Bats Over Bled |
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3 Oktober 2023 - Bled
Last night after dining on ravioli smothered in too much cheese I took a walk down to the lakeshore. Drunken Brits were skinnydipping as drunken Brits do. Nearly everyone else seemed to be Chinese. I've definitely come to the biggest tourist trap in in Slovenia. Cool old castle on a cliff over a lake is apparently a draw to more people than just me. Yesterday morning I visited a warm spring at Klevevž beneath the ruins of an old castle with batcaves underneath. Sadly the batcaves are closed to people for the sake of the bats, but the warm springs have a pool where I joined three bald old men while an elementary school class ran and screamed around the ruins. I would have thought this would be a draw for foreigners, but no. The castle over the lake, Blejsko Jezero, is well lit at night though. And if one gets far enough from the splashing Brits there are bats that come out at twilight to hunt the bugs just above the surface of the lake. I sat in the dirt on the lakeshore a long time watching them. Bats have a magical quality to them as creatures of the night. They're almost not real. Like the plethora of Chinese tourists. When I came back to my hotel there were about 40 checking in, which felt a bit like Wyoming outside Yellowstone in the Summer in the US. But they don't seem to use the pool much. This hotel got me with their hot tub, so that was the first place I went after checking in. I was undeterred even by the young boy splashing about, as young boys do. What are the limits to the rules? What can I break? His grandfather, ex-Croatian military, joined us and we fell into a conversation about travel in the US. Being in the military he'd even visited Georgia (my home(ish) state, not the country). His 55 countries dwarfed my 35 though. While his grandson periodically splashed him in the face he told me about what was interesting to see in his hometown of Zagreb. Apparently nothing in the world is more beautiful than the Plitvice Lakes in any of the 55 countries he's visited.
Looking down from said castle over the lake I can see deep down into the valley. Mountains on the left; hills on the right. Surrounded by Chinese women taking selfies with their Union beers. Is there a worse harbinger of death than Chinese women? Slovenia's birthrate is of course below replacement rate as all European countries are, but China has a hundred million men who will never reproduce. That's almost as many people living in the former Hapsburg lands. There's still a long way down to go in Europe to catch up with the Chinese, but I'm confident we'll get there. Last night before the pool closed I took an Economist to the hot tub, but ended up in conversation instead. They were from Macedonia (he wouldn't bow to say "North Macedonia"), but he now lived in Dortmund, Deutschland. I gave him a beer and we talked a long time auf Deutsch about politics and life while his wife played on her phone.
