Yes, my friends, it might be shocking but it´s true – Walking on Moss has reached the point when it does not make much sense to continue further. Why is that? Because we have reached home. We are back at the starting point, well, sort of, anyway. A few days ago me and Nar arrived to Brno in the Czech Republic, so I am back in my home country from which I started this nearly 2 year long European journey, which brought us to the southern tip of Europe (Portugal, including southern Algarve), near the polar circle (Finland and Sweden), to the lowlands in Holland and to the nothern edge of the Balkans in Slovenia. Our life here will probably not be extremely exciting (with Nar working full time from now on, and me hopefully too – perhaps after the summer), so I don´t think there would be a whole lot to write about…

But let´s go back to the last days in beautiful Ljubljana which we both miss so sorely, as it is one of the most beautiful cities (or, capital “towns” :-p) we´ve seen. Of course, we had to throw at least a little goodbye party, so we invited a bunch of our friends (Blaž and Eva, Goran and Julia – funny enough, all couchsurfers!) to the stylish teahouse Čajna Hiša. It was a nice evening with nice tea and nice company. I should note that Julia, a French girl, is also leaving Slovenia because she couldn´t find a job, or not a job that would pay enough…it´s sad, but at least now I feel that we´re not incapable :-p It simply is not easy to find a decent way to live in Slovenia if you´re a foreigner and not filthy rich 😦

We also met up with Ana, our landlord, in the café of Kino Dvor, she was the best landlord one could ever wish for, and we are so grateful for having been able to live in her beautiful flat!! Now there is an American guy with a Slovene girlfriend coming to “our” Ljubljana flat, so again it will be occupied by (a) foreigner(s) :-p But the guy already has a job, as an English teacher… one of the lucky ones 🙂

The last few days before our departure were incredibly stormy and rainy, with really strong pouring rain… The last Saturday market was no exception, we got thoroughly wet! But then the last evening before we left it was gorgeous warm sunny weather, perfect for our plan to go for a dinner to the Gostilna Pod Vrbo, a restaurant near our house with a beautiful terrace amidst maple trees. We had a reeeally yummy dish of grilled sea fish! And even a great fruity dessert and some Slovene wine (for me, at least) – something we don´t normally do, but oh did we enjoy that special treat! It was such a nice last evening, full of happy/sad feelings…

I can´t even express how much I despise packing, by the way!! It was waaaaay too early to be packing AGAIN, after only three months…so much work. It took nearly a week to slowly pack everything… On Friday 15th the mover guy was supposed to be there already at 7 a.m., so we got up at 4:30(!) to be able to still pack the last stuff and have a quiet breakfast, but then we got a call that he´s stuck in a traffic jam. He actually showed up at about 10:30. Then it was another hour to load all the stuff. It was a reeeeally hot day, not nice to travel. But we were happy nevertheless that we could go by car with him and didn´t have to pay extra for train tickets, and travel by train, with two changes and a lot more time spent… The journey was ok, except for the heat and for the fact that in Vienna we also got stuck for quite some time in a traffic jam (which made the moving more expensive in the end…). We arrived to our place at about 5:30, the real estate guy was already waiting there for us with the keys and the rental contract, and the owner´s wife with her little son came in a bit too. So we had to discuss all the official and practical issues, while the mover guy (together with a colleague of his who arrived to help out) moved all our many many boxes and other items – up 3 floors, without an elevator…They were really wet from sweat and no wonder, in the heat!! In the end this moving turned out to be more expensive than our moving from Holland to Slovenia, but at least we will get it paid from Nar´s job after 3 months of his working there…

The next day after our move we went to the Brno centre for a little bit of sightseeing and also to purchase our yearly public transport pass. The centre is not as cute as in Ljubljana and we miss the river promenade, but there sure are many nice old buildings, and the cathedral with the park is very nice too…We will just have to explore a lot still! In the evening we went for a short walk in our neighbourhood where there are many well kept family houses. We really really like the area, it´s incredibly green and quiet, with a forest just behind our house, with little garden cottages. We bought a map of the Brno surroundings so we sure must make a trip to the local forests and hills!

On Sunday morning we went to Bystrc, the neighbouring district, to a little farmer´s market near the Brno dam. There were unfortunately not many stands with veggies, but there were a few where we could purchase some vegetables, and the atmosphere was nice, very village-like, with some old grandpas playing Moravian folklore music 🙂 I also got a contact for farmers who do delivery boxes, so we will give that a try next week!

