quite simply… awesome

The most outstanding acts were  Companyia Leandre & Claire with Fragile who received at least a 5min continued applause at the end. The other notable appearance was by Dave Evans & Mat Riccardo with Married Men.
There were other shows well worth the time (I even got a part in one of them… again ) but these two really deserved my vote for best of the day, quite possibly the best acts of the entire festival.
Don’t worry if you missed them though, both will appear again in the following days and next week at Lent festival in Maribor.

No photos yet, probably won’t have the time to sort & edit them untill next week.

By far the best and in reality the only true street theatre festival in Slovenia started in the parks, streets and squares of Ljubljana yesterday evening.
As always I’ll be following it closely for the next 4 days all over the city, trying to catch as many performances as I possibly can. Unfortunately the weather doesn’t seem to be cooperating this week with afternoon thunderstorms being forecast pretty much every day.
Well, at least it won’t be boring

A couple of photos from last night:

or  the alternative link

Oh well, all good things come to an end…eventually.
At least I got to escape from reality for a couple of hours every day. Just me and my own subaquatic parallel universe.

Did a couple of nice dives which could have been a lot better (and deeper) if only… well, let’s just say there are people who have logged many more dives than I have, yet still don’t know much about diving or what’s happening with and around them underwater.

Thankfully I had Stefan as a buddy on a couple of dives which turned out great. He’s a maniac of Jaques Custeau type (ment in the most positive way possible) from Munster.
He dives with a homemade BCD (bouyancy compensating device) which he glued together out of two moped innertubes, two valves (so he can inflate/deflate) and a few straps to hold it all in place. And sometimes he dives without even that piece of luxury.

note to self: have to try that sometimes

We did some nice, deep dives together however I chose not to follow him down to 55+ on one particular dive which was the second of the day.
On the first one, just 3 hours earlier, (@ Leo’s garden on Hvar packed full of gorgonias and nudibranches) we went quite deep, down to 47-48m with a somewhat long(ish) deco stop while holding on to the line in a strong current so I decided it wasn’t terribly healthy for me to do the second one below that. I leveled off at 40-45m and continued to swim along the wall just as he did some 15-20m below.

There were plenly of nudibranches around (never seen as many before), a decent amount of lobsters, two octopuses and various fish species I’ve never even heard of.

I even went after a couple of dolfins swimming 20m away from the boat but they diassapeard the moment I slipped in the water. Technically I did swim with the dolfins, I just never saw them underwater I could hear them but that was it.

I definitely have to go back again in the off season when (hopefully) there won’t be any tourists left on the islands. There are some nice spots we missed again this time around (especially caves) which are out of reach for begginers (for various reasons) yet with only one instructor at the dive center there really isn’t a whole lot you can do but plan the dives so everyone in the group can do it.

There’s a slim chance I may go there again in august as an assistant. Prepairing equipment, driving the boat, escorting more experienced divers (while Leo takes care of newbies), taking photos (and making lot’s of money) … basic stuff like that.

Considering the small number of dives I did so far (getting closer and closer to 50) it feels good to know that people believe you are actually the divemaster with (at least) two or three times as many.

evidence below as usual but let’s try the new slideshow feature

and the  alternative link in case it doesn’t work as it should.