The three bevandas and the sea

Although this post is part of our Cross Balkan Blogging exchange, it technically doesn’t come from the two opposite ends of the region, as – due to an auspicious development of events, Ekaterina was able to join the two Melinas in Slovenia again.

This time, the three of us went to Izola for the Kino Otok film festival. In addition to the main reasons we were there – the two Melinas as volunteers and Ekaterina as a participant in the Happy Camera workshop, we also decided to take part in the Isola Cinema Photo Contest.

Since we were already taking pictures all the time, we though we could easily “return the town its gaze and try to make the winning photo of Izola and its people,” as the competition announcement rules specified. In addition, we also made our own rule (which we fulfilled with varying success) – that the pictures should show Izola, its sights and people in a way that isn’t cheesy or too obvious.

These are the 11 pictures we submitted:

We sent all the pictures under the name trio bevanda, inspired by having spent the previous nights enjoying copious amounts of red and white wine mixed with water. In our case, the ratio was always 2:1, with the wine sometimes being 2 and sometimes 1, depending on our mood. But the final mixture was always glorious, not unlike the 2:1 varying relationship between us three – sometimes it was 2 Melinas : 1 Ekaterina, and sometimes it was 1 Melina : 1 Melina + 1 Ekaterina. (Funnily enough, in Slovenian, the term bevanda is used for the wine and water mixed drink, while in Italian the word simply means ‘beverage’).

And then, we started to wait. We obsessively checked e-mail for any response and carefully scoped out the other submitted photos published in the festival’s daily paper and on its website.

Quickly, we became a classic case of counting one’s chickens before they hatch. Or, as the saying goes in Bulgarian and perhaps more appropriately to our seaside setting, putting the pan on the stove though the fish is still in the sea.

Did I forget to say that the prize for the winning photo was a Canon EOS 550D camera worth several hundreds of euros? Fuelled by each others’ enthusiasm, we became convinced that one of the photos we submitted would surely win the competition. After some brief doubts about what to do with the prize we were certainly getting, we decided we would sell it and use the money to sponsor the trip of the two Melinas to visit Ekaterina in Bulgaria. Once that was determined, all we had to do was wait to see which of our photos would be the winner.

And then the crushing announcement came. Somebody else had, in fact, won the competition and was getting the camera, which was supposed to finance our great plans. Now, it seems, we would have to find a different (and more reasonable?) way to do it.