Adriatic Diary

Saturday, August 16

We got up today still jetlagged, but decided we had to make an effort and get out, so we took the bus to Piran. The guide book said it was a 30 minute ride, but he must have taken it (if at all) on a Wednesday in November. We crawled along the road with bumper to bumper traffic for an hour.
The marina was pretty much like the traffic – bumper to bumper people, but more naked. I’ve decided that men on the beach follow a rule: the size of your swimming trunks has to be inversely proportional to the size of your gut. If you’re over 75, you can just go by the rule of thumb of wearing the same size Speedo you would have at 18. I don’t know whether I was more embarrassed at the all the flesh around me or at the amount of body covered by my modest tankini. I would say I felt like a granny, but all the grannies were going topless. I have refrained from taking a picture to post here.

October 19th
Though it’s hard to believe it, we’re about half way through our stay here, and with my brother and his family coming to visit, and the pressure being on to show how native we are, it was a good opportunity to think about how far we’ve come. Here’s what I can do in Slovenia and in Slovenian:

• Ask for drinks
• Decipher some of a menu, and usually get what I think I’ve ordered
• Use all the standard polite words: please, thank you, excuse me (hvala, prosim, oprostite)
• Shop (with a few gestures if necessary)
• Get the bus or coach round about Istria
• Drive if I have to (OK, I did it once!)
• Get around Koper and Ljubljana, know market times, shop hours etc.

Things I can’t do:
• String together a whole sentence in Slovenian
• Drive anywhere
• Get up the courage to go to small shops for niggly little things (which is why we still don’t have a plug to fit the bathroom sink)

Things I wish I could do:
• String together a whole sentence in Slovenian (though I seem to get by pretty well with a combination of Slovenian, Italian and English)
• Get my tongue around the Slavic combinations of consonants
• Figure out church habits here (I miss you all back home at Resurrection!)
• Buy a little country farm and live the Mediterranean life in the summer!

We had fun with my family (I will skim over driving adventures, encounters with Croatian police, traffic jams from hell and a ‘manly’ English cold that laid us girls low for the last several days). We got to show them lots of our favorite places. In addition, we drove down to Pula on the Istrian coast to see the amphitheatre, the sixth largest in the world. Apparently no one has figured out why such a huge place was built out by a small provincial port.

We also continued our tour of Slovenian caves with a visit to Škocjanske jame. It’s a series of caverns formed by collapsed valleys and carved out by the Reka river - it has the largest underground canyon in Europe. We weren’t allowed to take pictures inside the caves for preservation reasons, so no great shots to post. Some people were disobeying the rule, and I have to admit to a strong urge to push them or their cameras over the precipice to the canyon below. As my brother commented, it was a true Tolkeinesque cave, with breathtakingly large caverns, shimmering stalagmites and stalactites, and a bridge fit for a fight with a balrog – definitely recommended if you’re out this way (it’s about 30 minutes from Koper). Web site: www.park-skocjanske-jame.si
  Now I’ve been to so many caves, apart from being amazed at my own bravery, I find myself asking questions. Just why do some creatures decide to go live in total darkness with hardly any food? I mean, look at the proteus, the cave salamander: it just hangs around in the freezing water at the bottom of caves, wondering if any food is going pass by this year (sometimes it has to wait five years or so for dinner!). Is that adequate compensation for being top of the cave food chain? Then, I get told that caves were only really explored in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What were people doing before then? Ignoring the huge holes in the hills? Not bothering to go outside the village? Afraid they were full of dragons, dwarves or marauding Turks? I can believe that for most villagers, survival was the only thing on their mind, but surely every generation has enough curious people to wander in a cave or two. Please, no answers on a postcard…

Saint Nicholas Day #2
Saint Nicholas faithfully delivered his tokens in our hotel room on Saturday (December 6th). Each girl had a chocolate Nicholas, a rosary ring, a bath bomb and an individual-sized panettone. But Saint Nicholas had made a fatal error in giving Magdalen the panettone with the blue ribbon, when he should have remembered that blue is currently Beatrice’s favourite colour. Much wailing ensued, until we persuaded her sister to promise her the treasure.
I’ll sum up Padua in the form of each family member’s top five list.

Magdalen: 1. Feeding the pigeons in Saint Anthony’s square.
2. The market at the Prato della Valle.
3. Seeing Saint Anthony’s jaw.
4. The frescoes in the Cappella degli Scrovegni.
5. The food market along the Via Roma.

Beatrice 1. Feeding the pigeons in Saint Anthony’s square.
2. Seeing Saint Anthony’s voice box.
3. Seeing Saint Anthony’s tongue.
4. Seeing Saint Anthony’s teeth.*
5. The hotel.

Ted 1. Giotto’s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel.
2. Frescoes in the Baptistery.
3. Frescoes in the Palazzo della Ragione.
4. Frescoes in Saint Anthony’s basilica.
5. Wandering around the streets.

Me 1. Giotto’s frescoes at the Scrovegni Chapel.
2. Pilgrimage to Saint Anthony’s basilica (but not particularly his voice box or tongue, or jaw for that matter).
3. The markets (have to agree with Magdalen – they were huge and vibrant).
4. Frescoes in the baptistery.
5. Walking around the city, taking in 800 years of history.

*For the confused, Saint Anthony was renowned for his preaching, hence the preoccupation with these particular relics. Roughly contemporary to Saint Francis, he was beatified even faster than that beloved saint, earning him the title “Il Santo”, “The Saint”. For this he gets the important job of running Heaven’s lost property office, being the saint you appeal to when you lose things.