Day 5! (Sunday)
So far there has been a morning ritual. The sun wakes me, I ignore it. The mosquitoes wake me, I kill or ignore them. I try to sleep for a bit until eventually it gets too hot in the tent and then I’ll get up. I’ll do my morning devotion under the kitchen tent and I’ll clean a bit. Then one by one the boys wake up and we’ll have breakfast. But today they didn’t wake up. I was out of my tent by 07:30 and they kept sleeping. At 10 they were still asleep! I was also still tired and I thought it was very unfair that they had shadow and I didn’t and I was hoping that the sun would shine just a little but harder so that they also would be baked out of their tent. But none of that happened. So I wanted to rearrange my suitcase a bit (it was in the outer bit of the tent) and I decided that was a fine place to sleep. So that’s what I did. After about 15 minutes Izak woke up but I was still comfortable then so I kept laying there for another 20 minutes before I got op. By that time just Filip was still in his tent. Oh and Kiki also. They had not started breakfast yet which was quite disappointing. Of course I could’ve had breakfast by myself before, but the last time I had done that it didn’t work out so well (they went swimming on Friday morning and then I had breakfast by the time they came back at 10. They had pasta then and then told me to eat now because it would be a while before we’d see food again, but I was kind of full so that didn’t really work. They then explained to me to go with the flow. Because if I go with the flow I can’t be hungry when it’s time to eat).
At a given moment they were in a conversation. – by the way I now have enough knowledge of the Slovene language to often be able to determine the topic of the conversation.. so they know to be careful around me because when I have a feeling the conversation is about me, I’ll ask for translation. So they were talking -and they also know that I know that ‘ona’ means ‘she’ so they don’t use that word so often anymore - . But Kiki kept very noticeably moving his head towards me as they kept talking. So at some point I said. “OK! Translation please!”. He didn’t want to translate: ‘It is not my job to tell you’. ‘Of course it is!! What’s up?’ I asked. Money problems. They’re broke. So I said: ‘But I have money’. ‘We know’, he said. So I guess that’s what they wanted to ask me. Fair enough, I’ve been living here and have not paid for anything yet. And all they want is € 10. So we went to the shops. Which was beautiful because there was a bathroom there (with one very big spider! I wondered to myself if Hadassa would’ve held it for another 2 days because of the spider).

-Rock, paper, scissors-
It’s a way of life. And today, I won! ☺ Everything here is R,P,S. When, what or how will we eat? R,P,S! Who has to get up to get something? R,P,S.. Just like our touch-the-ground-first actually *. What I forgot to mention before is that on Friday Tomaz went home with his car. Which means there is now 1 car to transport 6 people. So me being the lightweight has to sit on someone’s lap. After Friday I told them that if we were going to be dangerous (those of you who know me, know that when I get in a car I have my seatbelt on, I’m really a safety first kind of person. So sitting in the front seat on someone’s lap wasn’t working for me), I didn’t want to be dangerous in the front seat. So now they do R,P,S about who gets to sit in the front and then R,P,S about who has to carry me.** Yesterday evening I proposed that next time I would get to play R,P,S for the front seat too. You know, as a joke, and they indeed laughed. But today, they actually let me play! And I’m in the front seat as I’m writing this. Kirc is inbetween Izak’s legs.
For two days now they’ve known that I’ve been keeping a diary. Today I decided to come clean and share with them some of what I’ve been writing. So from now on I can write all names freely since they know I’m writing about them anyway. They’ve started to give me suggestions about the things I should write down. This morning Izak told me I should write about his splendid posture, and he also told me to write about peanut butter and honey, something I would have to taste first (it really sounds like one of those weird Egers-things***), which I really was not intending to do. But he just made me some and though I didn’t think it was amazing.. It’s edible, maybe even nice.
It seems as if they plan more and more. Even though it sometimes seems to take forever for them to finally decide. I think today it happened twice or thrice that they had 30 minutes discussions about the plan for the moment. They need a president! And after my super proposal about the dishes they did offer me to become their president.. Maybe I should run for it after all.
Today I realized how much I’m like Hadassa (my youngest sister). The wind blew over the bottle with oil and Kiki tried to safe it. However, in his attempt to save it he tripped, hit his foot and spilled even more oil. I felt for him. Poor boy. But then I saw him cursing inwardly (ok so probably not cursing with bad words), and I just had to turn my face away and giggle. And I knew that if Hadassa had been there both of us would have been creasing with laughter and we would have blamed each other for it.
Our adventure here is almost over. Matej left today so now there are five of us. We’re leaving tomorrow morning, with a bit of luck before the inspection comes. Yes, we’re on ground of Izak’s grandfather, but camping here goes against the plan the government has for this piece of land. I found out about this when I went to see the manager of the camp nearby to ask if we could shower there. ‘Well not really’ he said, because he doesn’t have a lot of showers (2) and ‘By the way, did you know that camping outside of official campsites is prohibited?’ No, I didn’t. ‘And sometimes the inspection comes by and when they see you camping they’ll give you a fine, I know this because one of my friends is with the inspection’. ‘Oh, ok’, I said, ‘I’ll let them know’. When I got back in the camp I told Izak what the manager had said about camping on these grounds. He knew. Kirc who was also there asked how that manager knew that we were camping here in the first place. ‘I told him’ I said. And I saw him think ‘Why does this girl have to talk so much’. Hey, listen: Izak knew what I was going to ask the manager and as sole instruction he said not to let the manager know how many of us there were. I stuck to that. And if there were more things I should’ve really not mentioned they should’ve told me that before hand. SO THERE.
Saturday morning (when I -what was I thinking- had drunk 1,5 litres of water and really needed a toilet) I ran into the manager again. He said the inspection would probably come on Monday. Back then I was still under the impression that we would leave on Sunday so I told him ‘Oh, we’ll be long gone by then’. In any case Kirc believes that I called the Inspection on us and that I should not ask anyone any questions (at the beach I’d asked someone if we could pay with Euros and they said no), I bring bad luck, he says.



* something me, my sisters and some of my cousins and friends do. If for example the doorbell rings and you don’t feel like getting the door you touch the ground and whomever touches it last has to go open the door.
** addition by Iz & Kirc: They’ve never played R,P,S about who has to carry me, just about who sits in front.
***Egers are my cousins Jechiël and Jaïra, they eat stuff like sprinkles with peanut butter and sprinkles with cheese and interestingly enough when I told Jechi about this peanut butter and honey thing he said that he already knows it and that it’s really nice