Three days after moving into the house, I experienced life on my own in Europe for the very first time. Running Man (RM) had always been with me, but he had a three-day tour to guide. He'd be spending the weekend with a busload of French tourists. I'd be spending time on my own in Goce. Although the thought of it was a little scary, it was exhilarating as well. After all, I had chosen to buy a house in a country where I couldn't speak the language. This was where the proverbial rubber hit the road.
This was also where the rubber would literally hit the road because RM was meeting his tour group at the airport in Ljubljana, about an hour away from Goce. We left early Friday morning. RM was driving his Citroen minivan while I watched carefully the route we were taking, asking a constant stream of questions about speed limits, emergency measures and how to make critical conversational Slovene like "I'm lost. How do I get to Goce?" My greatest challenge would be backing the car out and driving through the narrow wall-lined streets of the village. The rest should be relatively easy.Well, at least it appeared to be.
With RM safely delivered to his destination and me with my Slovenian cell phone, a tank full of diesel and a prayer, I kissed him goodbye and pulled out of the airport parking area, nervous but excited about making the trip back home. I found my way back to the motorway, remembered to slow down so the toll booth camera could read the sticker, and watched carefully for the Vipava exit. I was hungry and decided I could find my way to the cooperative in Vipava that had, among other things, a little grocery store and a pizzeria. I wanted to eat a little pizza, take the rest home with me, and pick up groceries to make lasagna for RM's return. How hard could that be? My confidence was building by the minute.
It was a sunny and warm October day so I sat outside and proudly used my mediocre Slovene to order a glass of water, a beer and a pizza, eating slowly and savoring my little adventure. I paid the server and left a Euro tip for which she thanked me in English. I put the leftover pizza in the car, grabbed a couple of shopping bags and headed into the store.
When you enter virtually any business in Slovenia, you're greeted immediately with a "dobro jutro," "dober dan" or "dober vecer," depending on the time of day. It's one of the qualities I love about Slovenia. When I walked into the grocery store, the checker smiled and gave me a cheerful "dober dan" and I responded to him with the same. I pulled a tiny shopping cart from the line and moved slowly down each aisle, just looking at what they had. Of course, that didn't take long because the store has only four aisles. But I figured I would be coming here often so I just wanted to know what they carried and what they didn't.
I decided to use boxed lasagna noodles since I didn't want to spend the time it would take for me to make fresh pasta. I found canned tomatoes and sauce, dried oregano and fresh parmesan and mozzarella cheeses. I picked out a couple of onions and heads of garlic, remembering I had to note the number posted above their bins, lay them on the scale and press the corresponding number above the scale. The machine would spit out a label with the appropriate barcode that I slapped on the plastic bags for the checker. Now, I needed meat. Typically, I use a combination of ground beef and Italian sausage. How hard could that be to find in a country bordering Italy where people eat more than one kind of meat at nearly every meal?
The bakery and meat counter were run by local cooperatives. So I pushed my cart toward the butcher and sidled up to the glass case that featured the fresh meat for today. The butcher greeted me and I, him. Then, I'm guessing, he asked me what he could get for me.
"Do you speak English?" I asked. He shook his head and said something in Slovene.
"Okay," I smiled at him. "Un minuto," my Spanish kicked in.
"Ene minuto, prosim," I corrected myself with a weak grin, although I still didn't say it correctly. Using the correct gender in Slovene, I should have said, "eno minuto, prosim" for "one minute, please." Well, he understood me anyway.
I could remember that the word for "cow" was "krava" in Slovene but had no idea what the word for "beef" was. I peered at the little signs sticking out of tubs of ground meat behind the glass. I knew to not ask for hamburger because in Europe, hamburger is truly a mixture of pork (ham) and beef (burger) and I didn't want that. I needed ground beef and a spicy pork sausage.
I pointed to one of the ground meats and asked, "krava?" The little sign labeled it as something that started with a "g."
The butcher looked at me quizzically for just a second, then his eyes smiled and he nodded his head in an exaggerated manner.
"Ja. Govedine," he said. "Koliko?"
"What? Uh, prosim?"
