Jump off a Bridge?!?

 We had our mission-wide Zoom call as per usual on a Saturday when nobody can travel.  President Field reported that his back is feeling somewhat better, although not as good as he'd like.

As we were meeting (on Zoom, so you can look around)  Liz noticed a strange boat tied up on the riverbank outside our apartment.  I told her it is the old-fashioned log-raft boat, and now they give rides on it occasionally.  It has three long oars in the back and it takes skilled rowers to maneuver and move the raft.  She thought we'd like a ride on it, so she went down.  They were not giving rides today - just selling drinks to the holiday crowd.  BUT, the man on the raft told her that at 4:00 this afternoon divers were going to be jumping off the big bridge across the river.  She must have looked concerned, because he also told her it is not just anybody who jumps, but diving teams, and it is all highly organized.

At 3:45 we were sitting on a bench at the riverside - I with my new Nikon camera and the long lens.  I am still getting fuzzy photos with it, and am beginning to suspect that the new lens is not clean.  But here is a photo of people across the river setting up to watch the fun.

The bridge is big and the road above is about 80 feet above the river, by my dead-reckoning.  I took rapid fire photos of several jumpers and here is the best one.

The jumper has climbed over the railing and is standing on the little blue platform the city has mounted for this event.

He is pointing his hands and preparing to jump.
    

He is crouching to get a good leap off the platform

He is now in his tuck, high above the platform and already beginning his rotation

He continues his rotation.

Now he is back to the level of the platform

He is falling very fast now, and is already at the top of the arch.

After briefly struggling to get aligned, he has aligned himself for a feet-first splash-down.

And makes very little splash.

The bridge is higher than any diving board, and it seemed like all the divers did their normal dive, but at the point they would normally enter the water they were still 30-40 feet in the air, so they had to struggle to get aligned during that long, but brief fall.  

After watching the divers, we visited the Old Vine House and looked at the exhibits in the Wine Museum.

The grapes on the Old Vine are almost ripe.  The picking is scheduled for Sept. 20 depending on how the grapes ripen.  They make about 80 bottles of wine from the grapes on the building.

The museum was as interesting as it could be for someone who is utterly uninterested in wine.  The tile floor is the most interesting part of it for me.  It represents the Drava River and various symbols on it depict history and locations of interest to Mariborians.

And then there is a most-interesting bicycle.  This was one of those times when it was painfully borne upon us that we are deaf, dumb, and ignorant to the Slovenians, although they are kind about it.  There was nobody around who could explain in English why so much effort was put into a wooden bicycle.

Serving - lunch

 Our mission is to serve the Members and Leaders.  Sometimes it is harder than other times.  We have a family in the branch who run a restaurant/resort.  They've been a bit isolated during the COVID-19 outbreak because there have been no regular sacrament meetings since March.  So, Liz called them and set up a meeting with them.  They suggested we meet for lunch at their restaurant, which is only a quarter hour west of Maribor.  So, today we drove out there.

The road follows the river upstream and winds through little towns that would look perfectly at home in Austria.  It is rural and there were fields of corn, vineyards, and orchards of apples and pears.  Incidentally, the vast majority of apple trees here produce IdaRed apples.  I can usually find some Jonagold, or golden delicious, but it is nothing like the variety of apples we are used to in the USofA.  I find IdaReds to be of boring texture and bland flavor.

The restaurant is just out of town on a little road leading down to the river, and we drove right past it before we realized it.  We had to turn around and come back to it.  Turning into it was like entering a driveway more than driving along a road.  We met a delivery truck coming out and had to pull over onto the grassy verge to let it pass.   House numbers here are assigned as houses are built, rather than pre-planned like we are used to back home.  The restaurant was number one, but the houses we passed in that narrow lane were all over the place, number 10 being between numbers 4 and 7.  Number one was at the end, closest to the river by a couple hundred yards.

