HEEEEELLLOOO!!!

I'm FINALLY back, and boy, do I have a lot to tell!

How to start? Chronologically?

Hmm...

Well, I got an eleven-year-old and a nine-year-old for room mates. And there were only two beds. The eleven-year-old named Mark immediately plunked down on the single bed. This annoyed me but wasn't too bad as the single bed was a rollaway and I couldn't fit on it.

So, sleeping in the same bed with someone else. Well, the bed was actually two mattresses on one frame, each with it's own sheets and blankets. That was fine.

What do you do with room mates?, who speak Slovene? Well, I brought some playing cards, and taught them Speed and Slamwich. Lowrie (the other mate) loved Slamwich. At seven-thirty (when we got up), and after we dressed...

"Garrett, do you want to play Slap?"

At lunch,

"Garrett, let's play Slap!"

And at ten at night...

"Garrett, I want to play Slap. Will your seester play Slap?"

At night, though, I wanted to read The Hobbit to relax, so I would purposely lose the game. So Lowrie thought he was a champion. But all the playing did make him really good, so the last day when I really tried to beat him, I couldn't.

In Slovene, "J" is pronounced "Y", and Lowrie thought that Jacks were Jokers, and he pronounced them "Yoker." "A"s are also prounounced differently. Aces were "Ass"

A game of slamwich.

"Three"
"Nine"
"Yoker!"
"Ass!" Slap.

In speed, whenever a Jack was played, Lowrie would put an unrelated card, like a five on it. Mark, when he watched, would speak in slovene and correct Lowrie, "Blah blah blah. Slovene, Slovene, then,
Ne, Yoker, Ne Yoker!"

The food was AWFUL. For breakfast we had bread, with choices of single-serve foil packets of jam, honey, meat paste. butter, and chocolate spread. No fruit, no yogurt, no cereal, nothing. There was cereal and yogurt, actually, but it was for "private guests only', whoever they were. Lunch and dinner were always some meat-based meal. Lunch was a slab of meat with starch and a vegetable, dinner was a form of meat stew. For the first three lunches, Avery (who has changed her name to Hippolyta {see my mom's blog} therefore was called HEEEEPY, the Slovene way of saying it, so there was a lot of "Day, Heepy, Day, Heepy" (ie Go Hippie, Go Hippie)) and I had vegetarian-burger-type patties that were decent enough. Thursday and friday they ran out and we had saurkraut and pasta one lunch and mashed potatoes and veggies in cream sauce for the other.
You had hot tea to drink every meal, and that was all.


Dessert was alright. The night we had fruit salad. everyone took one bite and pushed the bowls away. Hippolyta and I each had three.

Skiing was the main focus. As we were being sorted by ability, the director (Primoz, pronounced Primaushe) asked me to spell Hippolyta.

"H-I-P-P-O-L-Y-T-A"

Well, they don't have Y in the slovenian alphabet, so

"What?"

"Y"

"I?"

"Y.

- yes, I"



Our group instructor was named Ziga, the Z, as in Jia, with an accent on J, and he and the rest of the instructors called Avery "Hippi" and they said it "Heepy."


We must have been crazy, going to a slovene camp. Most of the children there knew "Hello' and "Thank you" in slovene, and that was it. So the announcments were all in slovene, the conversation at the dinner table was slovene, and instructions were in slovene. We were lucky that all the camp instructors spoke fluent english. But every time someone talked to us, half of the time we didn't know we were being spoken to, and the other half we didn't know a word, even if we were listening.

At one point, Heepy was being asked about the Tic Tacs she was buying She, at that moment, as we were at every moment, was clueless and thought the woman was saying "Do you want these. " She kept saying Ja, and the woman kept saying blah blah blah,
"Ja", blah, blah, blah, and on and on it went until her friends started cracking up and it became clear that the woman was asking her "spearmint or peppermint, NOT "Do you want these"?"

So That's embarrassed in Slovenia for this week as well, having to repeat over and over that I didn't understand slovene. In english, I might add, so the other person didn't understand me either.

All in all, though, it was a really fun camp. And we skied enough to last me a day!


******

As for the poll...

Cabinet; no one

Shoe closet: one

Oven: no one

Refrigerator: five

Soap and Shampoo cabinet: two.

Total votes: eight

Winner: Refrigerator.

ABSOLUTELY RIGHT! The next one needs to be a little harder, don't you think...

G-man