My Bleddy Fears

Water travel makes me nervous. One, I cannot swim. Two, when I travel international, I not only carry my camera gear, but my passport too. That summer, two years ago (when I did this trip), three passports had changed hands (the stolen, the intermediate, and the new). After debating about whether or not to take the boat ride in Lake Bled, I decided to give it a shot. I sat tight, clutching on to my bag and chanting some permutation/combination of God's name in a loop. However, people around me aren't perturbed a bit. They are in this urgent need to take selfies, and every time someone shifts, the boat slightly shifts too, giving me many butterflies in my stomach. The children are leaning out and difficult to control, as usual, the parents have kind of given up, and the guy rowing the boat tells us that the lake is only 31 m deep. Only? Even 31 feet is going to make me nervous. People are changing angles to take pictures of the lake, tempting me to ask them if they have never seen a lake before. But the father of a family of seven (parents and 5 children) take the cake. Ten minutes into our ride, he decides to play music on his handheld device. Céline Dion starts singing her Titanic song. Shit, this is a bad omen, I tell myself. God, please don't let me die like this, due to a capsized boat in Slovenia, of all places...

sunshine