We entered and were asked if we wanted to sit inside or outside.  It being a nice day we requested outside seating, just like everybody else had done.  We went through the place and out onto a patio seating area under a huge grape arbor.

The grapes were smallish and not quite ripe, but bunches of them hung over our heads as we sat in the silence found only in the country - never in a city.  It was pleasantly peaceful, cool, and welcoming.  We had a delightful meal.  I ordered dora fish on potatoes and mixed veges.  Liz had a pasta dish with prosciutto,  truffells and chantrelles.  We had dessert with fresh fruit and ice cream.

Our friends were tied up and only joined us after we'd finished, but we walked down towards the river through an orchard to meet them.  We'd noticed families with children walking past the restaurant as we ate, and they were at a park along the water's edge.  The river moves too fast for swimming, but it is endlessly fascinating to watch water moving past.  We had a wonderful time meeting our member family,

My knee continues to deteriorate and I can seldom sleep more than 5 hours before it becomes intolerable, after which I move to the recliner.  We have scheduled an appointment with an orthopedist in Ljubljana next week.  According to the mission doctor who is familiar with my case, the choices are:

1. Live with pain.

2. An injection might give relief for a few months.

3. Go back to the US for a knee replacement.  This choice would end our mission, and I don't like that!  Besides, the USA is the worst place in the World to go right now with COVID-19 raging and people so emotional over whether the government can ask them to wear face masks.  Add racial tensions and I'd rather stay here.

My knee & The Dixie Shock Band

 Last night we had a really good band playing in the bandstand just outside our windows.  They are a group from Ljubljana, but they play New Orleans style jazz music from the 40's and 50's.  Their name is the Dixie Shock Band, but their music is not shocking at all.  In fact, it was quite mellow.  There was a guy who sounds just like Louis (Satchmo) Armstrong, with a deep, gruff voice.  He's the one sitting on a chair playing the banjo, under the canopy on the right side of the photo.

The leader is the bowlegged guy wearing suspenders and he played clarinet - playing it really well.  They also had a guy on trumpet, one on trombone, a drummer, and I heard bass a couple of times.  We didn't go down to see their faces, but other than the back-side view, we had the best seats in town.  The guy who sounds like Satchmo ended nearly every number by crooning "Oh, yeah", stretching it out like Satchmo did.  If you don't remember Satchmo, do a google search on Louis Armstrong.  Listen to "What a Beautiful World" on YouTube, which was his last big hit song, and listen for the "Oh Yeah" at the end.     We opened our kitchen windows and sat on our little cafe chairs to watch them play.  It was a nice, romantic evening.

The day didn't start all that nice for me.  I woke with excruciating pain in my knee.  Some pain has been normal for a while, but this time it was awful.  I can't figure it out.  I walk a mile or two every day, and it doesn't hurt much when I walk, although I do use a cane.  But when I get back and sit down it aches.  I get an occasional pang that is short-lived.  When I sleep I lay on my side.  When I lay down in bed, one knee on top of the other, it will start to hurt and the pain grows if I continue to lay like that.  I started putting a pillow between my knees a few weeks ago, and that helps a lot, but it still comes sooner or later.  Usually I wake up after 5 or 6 hours because of it hurting.  So I get up and sit in the recliner until morning, sometimes going back to sleep and sometimes unable to.  It helps to have my knee flexed a little, so I put a pillow under my knee in the recliner, but even then it will start to hurt again, especially if I let my toes point out, instead of straight up.  Kind of weird.

  Well, I didn't set out to complain about my knee, but the reason it impacted my day is that we were scheduled to go with the young sister missionaries down to Celje to celebrate one of the elder's birthday.  Liz baked him a cake from scratch - no mix involved.   Whoever heard of such a thing in this day and age?  She also has a roman candle disguised as a birthday candle and she hopes to get a big bang out of that!  But with my knee in its current state of ouch, I opted to remain home and mope while she goes out to party.  Their plan is to have lunch at the restaurant of birthday-boy's choice (probably either pizza, or hamburgers), and then hike up to the Celje Castle.  1,000 stair steps and then along the cobble stones to enjoy the view doesn't seem like the prudent place to go for this old geezer.  So, I stayed home and watched a movie named Gunjan Saxena, which coincidentally is also the name of the first female combat pilot in the Indian military.  The subtitles were very soothing.

