Do Europeans Have Taller Wallets?

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It’s raining, which is somewhat of a novelty; we’re pretty sure the last time it rained on us personally was when we were in Toronto more than three weeks ago. But there are advantages. It seems that wasps don’t like rain. These pesky creatures seem to be everywhere here. We’ve been very careful to keep our hands over the tops of our Fanta bottles; I suspect your day wouldn’t improve if one snuck in when you weren’t looking and you swallowed it. In the words of the young American girl in front of us in the ice cream queue last night “if even a tiny trace of those nuts gets into my chocolate ice cream my throat will close up and I’ll die in screaming agony on the ground right here in front of you” - OK I might have embellished this a bit, but not the bit about dying, maybe only the “screaming agony“ part - I don’t think you’d be able to scream if your throat closed up. Anyway the wasps seemed very partial to my marmalade at breakfast yesterday morning, but I’m able to dine in relative peace this morning, and I can use my serviette for its intended purpose, ie wiping excess marmalade away from my mouth, rather than swatting away swarms of large dangerous insects.

This morning we’ll be driving up to Lake Bled which is only about fifty kilometres north of Ljubljana. Whenever we book places that seem to be bit off the beaten track I usually have visions of them being close to deserted. I’m not sure why, as this never turns out to be the case, which probably just means they weren’t really off the beaten track in the first place. It seems that Bled is no exception; the traffic comes to a complete standstill about three kilometres outside of the town.

We manage to get through town, but it seems that our troubles have only just begun. The car park for our B&B is at right angles to and right next to a very busy narrow road. The owners have kindly placed a traffic cone in front of our ridiculously narrow space to stop anyone else pinching it. By my reckoning it’s not possible to get into the space in one go; we’re going to need to manoeuvre backwards and forwards a few times. I stop to let Issy out so that she can move the cone out of the way. We now need to wait until there’s no traffic coming from the other direction so we can do our manoeuvring without having a head on collision with a truck, but by the time this happens the queue of traffic behind us has stretched halfway around the lake. I’m sure there must be a better way of doing this, and I make a mental note to consult the Google machine before we have to park here again.

Our host is, as we’ve come to expect here in Slovenia, an extremely friendly and helpful gentleman by the name of Robert. He tells us that he’s been to Australia three times to compete in international rowing competitions, including one on Lake Wendouree in Ballarat near Melbourne. I jokingly ask him how he went expecting he’d probably be pleased to finish anywhere in the top hundred (I assume there are at least a hundred nations in the world that have a least one rowboat). He says his team finished third once and so got a bronze medal, which sounds extremely impressive. And the other two times…. well they won gold! I’m now thinking we might be talking to a Slovenian sporting celebrity.

We walk into our room and our jaws drop. Issy says she’s having a Monterosso moment; that’s the moment from our 2015 trip when she uttered those immortal words “cancel the rest of the trip; I’m staying right here”. Our first floor balcony is the width of the narrow road from the edge of the lake and looks straight out at the iconic island church that’s on just about every poster I’ve ever seen advertising Slovenia (so why, I hear you ask, would I have ever thought that this place was “off the beaten track”, and that is indeed an excellent question). The view is absolutely stunning.

We set off for a stroll along the lake shore. The water is crystal clear and there are lots of people swimming. I assumed it would be freezing, but Robert said no, it’s almost too warm. I suspect “too warm“ by Slovenian standards might still be close to freezing for us, but we agree to suspend judgement at least until we’ve dipped our toes in and they haven’t snapped off. There’s also a lot of rowing going on - we can’t actually see Robert out there, but it is a biggish lake. The views of the church and across to Bled Castle high on a sheer cliff on the opposite shore are ridiculously spectacular.

Now for a slight change of subject, I’m curious to find out whether wallets in Europe are taller than they are in some other parts of the world. Until this morning I had a fifty Euro note (parking’s expensive in Ljubljana), and it had been sticking so far out of my wallet that the top bit had become all wrinkled and torn. As far as I can tell all Aussie and American banknotes are the same height, and this is about ten percent shorter than the largest denomination Euro note I’ve now got, which is a twenty. So I reckon the fifty, which I know was taller than the twenty, might be say twenty per cent taller than the Aussie and US notes. I’ve never seen a 100 Euro note, and perhaps they even have larger denomination notes than that here, something I doubt I’ll ever get to experience first hand, and presumably they’re even taller. I wonder if really rich Europeans then need to have really tall wallets just so that all their really large denomination notes don’t get all torn and wrinkled, and if so whether they might then have trouble fitting them in their pockets. On second thoughts maybe really rich Europeans just use credit cards all the time to save having to pay tailors, and that’s then part of the reason they’re so rich. I think I need to go out on the balcony and have another look at the view.

We dine at a ridiculously cute restaurant two doors along from our B&B, and right across the road from the lake. We’re what feels like about a metre above water level. The food is excellent, lots of sausage and other meat… Our young and very friendly waiter Goran is not having a good night. According to the head waiter, if a guest has a dirty wine glass, it seems that the correct solution is not to pour his wine out of the dirty glass into a clean one and give it back to him….

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Photos

Lake Bled
That’s our B&B in the background