Decisioms, decisioms, decisioms!

We've been fighting off boredom for the past couple of weeks.  We are assigned to serve in Maribor, but we can't cross the border, yet.  At one time, we were going to go and accept a two-week quarantine, just to get there, but President didn't feel we should go until church meetings start up again.  Then they shut the border tighter for non-citizens of Slovenia, while loosening it up for citizens.  That's when boredom set in.  We were just waiting to go.  Church meetings are scheduled to begin again on June 7.
  Meanwhile, one of our callings is to cook comfort-food meals for newly arriving, disoriented, jet-lagged, newbie missionaries when they arrive - usually three meals which are prepared at the Mission Home.  We have a group of 8 who have finished their virtual language training and are ready to come, then were temporarily released because flights weren't available, and now we can get flights, but they have to be re-assigned and flights scheduled.  We don't yet know exactly when they will arrive, but perhaps next Tuesday.
  So, that brings us back to the Mission Home where we would do the cooking.  I have been of the opinion that the house is unsafe for several weeks.  The walls were cracked but it wasn't clear how much structural damage had been done, so workers cleared a little patch of plaster off to see the bricks.  That revealed that the walls were not well built.  So workers cleared the main bearing wall and several other patches off, and that revealed bad wiring, missing mortar, mud instead of mortar, broken bricks, misaligned bricks, a concrete pillar that was half brick, and more.  The first, moderate earthquake (6.5 Richter scale) broke the walls.  Then a minor earthquake, (3.2 Richter)  opened the cracks wider and moved things around.  At that point I was convinced the whole house could collapse at any point.  I sent 180 photos to the Facilities department to show why I was concerned.  Weeks passed.  Yesterday evening, President got a call from the Facilities Department telling him that the house is unsafe and he should move out IMMEDIATELY, that same night, without delay.  They said the concern was that another earthquake could bring it down.  Especially since they've pealed off the inches of solid plaster that was reinforcing the lousily-placed bricks.
    Well, it was just unreasonable to think we could move out that fast, and we spent another night in it.  This morning, we decided to visit the Rijeka area, which we've wanted to do ever since we started thinking about a mission here.  We had already talked to the senior missionary couple who live in Rijeka to ask them to guide us over to Hreljin where Liz's father was born.  Their schedule only allowed that to work tomorrow.  We were going to come down, visit Hreljin and go back that same night.  But since we have to leave the Mission Home, we came today.  We thought we'd get a hotel in Opatija, which was the Mediterranean Riviera for the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  That empire dissolved during WWI, and then the French Riviera became the big thing.  Opatija has stayed the same since then.  It has wonderful, but old, hotels along a delightful coastline with beaches between rocky outcrops, and eye-entrancing vistas of coastline backed with mountains and vineyards.

This is the cover of a brochure for today's Opatija.  After we got here, we discovered the hotels are still closed due to COVID-19, but we managed to find a beautiful, modern, small apartment for an extremely reasonable price.  The circular garden in the center photo of the brochure is below us to our left.  The statue of the girl with a seagull landing on her outstretched hand is straight ahead at the water's edge.  This place is gorgeous!  The landlady almost cried when I told her we plan to stay four days, but we might be here for a week or more.  She was so happy because they depend on tourists and the country's border closure is killing them.  They are desperate to rent their places, and are willing to cut the rates to the bone.

This is the view from the balcony of our temporary apartment.  It has been sunny and nice all day, but a squall blew over this evening and you can see it passing over Rijeka in this photo.  Weird winds and rain with scattered, huge raindrops fell for about 25 minutes.  Then it was nice again.
  As I was writing this, the landlady came back and gave us a basket of fruit, lunchmeat, cheese, coffee, and wine.  The lunchmeat is PRSUT, which is this region's version of the prosciutto that originated in Spain.  It is very, very good, although salty.

So, our plan is to tour around the Istrian peninsula for several days.  We'll visit the little towns, and eat the wonderfully unique cuisine of this area.  We also plan to see an old Roman town, including the best-preserved Roman Amphitheater there is.
  And when Slovenia opens their border to us, we'll go to Maribor and go back to work.