September 25 (Day Thirteen)
This is a day for transitions. We have to check out of the Milano, switch cars at the Molo Bersaglieri, get our stuff into the new car, and make it to Ljubljana at a reasonable hour.
I was up working on my trip journal in the middle of the night before going back to bed, so I got a late start and Lindy was already in the breakfast room by the time I got downstairs. I was happy to find my buddy Stefano in the office, and he immediately wanted to help us again on the cars with his Italian intercession. His call to Avis to confirm our reservation ominously brought no recognition from them of anything but the cancelled one, so he put me online behind the front desk to try to pull down the actual voucher from Auto Europe (I had graduated from thief to associate). When he printed it, it turned out not to be Avis at all, but a completely other firm, EuroCar (not to be confused with Auto Europe), which, fortunately turned out to be on Molo Bersaglieri too. When he called EuroCar, however, to confirm, they had wrong date for our availability, the 26 th instead of the 25 th. t one point I was talking to Stefano in English and he was talking to EuroCar in Italnia, but the exchange got complicated enough that he suddenly turned the phone over to the present clerk, the woman who checked us in the night before. Forceful and decisive, she negotiated a mid-day pickup (at 14:00 rather than the next morning).
“She speaks better English than you?” I wondered aloud afterwards.
“Everyone here speaks better English than me,” he sighed.
Now he and I head across the lobby to the bar to have our drink; only it is not exactly a bar and we wouldn’t have drinks at 9 in the morning anyway, so it is coffee for him, mint tea for me—plus more conversation.
It turns out that Stefano’s story is more complicated than the frustrated desire to be in publishing. The Milano was started by his great grandfather in the 1920s and is now run by his uncle. He was interested not only in literature but medicine, in fact to the extent that he completed 34 of 52 hours of medical school before dropping out and coming to work here as the manager. When I tried to ascertain if he was returning to medical school anytime soon to finish, he said, ”Too bad, no; this is my career now. It is the family business.”
I tell him about my own family’s involvement in the hotel business beginning around the same world era. Like Stefano’s family, the Grossingers launched their enterprise in the early part of the twentieth century and expanded during the Depression. My father wanted me to go into the hotel business, so I worked for him one summer during college before escaping for good. Grossinger’s was a full thousand-acre resort, much larger than the Milano, but at least the Milano is still a going concern. Grossinger’s slid from its pinnacle to crash in bankruptcy in the mid-eighties.
It is a striking if asymmetric parallel in our lives. I offer to send him my memoir that includes the story my family and history of their hotel; he promises to try to read it. (To show how much can get lost in translation: he assumed we were returning to the States and then coming back to Trieste and he wanted me to bring my book with me—even though I had told him a number of times we were headed to Slovenia and then Frankfurt.)
We then discuss getting together in October when we return; he reiterates that he would like to take us on a tour of the castle.
After our tete a tete, I had first thought to go to Molo Bersaglieri to make sure we had a car, then come back, get the Elf, and return it to Hertz while picking up the new car. I considered at least getting the paperwork done for the second car before returning the first so we wouldn’t get stuck without transportation. But now that our reservation is confirmed, I feel we can condense the exchange to one trip, driving to the Molo and leaving the Elf at Hertz before picking up the new vehicle. In fact, we can eat lunch in town after leaving off the Elf and before getting the Eurocar. That way we do not either have to walk the mile again into town or find parking there while we eat.
With that in mind, we put our bags in storage, hang out at the Milano till near lunchtime, and take the Elf toward the Molo Bersaglieri. The streets flow perfectly into the waterfront drive, and we are there in no time (the wharf juts into the Gulf just off the central piazza). It is hard to imagine a rental cars on a pier, but a walk along the concrete into the Gulf reveals an airport-like string inside a big swinging door near the end: all three companies that we know about and no more. The cars clearly must be elsewhere.
Here Italy confounds our plan. We miss the lunch deadline at Hertz by five minutes, and now the office is on siesta till 15:00. Luckily, though, we found a legal blue rectangle for parking the car right in front of the wharf, so we leave it there and set out to hunt down the restaurant recommended by Paolo, the one that we couldn’t find the night before: Citta Pisoni, supposedly on a small street between Via Della Pescheria and Via San Sebastiano.
