Beautiful Bled

                                            On The Road Again

       I like water more than most people but it was good to be on terra firma again. You can actually feel the ground(?) shift in Venice underneath you. The first night we were at a reataurant and I felt I was still flying, my body was shifting up and down. Lynda thought her vertigo had come back but Giorgio reassured us that sometimes the grounds shift depending on the tides etc. Today we traveled by rental car to Slovenia.
       Before I write about our second country,Slovenia, I need to tell you about rest stops in Italy along the autostrada. They are cultural experiences in their own way. To go to the bathroom you are expected to donate a small sum of your choice to use the toilet. This pays for the ladies who clean. Early in my travels to Italy you would have to pay for toilet paper or you couldn't use it. Think of the implications of not paying. The toilets are in the basement of the rest stops. On the first floor these places have cafes, sell beer and wine(and grappa), pastas, salamis, sandwiches to go and all sorts of games for kids to play in the car and gifts to take home. Sometimes foreigners would even offer to wash your windows for you.
       We left a country in which we are comfortable with the language to one we have to guess at words. Fortunately so far we have come across people who speak English. The TV in our 5 room apartment, a 42 inch flat screen, is filled with English-speaking programs with Slovenian sub-titles. That's one way they have been socialized into the English culture. By the way our apartment which has a view of an ancient castle on a hill overlooking the lake at Bled costs us 70 Euro a night. After Venice, that's dirt cheap.(no pun intended on the dirt versus water metaphor)

High above Lake Bled

       The Lake is beautiful and the island on the lake is quaint with an old church on it.

The Island with the Church

Tomorrow I hope to convince my wife to walk around the lake(6 km.), row out to the island and tour the castle. What are my chances she'll do all this?
       The lake is in the Julian Alps that border Austria. They still are capped with snow. One that we see from the lake is over 9000 feet high.

Snow-capped Alps

       To tempt her we walked into the town tonight and sat at a coffee bar by the lake and ate the specialty dessert of Bled, the Krema Rezina.

I had one myself!

Maybe with enough of these she'll make it around the lake. I heard that there are restaurants around the lake. Hopefully they'll serve the delicacy. I'll let you know how that turns out in my next posting.