Yesterday was Nar´s first day at work – he works as a customer support representative for a big international company. Again, after Starbucks, working for Big Biz :-p But he seems happy with his colleagues, so hopefully all will go well! I will be searching for a job soon too, to be able to start working after the summer macrobiotic conference….

There was lots and lots of unpacking in the last days (also our landlords left a LOT of stuff here to sort through :-p), and buying stuff that we still need…. In our nearby OBI we bought two little foldable chairs so now we can sit and eat on the balcony with the gorgeous forest view 🙂 Of course I am also now on a mission of checking out all the local health shops and markets and farmer shops… The main Brno market at Zelný trh is quite big, but the variety is a bit sad, comparing to the Ljubljana market…better not to compare! But one can find some good local products there, you just need to watch out for the signs, because a lot of the produce is imported, it´s not really a farmer´s market…

SO….

I hope you enjoyed my blogging about the travels!! Now time for some more quiet sedentary life….right?? 😀

 

Yesterday it began. Again. After three months. Packing!! We still have a couple days to go before our move but I figured it´s best if we already start on it, so that we are not fretting last minute and can still enjoy ourselves a bit these last few days, and also can still meet some friends or make a trip. We purchased five more large moving boxes in Baumax, so it just MUST be enough. With every move the amount of our stuff is increasing, so it´s each time longer and less relaxed to pack 😦 So I really hope that we won´t be moving again anytime soon!!! In Brno we will have the whole weekend for undisturbed unpacking as we won´t have any internet connection until Monday when the UPC guys come :-p I guess that´s a good thing. We also probably won´t have a dining table for the first few days, but hopefully we will be able to buy a secondhand table which I found online!

Yesterday was also our last Saturday organic market, oh how I will miss it! It was very rainy, so it was not as enjoyable as usually, yet, it will be hard to part with the vast variety of vegetables and fruits offered at the central Ljubljana market, be it the organic or non-organic part. I know there is an outdoor market in Brno, but it cannot compare, sadly…

About a week ago I celebrated my (already 27th..) birthday, it was a very quiet celebration, just the two of us, nobody else… But it was very nice nonetheless! I made a sinfully wonderful macrobiotic cake – a blueberry tofu cheesecake, great success!! And not too sweet 🙂 For lunch we had a falafel sandwich at the local famous (and only :-p) falafel place and for dinner we went to our favourite Indian restaurant Namaste, yum!! And in the afternoon we finally went to see the Ljubljana zoo, which is reeeally tiny and has only around 40 species, but it was nice to see some live animals again. And most of all we enjoyed the children´s petting zoo, where you could walk among a bunch of farm animals which were very tame and (mostly) fond of attention and some cuddles. There were very tiny and adorable piglets there!! But only the older pigs actually liked to be touched. The zoo was a bit chaotic, with a map that was not too up to date, some animals were missing or in different locations, the tiger was unfortunately already dead 😦 And shortly after our arrival it started raining. A lot. But well… not everything can be perfect, not even on your birthday 😀

The day before my birthday we went to Kino Šiška concert hall to see a Megadeth concert. Nar was so excited to go see it. For me it was more of the thing “to do” – although Megadeth is not exactly my cup of tea, I do like some of their songs and it simply is a very popular band which has lots of energy that they transmit to the audience during their concerts, which is always a big experience. It was pretty crowded in the concert hall, but not unbearable. It was also nice to be able to go by bike there and back! Such a huge advantage of Ljubljana!

The most exciting thing though was our Friday trip to the magnificent Postojna caves!! We went there by train, which had about 20 minutes delay, so we had to walk reeeally fast from the station to be able to pick up our tickets (we paid them online in advance, but still had to pick up the physical tickets half an hour before the tour…). We managed just in time! There were sooooo many tourists there, unbelievable! That´s definitely the downside of Postojna, it is world famous, so it is to be expected, but still, it has this disneyland feeling to it, with the crowds and souvenir shops… Yet, the experience was SO worth this fuss! The tour took a whole hour and a half, first we went by a little electric train, then by foot and at the end again back by train. It was very cold inside the caves – only about 8 degrees, while outside it was nearing 30°C, huge shocks! I expected the caves to be cool, but they were beyond my expectations! We saw a couple of kilometres of the cave complex, which has about twenty kilometres in total, with enormous “halls” with stalactites and stalagmites of all sizes, shapes and colours (well, ok, grey, reddish or white). We had an English tour guide so we got to hear some information about the formation of the dripstones/caverns and also about the more new history. The caves were discovered in 1818 and ever since were one of the hugest attractions of Slovenia. Even the word “karst” has Slovene origin. So yes, I can definitely recommend visiting Postojna to anybody, though you have to prepare yourself for being just a member of a large group of tourists seeing the place together with you.