On the map the intersection looks very close to the Molo, but the same tangle of crisscrossing streets in between that defeated us the night before defies both our maps. As we are walking past La Piazzetta, the restaurant we ultimately settled for the previous night, Lindy decides to stop a young woman with a baby carriage. Not only does she know Citta Pisano, she happens to be going in that direction and will revise her route to lead us right to it. We walk together and chat. A kindergarten teacher (we collaborate for a while to find the English name for her job) with a six-month old in the stroller, she is the one who tells us that La Piazetta is only for tourists; Citta Pisano, she says, is far better, a place that locals like, hardly ever any tourists.
It looks like nothing from the outside, a drabness that probably is intended. The old man behind the counter stares at us for almost an hour; a few of the elderly partrons do too, especially after I take out the laptop. We need to spend about two hours here all told, so we will take our time. We order some vegetable soup each and then I ask for spaghetti with tomato sauce, the most bare-bones dish, you’d think, one could get in an Italian restaurant. We were hoping it wouldn’t come too soon but hadn't considered it mght take forever. Once a spaghetti-less hour had passed after the removal of empty soup bowls, with us reading and trading the laptop back and forth, we began to be concerned about the trajectory of the day and getting to Ljubljana before nightfall. We could see into the kitchen at counter level behind translucent glass, just hands working on dishes, and there was no spaghetti on the horizon, though the brazenly bare-handed preparation of food did give me a moment’s pause.
Lindy tried to summon the waiter, but he avoided direct contact (he barely spoke English anyway) and kept holding up two fingers. It certainly didn’t mean two minutes, and there was no obvious measure between minutes and hours. Maybe it was really two minutes, but he kept renewing it. Finally, at nearly 14:00 my dish arrived. It couldn’t have been simpler—plain spaghetti noodles, with a gob of tomato sauce in the middle for mixing in with the noodles, nothing else. Yet it tasted amazingly good. I have never cooked noodles so perfectly firm, neither soft nor hard. Lindy shared the plate, and then we vamoosed out of there, briefly back to the Piazza Dell’Unitá d’Italia where Paolo told us there was wireless. Despite the lateness of the hour I was wanting to send our stacked-up emails and pull down messages off the server.
We sat in different parts of the piazza, but either there was some configuration problem or I did not know how to get wireless in these circumstances because in all parts of the piazza different free wireless networks (no password required) showed on the “location” screen, but none of them worked. The computer would grind away and each time generate the message that I was not configured for an automatic connection.
We walk back to the Molo, down along the side of the building into the auto zone. There we wait for the woman at Eurocar to finish a conversation. She seems about nineteen and is a lot more interested in her cell than us, talking to "friends" intermittently while slowly filling out our form. Her phone keeps playing its catchy tune and she keeps answering it, so we make very slow progress. We will, however, be out of there before the Hertz guy returns from siesta (the Eurocar lady says he is always very late), so she shows us how to leave the keys and paperwork for him in an unmarked box, something for which there are absolutely no instructions anywhere in the vicinity of the Hertz window.
We get into her car and are driven a mile or two further along the waterfront to a lot. She points to our new vehicle, a tiny blue Alpha Romeo. Then she stands over Lindy, issuing instructions, watching her start the car, and answering questions about the parking brake, lights, and so on. Her favorite English word, like Esperide’s, is tonal variations of “exactly.” After she leaves, we have to figure out how to exit the lot, as a truck is blocking the only path.
“Kaput,” the driver says to Lindy when she remonstrates, and he throws out his hands at the hood under which he is at it with a screwdriver.
Better to make a gradual U, go around the circle counter to its directional arrows, and try to squeeze between his rear and a parked truck than to try right there to get through the narrower space between his front and another parked truck. Probably there’d be a fist fight by now in America—three trucks collectively all but blocking the only exit and entrance to a busy lot, the pivotal one being worked on by a guy with seemingly no sense of urgency, whistling as he alternately puffs the hell out of a cigarette, drinks a beer, and taps his screwdriver idly here and there—but things are cool and people make do.
It’s back past the train station, up on the curb alongside the Milano, scuse, scuse again to the throngs, pay the bill, get the luggage, say a fond farewell to Stefano, promise to visit the castle with him in a week or so, whip around the corner, hang a left on Via Corolneo, an extension of Via Milano—and we are headed toward the border. Wow!
