Being an ex-pat American living in Israel, I generally leave it to others to pontificate about the merits and demerits of Brexit, as in England leaving the European Union. I don’t pay much attention to the European Union period, at least most of the time. However, having an ‘open border’ does come in handy once in a while.

Day 8 of our cruise brought us to the very top of the Adriatic to the venerable city of Trieste, our next scheduled stop. However (a big ‘however’), the Golden Iris did not dock in Trieste, but in Koper, which is a half an hour bus ride away AND is in Slovenia (which is not the same as Slovakia). If you ask me why our ship couldn’t or didn’t dock in the port city of Trieste, I don’t know; it never occurred to me to ask, nobody else thought to ask, and nobody bothered to explain why. We just did, and that meant crossing the border between two countries, which at some time pre-E.U. might have meant the usual bureaucratic border control folderol. These days? You just keep going on the highway, and nobody thinks twice about it. Even the fact that we were using a Slovenian guide to show us around an Italian city didn’t seem at all out-of-the-ordinary. Continue reading →