It would be really nice to still get to see the northern side of Bohinj lake (in better weather than last time!) but the weather forecast is not giving us much hope 😦 Anyway, back to packing……..

 

 

Yes, that´s correct, as I mentioned in my last post, it´s time to move on again…in a couple of weeks we´ll be saying goodbye to beautiful Slovenia and Ljubljana, and to our cozy little flat. We officially announced our departure to our landlord, I spent hours and hours online going through hundreds of ads for flat renting, and then finally I went for a couple of days to Czech Republic to see some flats with my own eyes.

I was very lucky to find a “prevoz” (carshare) with a guy who was going together with his friend to Brno, for a poker tournament, and he could take me to CZ on Wednesday and bring me back on Sunday. It was a bit hectic, but it was just enough time to see the flats (at least the few flats that we decided are worth checking out) and to pay a visit to my family.

On Wednesday we took off on a rainy cold morning, there was 4 of us – the driver, his friend, me and a Czech student of architecture who is doing an erasmus exchange here. The trip took 6 hours which was a bit longer than expected because we went through Kranj (where we had to pick up the Slovene guy) and Klagenfurt, and this route led through some winding mountain roads. It was even snowing in the mountains, in mid-May! But then most of the route was on the highway which went very fast. We arrived in Brno around 4 p.m., I had no clue where to go from the place in the centre where they dropped me off, I just knew the numbers of the trams I had to take to get to my friends´place. I immediately dashed to a bookshop to buy a map of Brno and the shop assistant helped me with finding my way to the tram stop which I needed. My friends Jakub and Veronika were already expecting me in their home, where I could stay for a night (together with their frog, loud hamster, worms and all kinds of other weird bugs :-p).

The next day morning I headed to the appointment for the first flat and I met up with my mom (who came from Prague to see the flats with me) in front of the house. It was an incredibly run down building which was supposed to be undergoing reconstruction soon, but meanwhile it looked like it will fall apart if you jump a bit on the floor or lean against a wall…too bad, because it was the flat with the nicest kitchen 😦 And the interior was quite nice… After seeing this flat we went for lunch to a macrobiotic restaurant (yes, a real macro restaurant!), really yummy! Though also very tiny… How I would love to work there…

In the afternoon we had 4 more flats to see, with different real estate agents, so that kept us busy travelling from one part of Brno to the other. One of the flats had very old furniture (and also a very old cranky owner, who actually kicked out one of the tenants, but it was not certain if she´s really leaving in time or not…), another flat was quite nice, but with a tiny kitchen with no daylight and almost no furniture (and it was in a family house where you would constantly be controlled by the owners…), and the next one was nicely equipped but without a laundry machine, in a very busy neighbourhood and again with a kitchen with no natural light….We started feeling a bit desperate. But luckily the last flat was really nice, on the edge of town in a very green rural area, in a well kept house, with a reconstructed interior of the flat, lots of equipment, great view from all windows, a fairly nice kitchen….The price was the highest from all the flats but well worth it, at least we believe so. So we decided to accept the offer. That saved us from having to stay in  Brno for one more day which would be really inconvenient (and there was basically just one more flat which I could see, in a village quite far from Brno). The new place is not in a central location like it is here in Ljubljana, on the other hand it is very close to nature and the connection with the centre is pretty good – there are a couple of trams which take you there in about 20 minutes… I am so curious how we will like it there, it will be so different!!

In the evening we managed to get ourselves on the bus to Prague, though it was kind of tight. But I was amazed how everything worked out in the end, even though at some moments it seemed to be a mission impossible to find a flat in just one day! The buses that operate between Prague and Brno are quite nice – the trip takes about 2 and a half hours, but you have your own little flat screen on the back of the seat in front of you, and you can listen to music, watch films or tv, play games etc. Pretty handy, there was even a nice film in their selection which I watched.

