Day 14: Road into and out of Slovenia

The church bells of the city of Pula mercifully didn’t go off at 7:30 this morning. Having been awakened many times during the night by the boisterous participants of parties going on somewhere nearby, it was a relief to sleep in for just a little bit longer today.

The party started at about 9:30 p.m. with male voices singing and an accordion player joining in along the way, then the crowd joined in with clapping and singing along. When each song was finished there was loud applause, hoots, yips –that might be akin to our yeahs– extremely long versions of yips, and whistles though the teeth, kind of like the ones sheepherders use to direct their dogs in the field. It was all very interesting to hear from our attic room, where the windows were in the ceiling, so there was no way to peer out to find the source of the night’s revelries.  If your neighbors were having such a party, you might invite yourself to it, unless you were as tired as I was.

Intermingled with the party was the occasional sound of volumes of bottles being tossed into bins and motobikes racing up and down the streets and alley ways, cat fights, and seagulls landing on the nearby rooftops. I think the party finally broke up at about 3:45 a.m.

Our now usual early pre-breakfast walk around the town took us to some interesting Roman ruins, circular alleys with little steep-stepped alleyways, where feral city cats appeared at ever turn and watched from garden walls from behind tree branches.

We returned to our hotel for our breakfast and made a seemingly simple request for two lattes.  The waitress nodded and returned with one cup of hot milk.  We tried again, saying latte = milk + espresso.  She dutifully returned with two cups of coffee.  We improvised something that resembled a latte.

We asked our car lady to show us the way to Piran and she dutifully did so as we headed north along the coast to Slovenia.  The landscape again made a big change, as did the architecture and construction of the homes and farmsteads. We made it to the Croatia – Slovenia border in little time presented our papers again and got another stamp for the passports. We rolled into the seaport city of Piran and started gawking at the beautiful details all around us. The buildings, boats, water, people, and reflections in the water all beckoned us to linger a while, which we did.

Our chosen café on the town square had caffé latte on the menu, so that was a great start.  It also offered a hot čokoláda, so perhaps it was not out of the question that a favorite drink, caffé čokoláda, could be had.  Communicating the ingredients wasn’t enough –it was as if we had just arrived from the New World on one of the boats in the harbor with some otherworldly invention that would take a long time to be accepted here.

The town square was large and made of large and very smooth and even blocks (an apparent ‘upgrade’ compared to other town squares). It was a hive of action. This is a city of boats and wheels.  Mostly pleasure boats, but also many working fishing boats.  All manner of wheeled mobility could be seen whizzing about. Older folks in three wheeled contraptions that resembled tricked out wheelchair scooters, kids on their foot scooters, bikes of all shapes and sizes, rollerblades and old fashioned skates, biker dudes and dudettes of all ages, inked and un-inked. Then there were the usual cars and busses. People were bathing in the sea and sunbathing on the concrete beach, the little ones in nothing but their birthday suits. There were lots of shadowy alley ways that lured us deeper into the city, to keep us exploring the mix of architecture and details, light and shadow, and the curious things the town was hiding there.

We wanted to stop for a late lunch before leaving Slovenia, so we thought we would try Bled. We had read that the place was beautiful, a wondrous place with a lake, an island, and a castle, it looks like a fairytale location. Too bad we don’t have any photos of it.

You’ll have to look it up on the web. The place was jammed packed, cars, people, families, people with dogs in tow. It was a madhouse. There was nowhere to park the car to get out and walk. So we tried to get out of there as fast as we could. We headed out for the main road again to make our way to Austria. We stopped at the city of Vallach for a bit to eat and get our bearings.

Like so many cafés on this trip, food was not something they concerned themselves with.  In this case, the drink menu was 10 pages long and the food choices were toast or pizza.  Paul pressed his coffee-ordering luck (only 2 strikes so far today) and asked for a decaf latte, but ran into another cultural barrier.  Knowing entkoffeiniert in German might have helped, but our server, who had a good command of English, just couldn’t fathom there was such a thing as coffee without caffeine, even at 8:00 at night.   In the earlier conversation, the server couldn’t imagine another ingredient being added to caffe.  Here, she couldn’t fathom something being subtracted.  These exchanges are all very quick and rather amusing, as long as you’re not too concerned about what you end up getting.

We finally settled in for the night at a place called the Hacienda Mexicana where all the rooms are decorated in some sort of Mexican theme and named after Mexican cities. The wifi/whiffy/wifey/why-fee or whatever the vernacular is for this part doesn’t reach our room so we are in the busy bar trying to get this blog post up for your reading pleasure. The restaurant and bar offer all sorts of Mexican fair and beer and is painted in bright festive colors. There is a large poster on the front of the building announcing that bikers are welcome and you could rent a Harley here if you cared to.