We ascend quickly through the suburbs of Trieste and out of town. To our left the entire metropolis sweeps out toward the sea, “a view to die for,” Lindy says. It is dramatic, almost iconic, the Mediterranean standing in for seaports everywhere, for spaceship Earth. This is where the UFO should land if it wants to send back one picture of sapient habitation, on this hill overlooking Trieste and the Adriatic gulf. But the vista is soon gone, and we are moving through hilly countryside, coming quickly to the border at Firente.
It is like a glorified toll plaza, as most borders are. Italy-Slovenia was one of the less rigid of the hard borders during the Cold War under Tito’s liberal regime, anyway and now it is softer than U.S.-Mexico. Some wry policemen look at our passports, cut up a bit, and we are waved through. The landscape, both human and natural but mostly human, mutates dramatically. We have seen rolling hills in Italy, but these are wooded and look like Oregon or Colorado. They do not sign themselves as European most of the time. When they do identify that we are not in the Pacific Northwest, it is by little villages and cantons that look Swiss or Austrian and somewhat mediaeval, large stone houses with clean rectilinear styles: lots of perpendicular lines, a tendency to high first floors and wraparound balconies and flower-boxes. Bony cows in small groups look individual enough to have personalities; they are not transgenetic cows but creatures from old children’s books that should have names and speak Slovenian if not English.
Mostly, it is rush just being here. We feel our journey shooting out behind us like a jet contrail. We have surged across Italy, one end to the other, all the way to its corner at Trieste, and now we have climbed out of Trieste, over the mountains, into eastern Europe. The license plates are mostly SLO, with a majority of sequences of numbers and letters beginning LJ for our destination. The language on road signs has turned Slavic and, by comparison to Italy, the words don’t have any friends, false or otherwise; the unfamiliar letter combinations and accents don’t get you even close to a sense of how things are supposed to sound, let alone what they mean. Lots of Hungarian and Serbian trucks barrel along with us.
Ljubljana is less than sixty miles away when we begin picking up road signs at ninety kilometers. A giant stony mountain sits menacingly to the left, but we will not have to cross it—the road bends away.
Don Edwards doing Western songs on the CD player, providing a counterpoint to the Colorado-like landscape, Lindy heralds it as her most ecstatic moment of the trip so far—it feels free and radical. I don’t mean that our journey has been strenuous or daring in any major sense, but the full import of what we have taken on is exciting. We are beyond Italy, and Italy was famously hard to drive across. We are in a country that we barely heard of ten years ago, the northernmost province of Yugoslavia. Just the idea of having gotten ourselves into Slovenia and driving its highway is enough for delight—novelty of scenery and concept and fulfillment of goal. Our path is across Eurasia. The trip has taken on a shape because it has a trail. We can look back to Torino and Siena and see the figure we are tracing.
The signs for Ljubljana get very low, like 6 kilometers, with no indication at all of a city, so I pull out the map just in time, as the road divides, and I tell Lindy, bear left toward where a big sign lists only Ljubljana, not Ljubljana and Zagreb. We then make a guess as to which Slovenian word means “center city” and follow its signs—but it was clearly the wrong choice, as soon we are on the streets of a small village with stone houses that look at once unreal and all too real. The scenery feels like Prague of our 1993 trip to Europe but also has an ambiance of the Navaho Indian reservation 1966 with its small hogan villages. Houses seem like individual stone huts, set apart, each one fabulous in an ordinary sort of way. All those Slavic letters on everything create a feeling that is slightly extraterrestrial or a destination of time travel.
As it is much too rural, Lindy stops and asks a woman in the street. I expect the worst in terms of language, but what we get back is almost perfectly English, not only from the first woman but a second one whom the first calls over, as they debate the best way to dispatch Anglophonic neophytes from here into their city. They decide we should retrace our steps, take a left, then another left, drive for a while, and ask directions again. We do that and, after two more course corrections with pedestrians, the streets are beginning to look like any old European city, quite a bit smaller and more open than, say, Amsterdam but part of the same general continent.
This landscape is more comforting than the villages we first hit off the highway, as it is likely to present our hotel. We come down a sort of main street of big department stores and Soviet-era institutional buildings with a few Trieste-like majestic apartments before we are baffled again. At a red light I shout to a young woman biker, “Hotel Park?” She ponders how to direct us and then says to go right at the corner, wind with the street and, after a while, ask someone. We follow her course, and the next girl we query gives us another set of complicated directions. Before we are done with those, we are seeing signs for Hotel Park.