In Prague the next day I went for a macro lunch to one of the Czech macro teachers who cooks lunches every work day, also very tasty. Yet, Prague really needs to have its own MB restaurant such as the one in Brno…On Saturday me and my mom went to Písek to visit my grandma in the hospital, and then the next day I had to go by bus again to Brno, because the Slovenes were leaving from their hotel and were not at all going through Prague. I arrived to Brno very early, but at least I had time to chill for an hour in the beautiful central park and eat my lunch there. This time the journey took only 5 hours as we went through Graz and Maribor, the quicker way. And we even had time to stop at the incredibly crowded popular bakery in Trojane where there were tens of people standing in a queue for their famous donuts and other pastry! Never seen anything like that! Slovenes sure are obsessed with their food…

Meanwhile Nar had a bunch of interviews for his new job and he got his position confirmed, he should start on June 18th! Juts two days after my arrival to Ljubljana he left for Holland, for one week, to see his family and friends, and celebrate his grandma´s 90th birthday. So now I am here alone, enjoying some solitude 😀 I did however meet up with one Czech girl from Couchsurfing, we went for a little picnic to the lake in Koseze on the edge of town. And I also hosted a very nice British girl for one night, a fellow anthropologist. I very much enjoyed going on my own to the Saturday market, which was unbelievably busy because there was a presentation of the Prekmurje region with many stands with local foods and other products, and also some cool folk music on the stage. It was such a big event that the weekly organic market was moved to the conventional market, that never happened before :-p

I also had to find a moving company which would take our stuff to CZ in June, the price differences are indeed enormous! In the end we settled for a company which offered us a ride, very convenient, because getting to CZ in time from here by train is not easy at all… But I can already say that I am NOT looking forward to all the packing – again!! Too soon… 😀

 

Zagreb was on our top priority list of places to visit while we are living in Slovenia. And no, not because it is a nice city for sightseeing, I actually didn´t have too high expectations about the city itself (knowing it is not a famous touristy place such as some of the towns on the Croatian coast, for example), but there was one thing I NEEDED to see – the macrobiotic centre called Makronova with its chain of health shops, own publishing house, organic label AND a gourmet macrobiotic restaurant, all located in one street in the centre of the city! A couple of friends recommended me visiting this unique place as it is an institute with a pretty good reputation and the restaurant was supposed to be quite awesome as well. Unfortunately, all the classes that the Makronova offers are held in Croatian, yet I wanted to see what it´s like there.

It´s a great thing about living in Slovenia that in the morning you can just get up a bit earlier, grab a little backpack, head to the train station (by bike), travel something over two hours by train to Croatia, see the city for a day, and in the evening go back by train and bike home, arriving around midnight 🙂 Pretty cool I´d say! It´s so close everywhere from here! During the trainride there were some magnificent views of the Slovene countryside (and it was an area we were not familiar with at all, south-east from Ljubljana) and it was bright sunny weather, great for a trip. The only irritating thing were the numerous ticket and document controls, by both Slovene and Croatian train conductors and border police. But we actually managed to go abroad just with our ID cards, to my surprise. Croatia is not yet in the EU, but in many ways everything is arranged as if it already was a EU member – there are also EU flags all over the city, strange!

In Zagreb we headed immediately to the macrobiotic centre – first we visited the shop which carries quite a lot of macro items (besides your usual organic shop goods), we purchased quite a nice unyeasted bread there for a good price and a few other small things.  Then we went for lunch to the upstairs restaurant, which is really fancy looking, I even dare say – it looks pretty damn posh! We were actually really really lucky, because a couple days later we found out that in about a week the restaurant is closing due to relocation and will open in autumn!! We had a very tasty lunch menu (“macroplate”), which was definitely NOT a small portion (as is quite common in more fancy restaurants), followed by some very decadent vegan desserts (which I would not classify as very macrobiotic-style, but they were close to that, anyway). Let´s say we felt very well fed when rolling out of the restaurant!

