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Brežice, a place of mystery           Photo: Water tower in Brežice, Bine Leben, 20.1.2024     Travel writing from the University of Maribor, Faculty of Tourism. Masters Programme: English in Tourism – Higher Level 2    Author: Teja Leben     Mentor: Dr. Jasna Potočnik Topler     Brežice, a place of mystery     Already from afar, after the highway exit for Krško from the direction of Ljubljana, I notice the silhouette of Brežice, highlighted by the Water Tower and the bell tower of the Church of St. Lovrenc, which I read about before the trip. Both rise above the houses and grove of the old town. Otherwise, you can also see a few taller high-rise buildings next to them, but very few, so even from a distance it can be concluded that Brežice is a small town. I am on the right track, as I would like to discover something more about Brežice and share it with the world.     ...

Fieldwork in Brežice, Slovenia Our first day of fieldwork was Monday 15th May 2023. We made a planned walk into town along Old Justice Street, Ulica stare pravde , and made a stop at the water tower, Vodovodni stolp Brežice. The weather was brightening all the time after a couple of rainy days. The Posavje I made my first visit to The Posavje Museum in Brežice just before 5 o'clock on Tuesday 16th May 2023. That was my reconnaissance visit aiming to look in almost every room for first impressions and to see if any artefact would stay in my memory for later detailed investigation. I also had in mind the painting from the museum's web list, of the hay-drying racks and buckwheat in flower by Miroslav Kugler because we had discussed that on the dialogue platform before my visit to the university tourism faculty. Alas, I could not find Kugler's painting but I wanted to keep moving rather than make a focussed study at this initial stage. An Ellipse of Plateaus On Wednesday ...

Hand-drawn Maps In our tourism research project on Brežice, Slovenia we reached the stage of hand-drawing route maps on which to create a hexis for later literary travel writing by the end of March 2023. We were still in the first phase of the process, which in our tourism textbook for travel writers and place-branding we call 'Step 1. Deep-mapping', Table 5.7 page 96.  The processual approach, where we work via dialogue journaling, began to yield up two emerging findings. One, which I will expand fully here, is the unknown town syndrome, and the other is linked to Paul Rabinow's (2007) Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco . It is the point where Rabinow develops Paul Ricœur's idea that meaning is discovered in what follows an event.   Even though I’ve been thinking about Brežice for a long time now, it is still unknown to me, and to the readers of this blog. How do the tourist office there tell English-speaking people from Britain or the US that their town of just 6,800...

An Unknown Town On 20th February 2023 we started the process of deep-mapping from our tourism textbook (1). A team of young professionals in Slovenia began with Step 1, the Library investigation of the town of Brežice. Yes, for readers in Britain and the United States, Brežice fits the category of 'the unknown town'. Where is Brežice? And how can an English speaker even learn to say the name of the town? Our First Workshop for Travel Writers Our first workshop was to write about heritage. Underlying the training of new writers is the need to build confidence in the new writer's own emotional response to cultural artefacts when they encounter them. To that end we looked first at jpegs of paintings from the region around the town. This elicited stories in that past tense in English which does not really have a formal name in grammar, it is the used-to tense. It's rather like the imperfect in French. Listen to this from Kaja:          'The picture reminds me o...