Slovenia the real story - Pictures are fixed

So after a long road trip…. – stopping at a nice small town in germany (Reagenburg) we had a meal there after we meandered around the quiet town – stopping to gaze in stifled amazement at the church in the middle of the town, - it was similar in architecture to the sacred heart cathedral in Bendigo – I think that this one was a replica of the Bendigo cathedral – although this was built some 600 years before….    We left there after seeing a guy spaced out of his head at mcdonalds – very amusing and also saw the most famous bar in germany “Max’s bar” haha.
We got stopped at the border to get our passports checked, bought  our tax for the freeways – 90 euro a year or 20 for a month,  and through Austria we went. Mountains… mountains everywhere, Austria is 45% mountains and boy have they learned how to tunnel. Going through tunnel after tunnel, which quickly lost its novelty factor as took us away from our friends – the huge towering cliffs peering down at us.

We arrived in Slovenia and met Willim at the airport, although I first will give a more dewtailed background about what we were here for in Slovenia. We were going to play in the EPL league tournament against eastern European hockey teams.  We were offered paid fuel, paid expenses and a few tours around the area. As we all know you have to be registered(to play in a hockey team) for 3 months with the club to be able to play with the team. This of course had not been done as we were in Holland playing hockey. So after a long 13-14 hour drive – through the night, battling heavy eyelids and trying to deal with an over caffeinated funky, driving through a storm, but overall we were happy but tired with our road trip. So – when you meet someone that loves to talk, and talk crap at this, and he starts with “Do you want the good news or the bad news” I immediately knew that we had been shafted. So with multiple promises, 2 hours sleep each at best, we were in no mood to be lied to – again. I will give you a bit of history about Wilim, he has been basically kicked out of boxmeer club – we thought because of some people over reacting about him. But basically he is a manipulative old arrogant man. Or that was our impression for the first 3 days. The club in Slovenia can’t afford to pay him the money that he is collecting from them. But the sad thing about Slovenian hockey is that they don’t know any better. Cuth – think of Lou solero but older, and doesn’t know as much about hockey. So the reason that we didn't leave there and then was because (funky was going crazy in the front seat with him) – the thing that makes him so annoying is that he loves to talk – I did a test – he spoke continuously for 12 minutes, and I didn’t say a thing. No even a yes or a ah huh. So initially he said that the club was not going to pay for it, but he ended up coughing up a tank of fuel and 200 euro to cover our fuel to Slovenia. He put us up in a hotel (as the billeting out with the team was NEVER going to happen). It is similar to Indonesia – their entire family lives in the same house, incomes are low, the country has recently changed to the euro, so prices for everything has skyrocketed, and they are having the daily struggle of wages Vs cost of living.  For us, compared to western Europe, prices are cheap – food, drinks and accommodation is cheap. So we were hating it, we were being lied to on a consistent basis, with him blaming the Slovenian team.  I can’t describe how uncomfortable it was to have the guys not know what we were doing there.  The day we arrived we went to see the guys play, they weren’t very good at all, - lets say our seconds would have beaten them 3-1 (maybe this year 4-0) but they had 1 or 2 good players. I want to tell a small detailed story about when we were at the ground there. We went back to the club house (this was an away game) and had a drink (he paid) and then he was asking for money to the captain in front of us. (for our fuel!!) we had no idea that this wasn’t organised. He hadn’t even confirmed that we would get paid!! We felt so so bad, 200 euro for these guys is 2 weeks wage, so it was horrible. Then to top it off, two guys came over and came us a plate of food…. They were visibly not happy that we were there. We left that place quite annoyed… Not knowing the guys at all yet, not having any information but the lies that we were fed to get us there. But enough about that guy – we had a night sleep and the next day we were in better spirits as we were going to be taken around.. So he had organised that we were going to a winery to taste some wines, and we had the morning/afternoon off. We got picked up by one of the players…. and went through some lovely countryside to a winery on top of a hill.


