with all the tools they could find at home. None of them understood English and I only spoke broken Slovenian, but that didn’t stop them. You could tell it was no longer just our problem but theirs too. One of them kept shouting some word out of the window (I still don’t understand what he wanted), another one was a landlord and was rummaging around the corner in his pub for something useful to break such a thick iron lock. From the outside, it must have look questionable, a group of men breaking a lock. After what felt like an eternity, one of them finally managed to break the lock. It didn’t matter how actually. Everyone was so happy, we couldn’t be more grateful. I never met such helpful and dedicated strangers. In German we would say “Kümmer dich um deinen eigenen Kram”. On the way back then, we also took the wrong road and suddenly ended up next to the highway, where a drummer was giving a concert from his trunk to passers-by. Of course, he got applause and a counter-concert from all the honking cars, trucks and buses. Something like this can happen when you trust Anne’s extremely safe navigation. I only bring you the best, that was always the goal. But instead of trusting the navigation, I advise you to rephrase it and call it ‘following Anne’s intuition’. With the melody of “Would you…?” we left him again. One morning we got up early and took the bus to Divača. As we missed the connecting bus on the way there, we had to give in and meekly tell the annoying cab driver that we would need him. The plan was also to go skiing at the weekend, which is why we took the bus to Lake Bohinj after visiting the caves.
As the buses are four times more expensive during the week than at the weekend, we didn’t have enough small change, so the bus driver took us and the bus full of people to an ATM (completely off the route, by the way) so that we could withdraw money. To the Slovenians reading this: Is this a normal thing here? When we arrived in the evening, we realized that we were in the middle of nowhere and there was nowhere nearby to eat, not even a bar where we could have celebrated our birthday the next day. Our last hope was a bus to Bled. Standing there, freezing, warming ourselves up with warm speeches about the desert, the bus passed us without stopping. We were exhausted, soaked and about to give up when a car stopped… You want to know what happened next? Well, you will find out in my next blog! 🙂