We went into a local shop selling “med”/honey products. They had a wide variety and I finally got the answers to my questions about the strange honey products we saw at the weekend market! Slovenes keep bees all over their country, not just in the western Julian Alps. The products in the store were from eastern Slovenia. There was forest honey made with tree sap, flower honey, chestnut honey, and some other kind of foreign tree. We guessed right that the white “honey” is cream mixed with honey. There were jars of honey flavored with chocolate, apricots, walnuts, and other fruits and nuts. The shelves displayed plenty of honey liqueur made out of fruit brandy and Slovenian honey. The wine bottles we saw at the market were indeed honey wine! We tried some – it’s very strong and sweet, as is the liqueur. We bought a small sampling of the liqueur and four types of honey from different kinds of bees.
The river here is the same gray-blue as the one in Zermatt, Switzerland, which means it must be glacial water. I think the highest peaks around here are around 8,000 feet. I don’t know if glaciers can live at that low of an altitude?? The lowest glaciers in N. America are probably at 10,000 feet. We found out that indeed, glaciers can exist at about 5,000 feet here!
Drivers stop for pedestrians here like they did in Sete, but they go one step further: they stop when they see you waiting on the sidewalk before you step into the street. Cars stopped for us in the dark and rain!
We bumped into the couple from Manchester again today in a park by lake! I wonder if we’ll see them in Bohinj – they’re going there the day after us.
We watched swifts and a starling go about their daily lives. A large group of swifts were gracefully flying above the lake, swooping down and just skimming the surface of the water. They are so quick and agile, they just flutter about and if you turn your head, they’ve already drastically changed direction or elevation. The starling kept our attention for a while. He pulled two large earthworms out of the sopping wet soil and incessantly jabbed them with his sharp beak until they were broken into several small pieces. He loaded up as many worm pieces in his beak as he could fit and readied himself to fly away – maybe to feed some little birdies in a nest somewhere?
We had our best or maybe second best meal thus far at a restaurant called Ocarina (means the little clay flute-like instrument – you see it in Latin America and apparently in Slovenia too?) I had an arugula rocket salad with parmesan cheese and Corey had Indian nan (bread) stuffed with cheese and roasted veggies and rice and couple sauces. Mine was trout (the whole fish) with roasted veggies and spinach with potatoes mixed in. Everything was seasoned to perfection. For dessert, we shared “Bled cake,” a rum and raisin cream cake that came with raspberry gelato and drizzled with chocolate. The entire meal was decadent and over-the-top. Gourmet is definitely a cut above the rest, but I couldn’t survive all that cream and salt more than once in a blue moon! The food we normally eat is incredibly bland in comparison – but if it weren’t we wouldn’t get such satisfaction out of the occasional splurge.
Turns out the Slovenes had a couple more surprises up their sleeves. Not only is this a charming country full of fluent English-speaking bee-keepers, there are some excellent chocolate-makers as well! Gorenjka chocolate is the most inventive I’ve ever seen. We tried juniper and tarragon flavor today, actually good! They have tons of other odd flavors like ginger and a couple nuts paired with raspberry. Much more exotic than Swiss chocolate!
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The weather today was even worse than the previous three days, as the rain barely stopped all day. It is our one-year anniversary! I wish the weather could have been better, but it’s still a cool place to be. We made the best of it though. We left the apartment around 1230, once it stopped pouring and was just regular raining. Our first stop was the bus station to see about tickets. Along the way, we ran across the same English couple again, for the third time! Turns out we don’t need to be tickets because you pay the bus driver directly, so that was a ‘wash’. We then went down to the lake and watched the birds for a while; swifts skimming the water’s surface and a black bird pulling huge worms right out of the soaked ground. Then we rolled up to the tourist office and asked about bus/train schedules in the area and about a movie theater. No luck with the movie theater, so we didn’t have that time-burning activity to try. Next, we went over to the shopping center and went shoe shopping for both of us. We got nice shoes namely for Sweden, but also for work once we get back to the States. By now it was after 1500, so we took a lunch break on the steps in the shopping center, out of the continuing rain. It wasn’t the most attractive place we have had lunch on this trip, but it worked. Then we hit the Mercator in the same area and bought some weird chocolate flavored like juniper…very interesting! We headed home to drop off our stuff and relax a bit before going out for a nice dinner. Initial plans were to go to the castle restaurant, but we decided to go to one in town, called Okarina. It was closer, and not perched on top of a mountain, so my still painful foot appreciated that. It was a pretty fancy place, and I felt very underdressed. I had an Indian-themed dinner, Nan bread (fried round bread with veggies/spices stuff inside) and tofu and vegetables cooked Tandoori-style. B had a fantastic trout (whole!) and vegetables dish. We finished the meal with a Bled cake, a weird rum cake with nuts and golden raisins inside. As an indication of fanciness, I had my jacket put on my before leaving! The walk back to the apartment was dark and you guessed it, wet! We got back to the apartment at 2130 and got ready for tomorrow’s trip to Lake Bohinj.
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| Slovenia Pictures |