I did manage to complete some of my auditing tasks, too, but that is too boring for an exciting BLOG like this one.

The Festival of LENT

 Our neighborhood is known as Lent.  It is the area between the square (actually a long rectangle) where the city government buildings are located, and the northern river bank.  From Friday 8/21/20 and lasting 10 days the city puts on a celebration of the neighborhood which has grown to be city-wide.  I'm a little confused about it, but here is the main impact to us.

A new band stand has been erected just outside our living room window.  The good news is that it is only temporary, but it will have a live performance every night from 5:30 to 10:30.  The group that performed the first night was partly C&W and fairly good.  Last night it was sing-songy Indian music, which was fortunately not very loud.  We don't expect that to be the norm, but maybe we'll be pleasantly surprised.

   The city has been repairing roads and cleaning up things.  Another new feature is in the city square.  This whole square and the road to the west have been closed to traffic since before we arrived, and the whole thing newly paved with bricks and flat cobblestones.  We noticed the fountain some time ago, but it was not turned on until opening night of the festival.  This photo is its first hot day.  Kids were stripping down to their underwear to run through it, and some of the Moms enjoyed it, too.

When I walked up to the square, I could hear the kids screaming and yelling to each other all the way down by the river.  They sound like kids everywhere.  

POINT OF INTEREST:  At the right edge of this photo, you can see half of a little balcony just above an archway.  That is the place where Adolph Hitler stood to say a speech to the people of Maribor, back when this city was part of Austria.  It gives me the chills when I walk past it.

We came back as the sun was going down, and it turns out the fountain has lights, too.

Notice that the crowd of kids was getting progressively bigger.  It's been hot and I bet that people are hearing about it and coming to understand how much fun kids have in a little water.  The jets shoot the water about 3 feet high, and the kids absolutely love it!   What fun!

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Friday night was a big thing for us.  We conducted the last audit of this round.  Not that we are done with them by any means, but we have done the reviews with the unit leaders and we have noted all the exceptions - the very first auditing council to complete that task in all of Europe Area!  It's nice to be first, and we got a nice pat on the back from the Area Leaders.

And finally, we inherited a few orchids.  Poor things!  We have NEVER owned an orchid that lived longer than its blossoms.  But we inherited these orchids and their blossoms were already gone.  A couple of weeks ago we noticed a shoot growing out of one of them that looked different than the rest.  It turns out that it is a blossom shoot.

The stem was bent over and we didn't have anything to tie it up.  But then I found where somebody's umbrella had fallen apart over by the mall and they left a couple of the little metal braces from it on the ground.  I used them to tie up the blossom shoot and it is working beautifully.

This photo was taken with my new Nikon D3500 camera,  I think it turned out rather well.  A couple years and I might get all the camera's features figured out so I can take really good photos.

