Narin and Piran

We drove to the Slovenian coast this week to spend a few days with our dear friends, Mijo and Drita.  On the way, we decided to stop for a night at the Pri Andrejevih tourist farm, which keeps thirty hives of bees in a beehouse on a trailer, and (more importantly) has a swimming pool.  We swam and ate and wandered up to see the beehives, from which they harvested 1500 kilograms of honey last year!!  Although looking around, that really wasn’t hard to imagine, as there are flowering forests as far as the eye can see.  I got close enough to take some pictures of the beehouse, which had a few traditional painted bee panels, until a guard bee started buzzing my head and chased me down the road (I tried to tell her I was a friend, but she wasn’t buying it).  It made me think of Wilber in Painted Hives.  :)

As an added bonus, the tiny village of Narin right next door happened to be having a festival celebrating St. James, so we sat out on our patio that night, gazing at every star in the sky and listening to the polka music coming from the other side of the village.  When I woke up at 4 a.m., they were still going strong, and when we drove past the next morning it looked like it had been quite a party.

From there, it was on to Piran and our friends Mijo and Drita.  We first met Mijo in 2011 when he was a waiter at Café Divine in Ljubljana.  He quickly became one of our favorite people in Slovenia (see Adijo, Mijo! and Adijo, Mijo...Again!), and we were bummed the following summer when we learned he had moved to Piran.  However, in going to visit him there, we also got to meet his wife, Drita, and together they are among the nicest, most-generous people we know.  

We have been to Piran a few times now, but this was definitely our best visit.  Mijo and Drita invited us to stay in their apartment, which is a stone’s throw from Tartini Square.  We got to spend a lot of time with them, swimming in the Adriatic, wandering around Piran, having a lot of good laughs, and viewing some awesome sunsets.  We also went to an Exhibition of the World’s Largest Spiders and Scorpions at the Palace Trevisini, which was fascinating… and extremely creepy.

Unfortunately, Mijo told us we can no longer say “Adijo, Mijo” because “Ciao” is the preferred good-bye in Piran (which is very near to the Italian border), and “Everyone will think you’re from Ljubljana if you say ‘Adijo’.”

Adijo, Mijo is more fun, but if we must… Hvala in Ciao, Mijo and Drita!  Until next time!