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.