Maribor is quite a quiet place during the summer. After the Lent festival, when there’s music all over, people crowd the streets and color the nights, a quiet and deserted-like atmosphere starts to settle in. I was just walking down the street from my house to the center, and there was no car on the road and almost no person on the street. I’ve heard about this ‘phenomenon’ from people here before, they even have a name for it – polenta, which both means the carb-mushy food, and a word game that would translate to something like ‘after Lent’.
Since people are mostly gone vacationing, there are not so many activities at my organization either. So the summer was mostly a time to travel, read, watch films and see friends. I’ve visited Brno (Czech Republic) and I’ve stayed there for a while, with my sister that lives there. It is a lively, beautiful city, with an impressive number of activities for the summer. They say the city is kind of empty since the students leave, but far from it. There’s people everywhere, and they seem to really enjoy watching films in both their outside, summer cinemas, and their inside ones, spend time on the sidewalks drinking beer, go to the parks, concerts, pools, and above all, to the many colorful terraces.
Two friends of mine then visited me in Maribor, and I took them to the places I thought to be relevant, or at least that were relevant to me during my stay here so far: Pekarna, Postna street, the little wine terrace on the river side in The Water Tower, the Jewish Square, GT22 and the Central Park. While being on the terrace drinking wine, we were lucky to have an event happen around us – a wine tasting, with poetry reading and live music. We got a little tipsy from the selection of wine that kept coming, so we went to my place to start on coffee.
After two and a half days in Maribor, we all went to the Croatian sea side, to Krk. We stayed in a huge camping place, which was actually really nice, clean and organized. It had the feel of a small town community to it.
In September we went, with some people from my organization, to a mobile-kitchen camp in Austria. We spent almost a week with workshops, vegan cooking and building a mobile kitchen that is going to travel around the spots where refugees are blocked, and cook for them. We got along great, we were equal, respectful and open, and I can say it was one of the best groups of activists I found myself among.
Now I’m back to work, and there is quite a bit to do: we’ve started a workshop/activities series with migrant children called Brezmeni Svet (World without Borders), the Theater of the Oppresses workshops are back, the zine meetings and activities have restarted, and some more projects are to follow.
Right now I’m attending and helping with the StopTrik film festival, and I hope to get some good material to do some writing about it.
I have a very poignant feeling of leaving, of this being the end of my stay here, but I guess I’ll come back with more on that next month.
Ioana
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