Because traffic is heavy—stop and start—I take out the laptop and begin playing with it. I am mainly looking for the phone number of our contact here, novelist and screenwriter Miha Mazzini, but I am curious to see if any networks show under “location.” To my surprise, there are wireless sites everywhere, some of them free, so as we drive along, I keep hitting the rescan button, hoping that we will stop somewhere long enough for me to get online and send and receive. Yet, we keep moving along a hair too fast, so it’s always “rescan” at the next stop.
Lindy has plenty of signs now, so she doesn’t need my participation on the map. I am totally involved in chasing networks as she turns into Tabor Street and starts backing into a parallel space alongside a park. A network is coming in—Netgear—and I hope it configures okay and we don’t move out of range. All of a sudden, new emails are pouring in, even as we are still maneuvering into the space. In the combined excitement of arrival and computer success, I decide to stay in the car while she walks down the street to see about our room.
There is a story about the Hotel Park, and I will have to backtrack in order to tell it. Miha Mazzini is the author of a novel Guarding Hanna, which Lindy and I have been reading the last week with dueling bookmarks that keep passing each other. We are now both around page 90, a third of the way through. Our friend Roger Conover, editorial director at MIT Press, who lives outside Portland, Maine (remember our stop in Freeport en route to Logan Airport), gave us this old (2002) galley of it back in July when we passed through his town for lunch, but we were collecting lots of books then and did not focus on it. As early as mid-July, in fact far earlier than that, we planned to visit Slovenia during our trip to Europe, in order to take his partner Eda up on her offer to stay in her apartment in Ljubljana if and when we went.
Now you may remember that in Freeport on our way Logan, in place of the apartment Roger and Eda offered contact with a couple, Miha, a Slovenian novelist and screenwriter, and Eda’s best friend, Irena. However, I did not connect that information to Guarding Hanna until we were on the trip. Luckily we had the galley with us, and I had read maybe forty pages by Lucca. Foreseeing the approaching meeting with Miha, Lindy picked it up in Lucca and immediately passed me. Then we took to sharing the copy.
This novel was published in English by Scala House, a small press in Seattle, one of several novels of Miha’s that have been successful in Slovenia but not so much so outside. In fact, he sold 57,000 of one, The Cartier Project, an incredible number, especially for a literary work in a country of only two million.
Guarding Hanna is set in contemporary Berlin. It is quite a remarkable book. The main character and narrator, identified only passingly as Dogsbody, is presented as a horribly deformed, hairy man who was left at an orphanage at birth and distinguished himself there by acts of vandalism and violence, including biting off two fingers of a blind boy trying to feel his face. He is later recruited by a gang patriarch for whom he does odd jobs while keeping himself hidden from most of humanity except prostitutes whom he pays for terrifying theater but not actual sex in a darkened room (he requests, for instance, that they feel his hairy face and boarlike teeth under the threat of their hands being bitten off or his gnawing into their bodies).
Then he is asked by his boss, Maestro, to guard Hanna, a witness to a crime, whose testimony is needed to save his son from jail. As Dogsbody has avoided contact with humans thus far, the necessarily close contact with Hanna has a huge effect on him.
The novel is primarily about Dogsbody’s emerging inner life, as he experiences for the first time how normal people go about their days. Highly intelligent but utterly misanthropic, fundamentally alienated, disdainful of all human activity as folly, Dogsbody begins to live his life through Hanna and discovers unknown and gentler parts of himself.
It is not a horror tale but a delicate awakening wrapped in an ugly, sometimes vicious exterior. Dogsbody has been made who he is by circumstance; he has become a fixture in a world of degradation and crime because he has known no other, but now a new self is emerging, and he is discovering, to his horror and wonder, that he is human, not animal. The text has almost the reverse feeling of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, in this case an animal gradually awaking to find himself a man.
The writing is not either Lindy’s or my usual sensibility, but we both love the book. It is beautifully composed, and its wry wit comes through in translation. Both the actions and perceptions of the narrator are original, Beckett-like, and provide an offbeat context for the modern world, as we see our civilization through Dogsbody’s eyes.
Miha has also been a lively email correspondent during our trip. At Roger’s suggestion we asked him for help in booking us a room at the Grand Union Hotel, which Roger portrayed as expensive only by Slovenian standards. When Miha does so and the hotel emails us back that the cost will be almost 200 euros or more than $250 American per night, I abort the reservation and ask for another option.
