Liz and Jim Patton

Slovenia is a flattened Switzerland, a kindergarten Austria, packaged in an area the size of New Jersey with about 1/5 its population. Slovenia sits at the northwest corner of the former Yugoslavia, surrounded by Italy, Austria and Hungary as well as Croatia. The people are almost all Catholic. They’re almost all friendly. The homes that dot the countryside are neatly-tended wooden chalets. Their signature food is a white cream cake, and their most unique totem is a roofed woodpile.
The land is beautiful, and we’re here to photograph nature. We spend the first days at two glacial lakes, Lake Bled and Lake Bohinj. These are set in the mountains, decorated by ancient churches and castles, all ideal and picturesque but the weather isn’t with us. At Lake Bohinj we have ducks, we have fish, and we have clouds – low hanging gray clouds that ruin the magic. The clickers are desperate. They spend the morning betting on which duck will make it to shore first. As the sun breaks through the conversation changes to Lightroom, the colors become lovely and the day is saved.

Slovenia was the economic powerhouse of the former Yugoslavia, an industrious people with a GDP 2.5 times that country’s average. It also had an outspoken youth and intellectual class which poked at the ruling communist party, along a crafty president, Milan Kucan who was able to walk a tight line between that party and his own people. In 1989 Kucan led a drive to adopt constitutional amendments and then held free elections in April, 1990, the first Yugoslav republic to do so. In December of that year Slovenia voted to become independent from Yugoslavia. The Slovenes secretly stockpiled weapons, and on June 25, 1991, they closed the borders with Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav National Army marched in but after ten days and only a few hundred deaths, the Slovenes prevailed, and the Serbs relented and left. It was the first, and by far the easiest, winning of independence from Tito’s former communist country.

Meals here are fun. Best has been lunch at a local farm that caters to
tourists – homemade bread with homemade sausage, prosciutto, cheese, cottage cheese with walnuts, and lard. Lard! Its not bad – some meat still in it so it looks a bit like pate, but they do need to change the name to something more benign. And then a huge walnut streusel. Everything made right at this farm or a neighboring one.

Eating here is very different from the US. Meals are sit-down. There is no way to get anything ‘fast’ – not a sandwich, not a slice of pizza, not a coffee can be had outside of a formal meal. You must go in to a restaurant, sit down and order and wait. It’s an effort, and time consuming, but maybe that’s why everyone here is so thin!!