The river yields a surprise

 Yesterday was a disturbing day.  Not that anything really affected us, but we simply witnessed something disturbing.  We were eating breakfast in our kitchen when I looked out the window and saw a police car on the other side of the river.  There isn't a road on the other side of the river.  There is only a simple, gravel walking path, just wide enough for people to pass each other easily.  But there is grass and weeds growing next to the path, and the police car was on the grassy area next to the path, with the wheels on one side uphill.  That alone made it unusual.  At first there was another vehicle that looked like a fire department rescue vehicle, but it was slowly backing up the river towards the footbridge, which I assume was its exit route.  After it passed the police car, the car drove forward and stopped by a grey bundle on the ground.  The two police persons got out of their car and just stood there.  Later, two guys with orange trousers came walking up the river to them and they all chatted for a while, then the orange pants guys left.  I think those were paramedics.  And the police waited.   Then a grey van with city markings backed slowly out to the police car by the grey bundle.  Two guys in black trousers and white shirts got out and chatted with the police for a long time.  And finally, a man in grey trousers and a white shirt arrived and had the police unwrap the grey tarp from the body.  He looked at it, talked to the police, looked at it again, and then left.  When he left the two guys in black trousers removed a casket from the van, put the body in, and loaded it up.  Then everybody left.  The whole time, people walked by and bicyclists rode by and the police didn't hinder them in the slightest.  It was apparent from crushed grass and weeds along the river bank that  someone had gone down to the water and along it for 20 feet or so.  Then there were several tracks leading up to the walking path, including a single line of drag marks.  Clearly the body had been in the river and two or more people recovered it.  When they loaded the body into the casket I briefly saw an arm, and it looked like a man's arm.  That is all we know about it.

   So, why was it disturbing?  Because we love watching the river, with the swans, ducks, swallows, and seagulls that inhabit it.  It is peaceful and soothing to watch it flowing by.  All our experiences in the months we've been here have been peaceful, and so watching them recover a body was kind of jarring.  Society insulates us from death in most cases, which makes it worse when we do encounter it.

Monday we bought groceries for our quarantined missionaries.  The sisters here in Maribor had a few items they need to get through another week and we delivered those things first.  Then we drove to Ljubljana, again.

    The sisters in Ljubljana live in an apartment complex right across the street from a big mall that features a SuperSpar grocery store.  So we drove to the mall first, and bought groceries.  We had the sisters come meet us outside the mall (a very short escape from quarantine) to pick up their things.  Then we met the elders outside their apartment to pick up theirs and then we decided to treat ourselves to lunch atop the tallest building in Ljubljana.   It is an art deco building, built in the 1930's, and at that time the tallest building in Europe.  It has thirteen floors, numbered from 0 to 12 in the European fashion.

I took this selfie on the 3rd floor.  This steel spiral stair starts at the ground and only goes up to the 9th floor.  For several stories near the top, there is a matching spiral stair going all the way to the top of the building, but it is made of wood instead of steel and concrete.  That wooden spiral staircase is beautiful, with yellow lights illuminating each wooden tread.  This is looking down from the 11th floor.

   There is a restaurant on the top floor, but it's closed due to COVID-19, of course.  However, there is a bar on the penultimate floor that serves ham and cheese sandwiches, pressed in a hot press to toast it and the meat at one time.  We had a marvelous panoramic view of the city and here is the very best view of the castle:

What a magnificent place to fly some flags.   Other than that, the castle is just a shell, or so I hear.

Yesterday, we set out in the afternoon with a list of members we are supposed to visit and encourage.  We drove all over town, but, sadly, did not find a single one of them at home.  After we parked the car in its garage (a half mile from our apartment), we stopped at a restaurant for dinner, and I ordered a very typical slovene dish called, "Roasted Meat" or "Mixed Meat".

Starting from the top:  chopped onions;  Tomato puree (I think other veges are also in this - it is quite sweet);  Tomato and cabbage;  Pork chop (this one was overcooked);  a nice ham steak; frankfurters (slightly spicy, but tastes like American hot dogs);  The last two items are very, very common in Slovenia and are often served on skewers.  They are both made of beef and pork, chopped and mixed together (sold in the stores as hamburger) then either formed into hands or pressed into sausages (there are two of each on the plate, and they are my favorite).  Price for this dish?  6.20 Euros.

Transfers

We were fortunate to be able to get 8 new young missionaries into the Adriatic North Mission.   Three of them are now assigned to Slovenia.  Meanwhile four of our missionaries were going home.  We hated to see them go!  Of course, it is a good thing for them to return home, where they will become the leaders in their wards, and inspire another generation.  

