the sLOVEnia triangle (123/365b)

we extended our rental car agreement so we didn't have to drive 3.5 hours home today, and instead drove 4.5 hours to slovenia! hoorah for seeing my sister's family. the morning hours were of course packing. zsolt's family left pretty early in the morning, especially considering we were still swimming around in the lake at 2:30am this morning and brian drove them to the train station. we looked around for missing things, and packed our stuff pretty slowly. henry was being a wonderfully special help, and ran around checking drawers and other potential "hiding places" until one of those very tall very cheap empty ikea wardrobes fell on him and broke his sunglasses and thankfully didn't break his head. that slowed things down - i just lay there and held him for a while, mostly just scared.

we gave the kids the rest of our florints since we can't use then for anything else anyways, and they went down to the corner store and bought rice cakes. they could have bought anything, and that's what they chose.

after checking out, theodore and i stopped to play "on the waves of lake balaton" (a piece from a gypsy violin book that we had serendipitous found the day before we left for lake balaton and that centa had magically scanned and sent to us)

see? i said i would go to the lake to drink my coffee this morning

the drive felt long. i didn't drive - i was too tired. and right at the end there was some fighting. we listened to some gypsy music and some fiddle music, but the rental car uses usb mp3 player and the songs have to be just so. i couldn't get them to play properly.

and music was not over yet. at 9:30 mary had a gig that she graciously decided to share with me, so when we arrived at 5pm we started rehearsing. well, first we printed music, then we taped things. then we made a list of things we wanted to play. then we worried about lighting. while we were practicing the menfolk came in and asked questions of how to make pizza. it turned out much better than a few nights before, although we burned one of the pizzas because theodore came in from picking figs with a huge very painful wasp sting. he cried and cried, and it was so painful. that was the second time today a kid essentially got punished by nature for being friendly and fun.

on the shores of the adriatic

our gig went well when we finally figured out WHERE it was. there were 2 tropic bars within a few feet of coast. at the first in was a sandy beach, a very empty public, and a moderately tipsy bartender who helpfully explained that this was not THE tropic bar. The one we were looking for was at the hotel at the top of the hill, in whose shadow we were currently standing. You drive to the top of the hill and take the elevator down 11 flights and there is the tropic bar. Her directions worked!

There they were, waiting. All the worry about lights had been for a reason. We never could figure out how to get them to stay on a single color. If they were behind us so we could see our music so was our shadow getting in the way, and people couldn't see us. from behind one of us was at a disadvantage. and where they wanted it, shining on us like a spotlight made it impossible for us to see anything. we could only play half of our music because the other half was somehow unreadable.

Mary played her solo bach, including her original fantasias on the preludes, which are very inspired, original and fresh. the audience loved us, and now she gets to go back and repeat the program for hotel guests every monday and thursday for the next few weeks. lucky her. too bad we are leaving on sunday.

we must have left via a special kafka elevator though. The hotel clerk had to let us use it, it was locked for the night. When we left the parking lot the thing wouldn't lift for us, and the button we pressed for "help" went to a busy signal. when we finally got out of there we drove into a rotary where a construction vehicle was putting down cones, blocking our exit. blocking actually all 3 exits. we drove around and around this rotary with no exit 3 times, then asked the construction worker, who was very annoyed and on break, what we were supposed to do. DRIVE! he yelled DRIVE OUT OF THE ROTARY! So we drove out of the rotary across the traffic cones and found some other strewn traffic cones in the road ahead of us so we hadn't been the only ones.