Miha’s response is: “Richard, I don't get it—you choose GRAND HOTEL, the most expensive place in the country? Of course it's expensive, it was meant and built for this! I'll call around and find some other options in the center of the town.”
I am embarrassed by this misunderstanding, but spending money on luxury hotels is not a good use of our resources. Having survived L’arancia in Lucca, we do not need to blow our budget on the Grand Union. In any case, Miha writes back moments later to suggest Hotel Park. It is a third the cost, so we jump at it.
In a subsequent email, Roger is disappointed by our thrift: “Personally, I would stick with the Union. There is no comparison between it and the Park, and any of the other options I would not recommend … you'd be driving into town as opposed to stepping out of the hotel and being in the middle of everything you want by foot…I’d pay the extra and stay at the Grand Union.”
Miha and I continued to correspond as we move across Italy. He remarkably set up a reading for me in Ljubljana and has proposed other things we could do together. At one point he wrote of Hotel Park: “BTW, I once spent there 6 months; their top 2 floors are cheap and reserved for the people in marriage trouble; it's full of men with one suitcase, staring out of windows deciding between jumping and getting drunk. On Sundays they walk around in their best clothes holding their children—daddies for few hours. You're tourists, you won't see this. If they will want to put you above 10th floor, grab Lindy by the hand and start screaming ‘I'm married, you see, I'm married!’ And Lindy will look at you coldly and say: ‘Take the b******rd!’"
When Lindy returns to the car and says that Hotel Park is fine, I am also relieved. When I get inside the lobby, I see that it is essentially a college dormitory in a part of the city that turns out to be filled with dormitory-like buildings, many of them (we learn) for high-school students in from the sticks to do their education in the big city. One immediate curiosity: there are two elevators, and the first is for odd floors and the second for evens so, after we hasten into a crowded car, we are baffled to find no 6 on control panel. It takes a moment to solve, as neither of us has seen this sorting system before. We dash out just ahead of the closing doors and take the adjacent elevator.
Room 619 is spartan and small, but light streams in through its giant window, and the view of the turrets, steeples, and red roofs of the city beyond the institutional buildings is dramatic. The space is in fact curiously comforting with its bare-bones presentation—no decor, no carpet, sparse furnishings. Lindy and I do better in non-luxurious situations. We feel guilty in expensive hotels and restaurants, as though we don’t belong among such folks, the various new global royalties—and also there is a certain hubris to traveling high on the hog and pretending that the planet can sustain such luxury while most of the Earth is so poor. Hotel Park is right for us, simple and functional without drama or hoopla of any sort, filled with young and very old people—a room and a bed and a bathroom with a shower, plus a giant communal cafeteria. We score one of the few parking spaces for guests in the roundabout in front. And there is a free wireless spot half a block away.
While I am sitting on a curb, briefly doing email there, Miha shows up on his bike and calls Lindy in the room—so, as I am heading back on the sidewalk, I am startled to see them already coming toward me. He is a quite tall, stocky vibrant-looking, almost-bald guy, between ten or fifteen years younger than us, a bit of professor, radical artist, and pro screenwriter about him, a bit of avant-garde fierceness in his air too. He is like someone you’d meet in Hollywood or on the Berkeley campus. He is headed to karate practice but will meet us for a late dinner if we want to stay up. Yes, we do.
We agree to reconnect downstairs at 9:30, enough time for a quick nap.
He and Irena arrive on bikes and, as we walk in a fluid cluster toward the center of town and talk about the passing Ljubljana scenery. We also touch upon writing and publishing, Irina's job (editor of the magazine section of the largest newspaper in town), Miha’s bread-and-butter work (as computer consultant at the phone company—he is a programmer as well as a novelist), the difficulty of being a writer in the Slovenian language, a bit of bio (mostly me to him while Lindy and Irena walk separately, for he must introduce me the next night).
We start out on Vidovdanska cesta and then Trabarjeva cesta. My keyboard does not have most of the Slavic graphemics—the many circumflexes and accented consonants—so I won’t even try to reproduce those. This is a studenty commercial stretch, mildly resembling Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley but much quainter and cozier, more mom and pop in its businesses. Young people are everywhere, eating standing up, parking bikes, talking on cells, creating traffic jams while congregating on the street.
The walk has the sense of a fairy-tale, as though we are passing through a stageset of small lit cafés and shops closed at night. The sound of Slovenian in the air, a kind of light Italian Slavic to the ear, is magical also, as though a very offhand post-modern opera is going on around us in which the characters don’t really sing their parts but are performing roles in an epic blank-verse musical that has no stage or boundary.