    Sister Ashurst was especially certain that we should give them a send-off, and a welcome.  So, instead of letting the elders take our car down to Ljubljana for the transfers, we tagged along.  That caused some problem with luggage, but it let us host a policinka party at the Ljubljana church building.  Elder Miller is a good cook, and he actually cooked all the policinkas.  Everybody brought their favorite toppings, and we all ate more than we needed.  We gave M&Ms to the departing elders and sisters for airport snacks, and we got to know the new ones.

   Our plan had been to go down to Ljubljana for the party, then return to Maribor that night, but President Field thought that if we were going to go we should stay the night to ensure the car would be available when it was needed.  I found a  highly rated small guest house near the church, and we had the departing elders drop us off there.  Sister Perry loaned us her bus card so we could get to the meeting place on the morrow.

    The guest house was very unusual, but quite comfortable.

The sketch above the bed is of a Catholic priest who was born on this property.  The guest house is in what was the servants quarters and kitchens for the estate, while his birthplace is the large house next to it.  It is known as "VODNIK'S HOME"  We are not sure we got it quite right, because our hostess did not have great English.  But, apparently he a. wrote the first cookbook, or b. invented liver pate.    He is well known in the country, and he defined Slovenian cuisine.

In the morning we went down for breakfast, and there he was again.  The hostess said this woodwork is over 200 years old, but it has been wonderfully restored and polished.  The stones between the beams appear to be pumice, and she said they are from the river.  The reddish tiles are clearly custom-made.

   BTW, the food was amazing!  We have been eating the local cuisine since we arrived in the ANM, and have only one time been disappointed.  Forget France.  This is the place for fantastic food.

The pink wall behind Liz is done in colored stucco, including the white stucco that makes it look like a beams or trees.  The yellow wall that looks like stonework is also done only in stucco.  It is all wonderful workmanship.

This fireplace is next to the bar.  The upper entrance is a window into the kitchen, so the lower one must also be a construct.

The ceiling is inlaid with stones like cobblestone streets, but I am sure they are thin slabs glued in place.  But it is a wonderful effect.

I have been a little disappointed in the quality of the photos from my iphone, so I decided to get a good camera.  My good brother-in-law-in-law suggested that I get a Nikon D3500 like he has and I had been looking at sources and comparing prices for two weeks.   The best local price I could find was a store called Besenicar in Ljubljana, and they had some.  So, after breakfast we rode the bus downtown and found the store.  Sadly, they had just sold their last one.  Riding the bus was a little complicated because there was a basketball tournament going on in all the cities in the country (including Maribor) and they had closed a number of streets and set up temporary courts.  We were able to deal with it on the way to the store, but afterwards, we couldn't figure out where to catch our bus, because it had been diverted to an unspecified alternate route.  Finally, a friendly driver suggested we get on his bus and he'd drop us off at the right place.   That got us on track and we arrived safe and sound.

     BTW, we also talked to a police woman (quite handsome and very athletic-looking with broad shoulders) who was friendly and helpful, but didn't know even that the streets beyond us were closed.  Liz was quite taken with her, but I looked at the heavy pistol on her hip and thought, "That is not what anybody would call a girl gun!"   If I were a criminal, I think I'd go to somebody else's beat.  She exuded an air of competence.

   Through a strange combination of government agency confluence, the young Slovenian newbie missionaries were required to self-quarantine for two weeks by Slovenia, even though they had just completed two weeks of self-quarantine in Croatia.  All the companionships in Slovenia except in Celje have one newbie, which means that all their companions also have to self-quarantine because they have to remain within sight of each other.  And that means that Sister Ashurst and I have to support them by buying food for them.  They were able to visit a grocery store on their way to their apartments, and we plan to make a trip back to Ljubljana next weekend to buy whatever else they need and to give them some encouragement.  Meanwhile, they are working principally with Facebook to find people to teach, so they can be completely productive while isolated.

