Jezebel takes on Kobarid.

Aw, you always leave too soon, summer. On the morning of September 1st, the door of warmth was kicked shut. A new door swung open and let in a gust of chilly air, signalling the beginning of autumn. That morning the temperature was just barely over 10°C. I’d let my stupid summer plan of riding up Mount Doug on a 7-speed cruiser bike slip away. Although the temperatures have since rebounded, I’ve also missed my chance to do the Vancouver Triple Crown ride.

Running was going well until I slammed my left kneecap into the sidewalk two weeks ago. The two easy runs I’ve done since this injury have both ended with me falling asleep at night with an ice pack on my knee. Garmin continues to flag my training status as “strained” while also dropping my VO2 max. On the upside, Garmin woke me up at 7am to notify me that my fitness age had decreased, with the falling confetti animation and all.

I have begun my surrender to the new season with a big batch of butternut squash soup and by planting some frost-tolerant vegetables in the garden. There is an ongoing search for a new sweater. Halloween costume possibilities have been mingling with memories of Slovenia in my head: I still have five more days to cover.

Onto day 6:

Ed kindly pointed out that my posts about Slovenia lacked positivity. In my defense, the most recent post was about my worst day of the trip. I’d woken up that morning in Bovec to find ants crawling all over the slimy, wadded-up tissues I’d discarded in the vestibule of my tent. The sight of these ants feasting on my snot sent me into a panic, thinking I needed to abort the cycle tour and head straight back to Ljubljana to recuperate until my flight home.

Being unable to find an easy way to return to Ljubljana turned out to be a blessing in disguise. After that long-awaited poop in Idrsko, instead of heading 18km southeast to the nearest train station, I rejoined the group in Kobarid, where they’d decided to spend another night.

Kobarid was one of my favourite stops of the tour, second only to Ljubljana. John Steinbeck could write an entire book describing Kobarid’s beauty. I, on the other hand, am more likely to talk about battery mascots.

I have learned that the pink bunny was originally associated with Duracell brand batteries. In 1988, Duracell let their trademark lapse, allowing Energizer to parody the pink bunny in their commercials. Then, in 1992, Energizer took exclusive trademark rights in the United States and Canada. In Turkey, for reasons I’ve yet to investigate, Duracell’s mascot is a brown bear.

This wasn’t my first time photographing battery packaging in another country. Here’s the Chinese mascot for Energizer:

…which included a glue stick FOR SOME REASON.

I also enjoy documenting dubiously flavoured beverages:

Like Cockta, Fructal is a Slovenian company that manufactures juices and candy bars. I was unable to find any information on the marshmallow and bubble gum beverages in English. Here’s the English translation of the ingredients list: Water, sugar, white grape juice from concentrate (5%), acid (citric acid), stabilizer (glycerol esters of wood rosins), flavoring, acidity regulator (trisodium citrate), coloring (carmoisine). Carmoisine may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children.

Essentially, nothing stranger than the flavours themselves. Because of the Carmoisine, these marshmallow and bubble gum flavoured waters are banned in the US. Sorry, Americans, you’ll have to stick with Mountain Dew.

On that note, I witnessed Ed’s inaugural sip of Mountain Dew while in London.

He didn’t think it was too bad. I should have bought him that bottle of marshmallow water in Kobarid to sample on my behalf.

It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the mountains, lakes, or rivers in Slovenia. It’s just that we have those in Canada too. It was only recently that Ed discovered that Canada has a staggering abundance of lakes. We have so many that we ran out of famous white guys to name them after and ended up giving some names such as:

Another Lake and And Another Lake, which are in BC. Relative to other provinces, BC doesn’t even have that many lakes (~20,000 versus Quebec’s ~1,000,000). Stupid Lake. Big Ass Lake. This Lake, That Lake, and The Other Lake

I enjoy a good body of water, but surely Ed can understand why I’d find marshmallow-flavoured water more noteworthy.

I won’t deny that the Soča River was stunning. As a picture is worth a thousand words, here are 3,000 on this resplendent river:

This comely bridge connecting the village of Kobarid to Kamp Koren, where we stayed, is named for Napoleon. Finally, a landmark named for a white guy other than Julius Caesar, I know. Anyway, the original Napoleon Bridge was built in 1750, then blown up in 1915, and once more in 1915. Napoleon Bridge II was built by the Italians, who did not realize that its eventual purpose would be to get glampers over the river to Kamp Koren.

