day five: a great surprise.

Ok, back to the Slovenia update.
Let me tell you, this post has been a long time coming.

Day five (Monday morning) dawned as early as usual.  We had the same morning routine of getting up at 5:50, breakfast by 7, team devotions at 7:30, then off to our classrooms for last minute prep and starting our morning with the kids.  We taught them about the Rajput people of India. 



We did some really fun, but really messy sand art.  They loved it.

The sand art they were doing were those sticky papers where you pull small sections of the pattern off to decorate.  One little boy I was helping kept telling me, "Look! I got a BIG piece off this time!"  Yes, yes you did.  I think you may be missing the point...

The kids left us around noon and our team, instead of having an afternoon or an evening session to put on that day, had the rest of the day off.  What a nice surprise!  So, taking full advantage of that time, a group of 8 of us took a day trip to Trieste, Italy.  It was about 30 minutes by taxi, during which we had a very entertaining taxi driver, Emil.  He learned English mostly through music.  He also was a hippie at heart and played us a bunch of Beatles and other similar songs.  At one point, he got us to sing along.  It was very fun and very much entertaining.



On our way to Italy!

Emil first took us to a beautiful castle that sits right on the Adriatic:

Outer gate leading to the castle

You can see how it sits right on the water.  Also, please notice the Italian flag on the top :)



If you look carefully, you can see land across this body of water...it's Venice! So close, I could almost see it :)



Back to the City Center now...

Trieste Piazza

Piazza again

One of the streets we hung out on...pretty much everything was closed though...

We were very excited to find a pizzeria that was open!

And my pizza was delicious!

Gelato for dessert!

Again, delicious!

Walking back to the taxi.  It was absolutely freezing out and we were eating gelato...

The Piazza at night

I just really like this photo

This was out last stop of the night.  We were back in Slovenia and Emil took us to this shopping area.  It was an old street that apparently used to be all shoemakers.  It was fun to see, but pretty much all closed.  Also, Emil went to go grab some dinner and we couldn't find him when we were ready to go...

That was my fun, great surprise of a day.  It still is a bit unreal that I was able to take a day trip to Italy.  I can't wait to go back for real one day :)