At this stage we were certainly sure that we were not going to the tournament in Bratislava (we knew we were not playing – but he was trying to “clarify this issue” with the Slovenian board – piss off… we knew he was lying.  The winery and the guy that took us there were really nice, (double meaning there – thankyou English)  and we went into a celler and tasted 5-6 wines and had them explained in hugarian and in English haha. We went back and had our first training session. To paint the picture of awkwardness, I was introduced as “head coach” .. ffs. The nerve!! He had not bothered to learn the guys names in slovenian, so he had given them nicknames such as “running horse” and “peacock”  or just NUMBER 23…. Come on… How demeaning. So the first thing I did was try and remember as many names as I could, thank goodness for my teacher name memory… Anyway, they loved my training session, it was easy to identify things that they didn’t have, and give them drills to fix it. 2 and ½ hours and they were much better.
 
An interesting note – he was hired speaking English and german, but 25% of the guys could speak English. So I immediately had Dyan (the captain) translate while I spoke. Made so much of a difference. Very strange, but so powerful as a communication tool. I would like to be a translator – dunno if I want to put in the effort to learn a language well enough to translate properly.  So we went to the pub afterwards and explained our point of view – they started to change a little, and knew that we were not attached to willim. Phhew. 

The next day we went to the Slovenian caves, they were about 2 hours away, they were pretty amazing, but expensive to get into – but he was paying so it was all good. 22 euro each *3 plus tea and lunches. I feel bad to be only wanting a free trip here, but the way he treated us was nothing short of atrocious, abysmal,  horrendous, staggerin – you get the picture. We were meeting another player (Alish) at 4.00 in Ljubiana and he was going to give us a tour. Well – no tour as we were way late cause he can’t read a GPS – he knows better, and he was too busy talking to the gps he missed the turnoff.. (I am serious) and we had a game against the girls which we were going to play with the girls against the guys. Should be fun. (fast forward 3 hours) we are not at the game yet, we arrived at 7.30 for a 7.00 game, the girls coach didn’t want us playing for them, (not organised) and the guys were smashing the girls. Willim walked onto the pitch midgame blowing his whistle(like 4-5 times)… My goodness… it was so awkward. We had 22 players looking at us thinking – we were playing a game, what the hell. I refused to go on the guys team, and Andrew went on after a bit, and willim continued to try and override decisions that the girls coach made while umpiring, yelling at his players, walking over to us and not watching the game, strutting around -  dripping with arrogance. It was a pitiful display, especially considering that he was 15 minutes late to the game, because he refused to buy a tax pass for the freeway because “the club should  pay for it” come on… it’s 15 euro ish and he was getting 300 euro a week…  This continued to the point where the girls coach blew a fuse and began his rant, yelling pointing and abusing us/him/the guys players and called the game off – despite the protests of his own team. If the decision to go to the tournament hadn’t been made, it had been concreted and nailed shut. We went for drinks….

Wild Strawberries!

The next day we were given a real treat, Tina the travel agent we had met 2 days before was coming with us. This had a twopronged effect. 1) He would talk to her, not so much us. 2) We would be able to have someone show us around the area. Our first destination was a castle – which was the biggest in Slovenia – pretty nice, about 600 rooms, but not like the medieval castles that you see on TV. We then were going to go to the triangle of Hungary, Austria and Slovenia. – Willim took a wrong turn (against Tina’s advice) and we ended up on a muddy road with us slipping around everywhere on a narrow road with quite steep embankments on either side. I wasn’t scared as any plunge off the side would have ended the incessant babbling that we were enduring, and there were multiple trees on the edge to prevent the tumble – rolling and catapulting glass everywhere and would have inevitably ended in an explosion (well in the movies anyway- cars are designed not to explode).