I liked Kamp Koren much better than Bovec’s Camp Vodenca. For starters, Kamp Koren took kredit kards, and none of the staff scowled at me for any reason. I pitched my tent next to Fatema’s, which she’d expertly set up without pegs, despite it not being a freestanding tent like mine.

Ed found Fatema’s resourcefulness worthy of mentioning in this post. Personally, I was more impressed by the audacity of the Swiss couple who showed up an hour after I’d set up my tent. They boxed Fatema in by parking their car next to her tent and stringing their hammock between the two trees, thus cutting off her direct route to the washrooms.

She was off exploring while this was going down, so I shared a photo of her new neighbours in our WhatsApp group chat:

Unlike me, Fatema radiates positivity. Ed even remarked how Fatema was so gregarious that she made the usually polite and chatty Hannah look like a “horrible woman”, which means Ed must think I’m Jezebel. Fatema even made friends with that uppity server at the Mosjtrana inn. So, when Fatema’s response to my picture of her new tent neighbours was:

“WHO THE FUCK IS THAT?!”

I thought, “yes, Fatema, that is the right energy.” I was pleased.

Because, yeah, I am Jezebel.

That evening, while waiting for a shower stall in the Women’s washrooms to free up, Hannah joined me in the queue. Clearly unimpressed with the wait, Hannah peered into the Men’s washroom and noticed that all stall doors were open. She suggested that we take our douching needs in there instead, so we did.

Unlike North American washrooms, the stall doors in Europe don’t have an inch-wide gap on each side or a gap at the bottom large enough for a random toddler to duck under to say hello.

Post-shower, Hannah remarked that the men’s showers were actually nicer than the women’s, which she’d used the day before. Grubby he-campers were blessed with stalls featuring knobs and a detachable showerhead, whereas the women got fixed showerheads with a push-button that dispensed water in five-second bursts.

In BC, of the 1,050 frontcountry campsites, only 40 have hot showers. British Columbian campers have kind of made peace with being smelly for a few days unless they “bathe” in one of the 20,000 lakes in the province. Simply put, I find the European camping experience less authentic.

Along with a plethora of lakes, BC also has ~8,000 named mountain peaks (and over 100 distinct mountain ranges), thousands of rivers (four that are longer than 1,000km). Of course, Slovenia is also only 3/4 the size of Vancouver Island (where I live). What stood out to me about Slovenia were all these wayside and hilltop shrines, of which there are about 3,000.

According to slovenia.info, the internet’s premier authority on “Feeling Slovenia”, Slovenia is one of the top countries in Europe according to the number of sacral structures per capita. To feel Slovenia is to feel God.

Ed and I explored the underground recession of this shrine for Saint Anthony. I didn’t find God, but my legs found a patch of stinging nettles. Fortunately, Saint Anthony spared this heathen from another trip to the pharmacy, as the rash was negligible. Embarrassed about my growing list of ailments, I kept my holy punishment a secret from the group.

In town, the four of us bypassed the cheese museum and visited the Parish Church of the Assumption of Virgin Mary so Ed could nap.

This was the first in our photo shoot series in which we replicated the scenes from each stained-glass window. Hannah appears to have kept those photos in her private collection, possibly to limit online evidence of us engaging in light blasphemy.

In keeping with the theme of my home country outdoing Slovenia, Vancouver alone has 577 Chinese restaurants. (I’m skeptical there are that many, but Google says so.) Kobarid has just one, and it was where we chose to dine that evening.

Much like the Chinese restaurants I’m accustomed to in BC, the decor was dated. The food was decent, yet nothing to write home about or leave a review about on Google. Out of curiosity, I looked at the reviews for this place, and it appears that most complaints were about the staff not speaking Slovenian or English. Oh no, we had to point at the menu! If anything robbed this place of authenticity, it was the absence of chopsticks.

Kobarid was a lovely village, and my second favourite of all our stops in Slovenia. Sure, I didn’t have to travel 8,000+km for spectacular alpine vistas, emerald green bodies of water, or Chinese food, but I did because the company was guaranteed to be good.

The greatest blessing of this trip was the divine company of these three.