    Today, I located a Nikon camera like I want, in a store in the mall across the river and down-stream a ways from our apartment.  I am tired of waiting, so I decided to walk over there.  I got the last one at a store called Big Bang.  I paid 20 Euros more than I would have at Besenicar, but I have it in my hot little hands!  I took my backpack with me so I wouldn't have to carry a big box with bright advertisements all over that say, "I am a valuable camera and this old codger can barely hold me while hobbling along with his cane."  After I paid for it, while still in the store, I unboxed it and loaded all the pieces into my backpack.  

    I had walked over there on a pleasant, partly-cloudy day, but when I got to the exit door of the mall, it was pouring rain so hard I couldn't even see the river.  Fortunately, a mall is a nice place to wait out a storm, and I found a comfortable chair to sip a cold beverage and read emails.  After a while, the rain slacked off and I walked home on a pleasant, partly-cloudy day.  The hills surrounding Maribor conceal thunderstorms like that.  We just don't see them coming.

    The Nikon camera is a LOT more complicated than my iphone, but I am chipping away at it, with the help of a book I downloaded into my Kindle.  Here is a sample photo taken at extreme magnification through the bigger lense:

Taken at max magnification through my 300 mm lense from our apartment window.  I'm blaming the rainy window for any blurriness.  These swans were mid-river.

The Julian Alps - Part II

Lake Ravinh is not as commercial as Bled.  There is no significant town at the edge of the lake, but there is a narrow bridge.  There were lots of people looking over the edge of the bridge, though, so we went over and looked.  As we approached the bridge I looked down and there were hundreds of these fish.  They look like trout, and they were not very large - more like what we used to call "planters".

The signs say there are several kinds of trout, including the large lake trout, salmon, catfish, and pike in the lake.  From the bridge we saw the larger fish.

Again, there were hundreds of them in the clear water, all across the bridge, which spans the place where the lake flows out into the Ravinh Sava River.  I've never seen anything like it before, but my guess is that the fish wait for food to be swept out of the lake.  Easy pickings will draw them.

    The morning was cloudy with periods of rain, sometimes heavy, but as the day warmed up it cleared off and we began to see the Alps.

You can rent boats here, but we chose to take the cable car to a nearby mountain peak for a better view of the mountains.

This is looking back down at Lake Ravinj.  The bridge is at the cluster of buildings at the top-right corner of the lake.

Here is the mountains soaring over the lake.  The highest peak is Triglev (three peaks) which is the highest point in Slovenia.  It is 2864 meters (about 9,400 feet) high but keep in mind the coast is only 30 miles away.  Here is a telephoto shot:

Not bad for a cellphone camera, yes?  At the right, just above the clouds is a little white square.  It is a hikers hut where people who want to climb Triglev spend the night.  It is said to be about 6 hours to the peak and back from the hut.  Our past mission president, wife, and friends climbed it a couple of years ago, got caught when rain clouds moved in, and felt it was miraculous they all made it back alive.

At the top of the cable car ride, there are hiking trails and things to do and see.

There is a legend of a goat/ibex/chamois with golden horns and magical healing powers.  The story is quite complex, so you should google "goldhorn" to get it.

  But, the view is what the ride up there is all about, except during skiing season.  There was a reminder of the former communist status of this country.

Back on the valley floor we checked into our next hotel (remember, we were scouting locations, as well as activities, for the conference), and enjoyed the flowers and beauty of the area.

This was our hotel.  Our room was under the slope of the roof and it is the one with an open skylight.  The photo might look like the mountains are off in the distance, but I walked to the road just beyond the house beyond the hotel and was at the edge of that sheer mountain-side.  It is maybe 50 yards away.

  Looking the opposite way, the highest point on that mountain is the cable-car house.

Here are a few more photos of our trip.

Liz loves the flower boxes in the windows.  They are everywhere in Slovenia.

More flower boxes

This hotel just looks like a beautiful place to stay.  How could it not be great with a tower like it has, and a name like ADORA?

There are many, many tunnels in Slovenia, but not so many that are hand cut like this little one.