The first restaurant candidate, which we reach fairly soon, is proposed and then just as quickly withdrawn by Miha as serving only potatoes. I say that would be okay by me.
“But I don’t eat potatoes,” he remarks.
We continue along this strip in active conversation. As we cross a major road, Resljeva, Miha dashes our brief love affair with Trieste, calling it “the saddest city in Italy.” When Lindy asks why, he says, “It is the only city in Italy with bad food, and the average age of the population is seventy.” This conflicts with the youth scene we saw in the streets, so Lindy mentions that. “Must all be Slovenians partying”: Miha’s response. Then Irena says that Trieste used to be a major shopping area for Slovenian kids as the closest site to get jeans, music, and the like, but no longer since Slovenia has become part of Europe and the Common Market. Miha continues in his critical vein: “Trieste used to be part of Slovenia anyway. Mussolini took it, and somehow in the final settlement Italy got it back. It is still the center of Italian fascism. It was really nothing until the Hapsburgs made it the port for Vienna.”
We come to three bridges right next to each other across the Ljubljanica River at a square marked Preservnov Trg graced by a large statue which Miha explains: it is the Slovenian national poet France Preseren being visited by the muse flying above him and bearing a bright gold leaf that she extends over his head. The collective spans are known as Tromostovje, the Triple Bridge, and they mark the center of town, are its favorite meeting place, Miha says, and then he points to the Grand Union Hotel, not far away. We share a laugh, as we see folks exiting in evening finery.
The bridges all have ornamental spires; the middle one is for cars; the other two are pedestrian. Bikes go on all three. They are very busy.
A large, old salmon-colored Franciscan church, Marijino oznanjenje cerkev, quietly oversees the square, its front painted with saints and inlaid statues, the words Ave, Grate Plena! inscribed on it in gigantic letters. Among the icons in little squares above the entrance is a Rosicrucian-style eye inside a triangle. It sometimes slips one's mind that Eastern Europe was more hermetic than Western before it slipped behind that fascist occult and iron curtains.
We turn here, cross one of the bridges, the pedestrian one, and then walk along the Ljubljanica on Petkovskov nabrezje beside the narrow river, almost a canal. Flanked by cafeterias and an interesting porticoed wall with boat landings and floating restaurants, it has somewhat the feeling of the Seine, though it is a mere fraction as wide. The lights and buildings from either side of the river reflect in the water's stillness to their vanishing point.
Miha points to a spiffy looking café, Zlata Ribica, and we take seats outdoors at a candlelit table. I can’t read the small English type below the Slovenian on the menu in this light, so Lindy takes it inside and orders for me too, mushrooms and noodles.
Our meal and conversation continue for another hour and a half, through dessert, ranging over a variety of topics, our life narratives mixed with discussion about Slovenia. While we are waiting for our food, Miha and Irena do a medley of tourist explanation around the theme that Slovenian culture has three main influences: Austria and Germany to the north, Italy toward the coast, and Hungary to the east. I ask where Ljubljana stands in this trio, and he declares as though I have remembered my cue in the script, “The meeting place of all three.”
Miha describes winning an audience award for a screenplay with only three votes because that’s how small Slovenian art-film audiences are. He says his programming job has a sanity time limit on it of five years, so Lindy asks how long he has been at it. “Five and a half.” He also explains how he will not translate my reading tomorrow but may have to translate my remarks for the director of the Writers’ Guild, who does not speak English.
“Unless he has learned since we last saw him,” Irena comments wryly.
I ask why so much English is spoken here compared to Italy, a country whose language is much closer to it. “Small countries and poor countries always speak English,” Miha explains. “In France and Italy, there is little English. In Slovenia or Portugal, you find English everywhere.”
We order desserts. At Miha’s suggestion Lindy and I share the Slovenian national dessert, a layered cake of poppyseeds, apples, walnuts, and cottage cheese, while they get an ice-cream-looking chopped-nut froth. Irena says that ours reflects the Hungarian influence on Slovenian cuisine. Both are very, very sweet.
Miha grandly takes the tab.
They walk us back along the river, pushing their bikes down the avenue until we see Hotel Park lit in the distance; then they hop on, and we split until 19:00 the next day when they will pick us up for my reading.\