"Koliko?" the butcher said again, this time putting his hands in front of him as if holding an imaginary basketball between them. "Koliko?"
"Ahhh," I said, now nodding my head in an exaggerated motion. "One pound, uh, ene kilo. Ne, ne half. Half kilo," I said, now moving my hands from the imaginary basketball to a bocce ball size. I had no idea how to say "half" in Slovene.
The butcher pulled some paper from a roll and plopped what looked to me to be roughly a pound of meat onto it, holding it out toward me over the counter, nodding as he said "Ja? Ja?"
"Ja," I nodded back, starting to feel like a bobble-head doll on the dashboard of a car.
He weighed whatever meat I had just picked out, wrapped it up neatly in the paper and slapped a label on it. One meat down, another to go.
"Do you have Italian sausage?" I asked. "Italiano kolbasa?"
He gave me his puzzled expression again, then he moved to a bin of sausages, pointing to them and saying something unintelligible.
"Italiano? Spicy?" I asked, like I thought he would somehow miraculously understand the English word, "spicy." Duh.
"Italiano? Ne, Slovenija," he said.
Okay, so we call it Italian sausage in the States but here, the "Italian" part just means something that's from Italy. And why would I ask a butcher in Slovenia for sausage from Italy? Duh, again.
Maybe I could at least determine whether or not the sausages he was showing me were pork. Too bad I didn't know the word for pork. I didn't even know the word for pig.
"Never leave home again without your phrasebook," I thought.
I scanned the signs perched among the other items in the case. I spotted what I was pretty sure were a trio of pork loins in one bin. The first word on the sign was "svinjine" which is reminiscent of "swine" in English. I'd go with that.
"Svin-yin-eh?" I asked, pointing back to the aforementioned sausages.
"Ja. Ja. Ja." Again, with his head bobbing repeatedly.
"Okay. Okay," I replied, head bobbing in agreement, big stupid smile on my face.
He asked me another question I couldn't understand but reasoned he was asking me how many I wanted.
"Uh, tri. Ne, uh...." I was counting up from "one" in my head, trying to remember how to say "four."
"Stiri!" I uttered proudly, four fingers in the air.
"Ja. Stiri. Bravo," he praised me for coming up with the right word. He wrapped them up, slapped on the label and asked me something. I guessed this time he was asking if I needed anything else. I didn't and it was a good thing because my neck had started to hurt from the incessant nodding. I figured his had as well.
"Hvala. Hvala lepa," I said, thanking him.
He starting ringing up something on the cash register.
"Oh, I pay here?" I pulled out my wallet and pointed from it to the counter and back.
"Ja. Ja. Ja." More nodding.
I didn't attempt to understand the amount he uttered. I merely looked at the receipt and handed him my Euros. He counted back a few cents in change.
"Hvala. Nasvidenje." (Thank you. Goodbye.)
"Nasvidenje," I replied with a smile and a wave, then pushed my cart toward the checkout line. I had no idea what meat I had just purchased but hoped it was close to ground beef and Italian sausage. Well, it would be whatever it was. I'd make it work.
"Dober dan," the young man said as I approached and started putting my items on the conveyor belt.
"Dober dan," I replied.
"Did you find everything?" he said, catching me off guard with his English.
"Yes," I said with a huge smile of relief at our ability to communicate. "I think I did, anyway."
"Good. Good," he said, his "d" sounding like "t."
He rang up the total and gave me back my change.
"Have a nice day," he said.
"Hvala. Nasvidenje." I replied, wanting to show him that I was trying to speak like the natives.
Good thing I didn't have to be home at any specific time. I'd spent far longer in the store than I had anticipated. The day was growing old and I still had to find my way back to Goce. I drove up the foothills, winding my way around the tight turns in the road and re-entered my village. I held my breath as I made the right turn between two houses, keeping the side mirrors from scraping on either side. I was relieved and proud as I parked in the drive and made my way through the big iron gates and back into the house with my groceries. It was good to be home.