Tina had an appointment at 12. We missed it. So we went to have some traditional food of Slovenia. On the drive back we had had enough of his talking, and we started just telling him to pull his head in. The picture changed, - we had started the day before, but with another person here it was easier. Anyway the food we had was AMAZING. We had mushroom soup – but it came in a breadbowl!! The bread was so delightful. Lezat… You ate the bread out of the bowl, and then you eat the bowl. “Nothing more satisfying then at the end of the meal then seeing nothing but a table” haha. But there was more, we had a dish that was pork – but it was nothing like the pork at home, it was melt in your mouth stuff, it was mixed with some sort of potato stuffing conglomerated with mushrooms, spices and something else I couldn’t quite put my finger on. The other dish was pork wrapped in bacon, with stuffing that was not so good. But the bread was so delicious. 

That evening we were supposed to have a tactic session and some short corners. We gave them all our short corners that we think that they could master – about 2 hours of short corners, and they were doing them quite well. I hope they do well.

The evening finished with drinks back at the hotel. It was such a nice evening, we had finally got willim to stop talking, the other guys were there. We were supposed to be there for tactics that willim was running. But the guys had 40 minute bike ride, and had to go home to their families… GRR so I ran it -  not that it bothered me too much, it’s what I do. Within about 3-4 minutes of talking about things, they were crowding around looking like I was talking about how to create a potion that would cure old age, it was amazing, (they were asking all sorts of questions about hockey, positioning etc –)… even with a translator. It is moments like that which made me glad I came to Slovenia, we were there to help out the guys as much as we could  – not to help out an annoying arrogant old man. That being said, the more we were there, the more I think he got the message that we didn’t want to talk ( I mean listen haha) the whole time we were there. After that night we would have gone to the tournament with them if we had of been asked by someone less annoying. The next morning was leaving day, we took off to the travel agency to find a place in bled – a lakeside town in the northwest of Slovenia. We couldn’t find a place there, so we went further to another lake in Bhinj. It was amazing. The lake was surrounded by mountains, and once again we had our mountain friends looking down at us.  Driving along the river was so cool, the blue crystal clear waters rushing next to the road with trees and green foliage everywhere..  We were not treated with very good weather when we arrived, rain, rain and rain. But we toughed it out and trekked up into the mountains for a waterfall, pretty easy walk up to it, there was a fair volume of water churning over it – probably because this time of month there is the snow melting from the mountains. We came back to our hotel – very nice by the way (22 euro a night) and I started looking at where the hell we were going to go because we had no plans now.  Mark wanted to go to Venice but after a brief look most of the cheap places were booked out. I was reading about Switzerland (which sounds amazing) and we eventually (after many hours of research) found a place to stay in a town close by Venice, and we will look through Venice for a few hours. I have this hangup about Italy, I don’t know if it because that they don’t speak English very much, or because of my experience with the trains in Sardinia, but there is something about the place that I don’t like so much (and I haven’t been there yet). Some of you might be saying – what! Venice in a few hours? Well.. yes. I will tell you what happens soon.  That night I went to bed late, but I wanted to get up early and go for a run, I was tossing up do I? Don’t I? and I asked myself – would I rather 1 hour of sleep or a run around a gorgeous lake, I chose the latter, and I got to see the lake in the morning sun with clear skies ( I don’t know what happened to the rain, it was supposed to rain all week) It was such a cool experience, jogging alongside this lake with huge mountains right on top of it, mirror reflection waters to the point where the mountains looked as if they had detached from their perch and wanted to join the lake in its beauty. I wish the other guys had of got out of bed early enough to come with me, but they sleep so much more than me. I got back feeling so much better, tired now as I write this in the car on the way to Italy, but nothing a few coffees in Venice can’t fix :-)

So I think we have learnt a bit in this trip to Slovenia, I was trying to get them to make the most of things, even when we learnt that everything was a lie and funky wanted to skip town in the middle of the night. It turns out that we met some wonderfully kind and friendly people, had some excellent foods and saw some breathtaking scenery.  Were we too trusting? Maybe… But we did get everything paid for – food, drinks, tourist attractions, accommodation etc..  I’ll put this is the “experience” box...



I thought I would add this photo in - note the mirror aspect.