Roughly seven hours after departing my hotel in Bologna I arrived at my destination, Villa Rosa, in Slovenia.  The bus stop was right outside the front door of the hotel, and for one euro I was dropped at the Bologna Central train station.  A very large train station at that.  

 

Fortunately I had the intuition that my pronunciation of Italian cities might  be a bit off and wrote down the name of my destination city, Gorizia, for the ticket agent.  Although I’m giving Italiano my best effort, lack of vocabulary iced with my gentile southern (Indiana) English dialect has fortunately net me a response in at least broken English everywhere I go.  

 

Oddly enough I find myself peppering these attempts with a “Bueno” or “C’est bon?” here and there.  What the heck?  I don’t speak Spanish or French either, I quickly remember as I am answered in one or the other.

 

While on the five hour train ride I pulled out what we who own bigger SLR cameras call our spy cameras, meaning small  point and shoot cameras, and did some drive-by-shooting from the train.  

 

 

I was particularly taken by what I believe are cypress trees as they stand in rows dotting the countryside.

 

I’ve always been fascinated by the juxtaposition of the old and the new when they spontaneously appear together in a landscape.  I saw several fields of freshly mown hay, in the  classical round bales of our painting forefather impressionist’s vistas, but behind this particular one I noted a fairly new BMX bike course. (This one’s for you Keaton.)

 

The next photo did not come out very clear (drive-by-shooting after all), but this sea of yellow is the sole sunflower field I saw and gasped “oh… sunflowers” as I excitedly positioned the camera for the shot.  

It was at that point that I found it necessary to try to convince my seat mate that I was not crazy, just an artist.  She fully understood.  She asked me to be sure and tour other parts of her fair country and not leave with the impression that the flat farmlands between Bologna and Venice were all that Italy had to offer.  I assured her, as an artist, I see more than just what she felt was uninspiring.

 

My hostess warned me that it was cheaper to take a bus for one Euro to cross the border from Gorizia, Italy, to Nova Gorizia, Slovenia as a taxi driver will charge double for “crossing” just because they can and not for any real reason.  As part of the European Union they are not really considered borders.  I found it a bit of a challenge reading the bus schedules, which I’m sure would be complex if it was in your native tongue.  Alas, I found the lone “International” schedule with a bus arriving momentarily to aid in my border crossing.  

 

Imagine my surprise when the bus station in Nova Gorizia completely closed down.  No windows for ticket sales, no restaurant or newsstand activity.  Empty.  Me, all by my self in this rather large closed down station at 2:00 on a Saturday afternoon.  I finally found a tiny corner door with an information symbol on it and two guys standing outside speaking in yet another language that was all new to me.  I pulled out the page I had printed from my destination’s website – thank goodness I thought to do that – and showed it to him and asked “Train? Taxi?”  He said there was not a train to my destination village today and pointed across a small park to a taxi.  We laughed that it was not like New York where you just wave and whistle until one stops (he did speak English, I didn’t suddenly acclimate to the Slovenian language).  

 

Fortunately, the taxi driver was available and happy to take me to the village of Branik, where I am staying.  He didn’t speak any English and will undoubtedly have quite a laugh with his family this evening as he tells of the American tourist who sat with her head hanging out the window.  You see, I have a severe allergy to car deodorizers.  It starts with a little ping in my forehead and evolves into a nightmare of a migraine.  As I had already used half of the migraine kit I packed for just such an occasion, I did not want to lose another day because of said deodorizers.  So I just did what dogs do and put my head out the window and enjoyed the fresh Alpine air.

 

With a view like this, I enjoyed every breath.

 

 

 

 

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Tags: artist, inspiration, Slovenia, sunflowers

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 4th, 2009 at 3:33 PM and is filed under Journey Notes, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.