When I crawled onto the air mattress that night, I hoped I could fall asleep quickly. I left the light on in the bathroom at the other end of the house to cut the thick and heavy darkness of the night. I closed my eyes then re-opened them immediately as I heard the tiny feet of something scuttling around above me. The ceiling in this room had two rectangular pieces of heavy white paper taped to it. The former owner said they covered some plaster that had started falling due to water damage before the roof had been repaired. I was regretting the fact that I hadn't ever pulled back the paper to see what it looked like above. As I continued to listen to the pitter patter of who-knows-what little creature's feet above my head, I prayed that whatever it was wouldn't come crashing down through the paper. I got up, turned on the light and moved the air mattress a little further away from the patches. At least maybe nothing would fall directly on me.
I listened for hours to the rattling of tree branches outside the windows and the hum of the two little refrigerators and the tiny freezer in the kitchen as they went on and off and on, over and over again, sometimes in unison and other times, in totally separate cycles. Then, I heard rain start to fall, lightly at first then heavy on the tile roof. The scuttling noises above ceased. Instead, I listened to the sound of water dripping. A lot of water dripping. It seemed to be dripping onto the floor above me. I hoped that if the roof were leaking, the water wouldn't find its way back through the paper patches. But after hearing lifeforms of some kind up there, I wasn't going to venture into the dark attic to see if the roof was leaking, that's for sure. That would have to wait until daylight. Finally, in the wee hours of the morning, I fell into an exhausted, dreamless sleep.
On Saturday morning, I put on my socks and shoes and bravely opened the door to the stairs that lead into the huge attic space. I wanted to see where the roof had leaked but didn't want to see anything alive, so I made a lot of noise tramping up the steep wooden stairs, hoping that if there were any critters out and about, I could send them running for cover. What I couldn't see wouldn't hurt me.
The upstairs space featured a vast collection of stuff. Some things, I wanted to keep. Some things were junk I wanted to clear out. And others, well, I didn't even know what they were. As I scoured the place for evidence of leaks, I found none. The attic was as dry as a bone but it certainly wasn't airtight. The wind had started to blow. The beams creaked, glass rattled in loose windows and cobwebs shuddered and shook. Creepy.
I spent the morning cleaning, then started making lasagna. I wanted to have it all put together in the pan, ready to pop it into the oven on Sunday evening when RM and I returned from Ljubljana. I'd inherited a lot of dishes and pans with the house, but no large skillets and only a medium-size pot. As I put the first of two batches of noodles over the tiny gas flame to boil, I opened the packages from the butcher and browned the beef first, then the sausage which I'd removed from the casings. Before adding any onions, garlic or seasoning, I tasted the meat. The beef was stronger and more gamy than I was used to. The sausage didn't have the spicy kick I wanted, so I thumbed through the little collection of seasonings RM and I had started to accumulate, adding a little of this and a little of that until the meat mixture no longer tasted bland. It would do.
I found myself facing another evening without even a book to read. I'd finished mine on the plane trip. I poured a glass of local wine RM and I had picked up from the cooperative in Vipava, wrapped up in a blanket and went out to sit in the dark courtyard, staring at the house and the countless stars in the sky. I picked out constellation after constellation, finding comfort in that fact that no matter where in the world I was, the stars above would always be the same. That song from the Disney movie about some mouse kept going through my mind. "Somewhere, out there, beneath the pale moonlight...."
The wind had been picking up speed throughout the evening and by the time I was headed back to the air mattress, the term "gale force" came to mind. Burja (brrr-yuh), the incredible wind phenomenon I had heard so much about, had arrived. I washed my face, brushed my teeth and started toward the bedroom. I stepped down from the vinyl-covered concrete floor in the kitchen into the middle room. The vinyl covering the wooden floor there gave a "whoosh" as my foot landed. The wind, coming through the cellar below, filled the space below the vinyl with air, pushing it up like a balloon. I whooshed my way into the next room and crawled under the covers dressed in sweatpants and a sweatshirt. The floor under the mattress was cold and I could feel it through the plastic, air and cotton sheet. I really needed to get a bed.
If there was scuttling above me, I couldn't hear it for the din. The entire house rattled and moaned as the burja wind roared and whistled. The paper patches on the ceiling breathed with a sucking noise as the house drew the air in and out like a huge pair of lungs. I curled up and pulled the blankets up over my head and prayed.
When you're from the Midwest, you tend to have both a fascination and a fear of the wind. Specifically, of tornadoes. RM had told me that tornadoes didn't occur here but what damage could a 60-mile-per-hour wind wreak on my ancient house? I told myself the burja had blown here for centuries and this house had withstood it. Smart thing to build a stone house with two-foot-thick walls, few windows and a cement-and-tile roof covered with large stones. I would survive the night and so would the house. And once this house could focus on something other than the wind, it would, no doubt, laugh at my fear.
Sleep-deprived, I crawled behind the steering wheel of RM's car on Sunday to make the drive back to the airport to pick him up. Burja was blowing violently. I dreaded driving in it but knew I had to get used to it. I also knew I would drive out of it halfway to Ljubljana. Wisely, I left Goce giving myself an extra hour for the trip. The electronic sign in the valley registered the wind at 120 kilometers per hour. That's nearly 75 miles per hour. It was going to be a very long drive.
I crept onto the motorway. The "no trucks" signs were flashing above the road. Trucks are prohibited on the motorway during burja because they apparently have a tendency to blow over. Yep, that's right. Blow right over on their side and onto whatever other traffic is around them. The orange and white-striped wind socks along the motorway were standing straight out, parallel to the ground, whipping around in tiny little circles. Speed-limit signs abandoned the normal 130 kilometers per hour (81 mph) for 60 kph (around 40 mph). I was afraid to go even that speed, feeling the wind push against the roof of the minivan. Nonetheless, the locals flew by on my left, unafraid of burja's force. Maybe someday I'd be like them but today, I'd travel in a white-knuckle fervor. Was it only two days ago that I had thought getting through the narrow streets of Goce would be my greatest challenge? What an idiot.
The motorway rises from the flat Vipava Valley up and up toward the peaks of Nanos. Although burja has been around since the beginning of time, they say that it became more violent and unpredictable when they cut the motorway into the mountainside, altering its natural path from the Adriatic Sea to the Julian Alps. As I climbed, vicious gusts rocked the minivan. I prayed, hoping that none of them would actually push me over the guardrail on my right. In many places, the mountain below the roadway is so steep and sheer that there would be nothing to stop you until you fell all the way down onto the valley floor. And in some spots, you could fall and not be found for days unless someone actually reported seeing your vehicle hurled over the railing. What in the hell was I doing driving in this? Oh, yeah. I had to pick up RM. On the bright side, if I didn't show up, he'd surely search for me.
By the time I emerged from burja territory, I had to pry my stiff fingers from the steering wheel. My neck, shoulders and spine were wracked with tension-derived pain. Unsure that I'd even bothered to breathe for several miles, I inhaled deeply then exhaled long and slow. I thanked God. I had made it.Then, it started to rain.
"You've got to be kidding," I thought as I found the wipers and figured out how to turn them up to full speed. Big drops of heavy rain turned into a dense downpour. I slowed down again as the tires hydroplaned from time to time. The rain let up before I reached the airport exit, becoming a slow drizzle by time I arrived. It had taken me an hour and 15 minutes to make the normally one-hour commute. I felt like I'd been behind the wheel for days.
I pulled into an empty parking lot just past the airport entrance. I had 45 minutes to burn so I pulled out the little notebook I always carry in my purse and starting making a list of things I needed or wanted to do this week. Driving wasn't on it. But getting a bed, rat traps and a flashlight were, as was a visit to the butcher with RM who could communicate my thanks for his patience.
I was relieved to see RM again. He was saying goodbye to his French guests as I drove around to the bus parking area. He introduced me to the drivers who'd been on the tour and we all walked into the terminal for a drink. The drivers, still on duty, couldn't have a beer. Me? I needed one. At least one.
As RM and I walked back to the car, I pulled the key out of my purse and handed it to him, walking toward the passenger door.
"You aren't going to drive me home?" RM asked.
"No way in hell," I said with a smile.