Then we headed to the tourist information centre on the main square – the very busy Ban Josip Jelacic square with a rider statue of the famous count. At the infocentre they gave us a free city map and also a brilliant little pocket guide, also for free, with very good descriptions of all the interesting places to visit, with some more detailed maps included. Also the system of signs for tourists, throughout the whole centre, is incredibly well done. So thumbs up for that Zagreb! We visited lots and lots of local attractions – the main city cathedral (destroyed numerous times in many ways, but always rebuilt, even now they are reconstructing the building…), a bunch of other churches (which were mostly closed, unfortunately), we saw the parliament and government buildings, the very famous Stone gate – the only preserved gate leading from Lower town to Upper town (which is an important place of pilgrimage, as there is a little Virgin Mary chapel inside the gate with many people praying at any hour of the day), Zagreb´s medieval (and still functioning) pharmacy, the renaissance defense walls built against Turkish invasions, the Lotrščak tower (from which a cannon fires every noon), the Strossmayer promenade with a beautiful tree alley, the funicular leading from Lower town to the promenade (with is 66 meters it´s the shortest passenger cable railway in the world, it was out of order though :-p) and many other smaller sites. Among them was also the Dolac marketplace which is pretty huge with its fruit and vegetable, fish, meat, cheese and other sections, but it was unfortunately closing down by the time we managed to get there. Still, Nardo bought a little woven basket for his sourdough bread rising process 😀 It was a day of long walking and absorbing a lot of information, so in the late afternoon we sat for a while in one of the pubs along Tkalciceva (the most picturesque and touristy street), with a local Karlovačko beer – refreshing, but the beer itself is not too great! 😀

Since we knew we won´t get to Makronova anytime soon (if ever again) we also chose to have dinner there, this time from the regular menu, and again it was very good! After dinner we had a bit of time, so we spent part of it observing people from a bench in the beautiful old Zrinjevac park, contemplating what a great day it was. We are so lucky we can travel, in such moments you can fully realize it… Zagreb was definitely beyond my expectations – I can´t speak for the city as a whole, as we didn´t have time to see that much of it, but the old centre is truly charming. And the pace seems very relaxed, not too busy, which I like a lot. Would be nice to go there once again…

Meanwhile, I am preparing for a trip to Czech Republic next week, to see my family and most of all to check out some apartments in Brno, the city we picked for our future life (hopefully at least for a year or two). There are some that we would really like to rent so it´s better to go see them and possibly reserve them if they are to our liking. I am going on my own, using the Prevoz website again (going by carshare from Ljubljana), as Nardo will be travelling to Holland just two days after my arrival. I am only going to be away for five days. Wish me luck with the flat hunt!!

As we are now “free” (=not anymore searching for a job) we have actually plenty of time to discover this beautiful city and country, which is quite an awesome thing to do! In the meantime Nar is applying for jobs in the Czech Republic, but he has to pass several rounds of assignments/interviews, so it will take some time to have a confirmation of a job position…we have to wait patiently right now. Wish us luck! I will be applying for jobs too, but probably in person, once we´re there, aiming for work in a vegetarian/macrobiotic restaurant or health shop, that would be my dream job. But I think first I will go to the macrobiotic summer conference in Holland since that requires two weeks of my free time… So we´re back in the loop of searching for a suitable apartment, not my favourite thing to do, it´s reeeeally hard to find the perfect place with a perfect kitchen, in a nice quiet area, not very far from the centre, for an affordable price… 😦 We just have to trust fate again, that the right jobs and flats will pop up! Here in Ljubljana the first didn´t work out, but the second was great beyond our expectations and we will be very sad to leave our beautiful little apartment!

We are now aiming to see more of what this city has to offer, so yesterday we went for a walk to the local botanic garden. It´s the smallest botanic garden I´ve ever seen! Ok, there is a medium-sized greenhouse, but you have to pay quite a bit for entry, so we didn´t go there. But the rest of the garden is completely for free and it´s more like a cute little park with benches where you can sit in the shade of huge old trees or among beds of herbs or flowers. Really great place to go and relax.

We visited the Slovene ethnographic museum, too, on a day when the entry was for free (that happens once a month). There were 2 permanent exhibitions (one of them was only in Slovene and was a bit chaotic, but the second one had English texts as well and presented traditional life in Slovenia in the past, with all the collections of old furniture, work tools, clothes, religious objects etc.). The second exhibition was pretty large and quite fascinating! I always enjoy these classic ethnographic collections which bring you to the good old days when people knew a lot of crafts and could make anything with their own hands, often with beautiful decorations… We also saw one temporary exhibition about the Native Americans of the Orinoko, with many huge poster-size photographs and a lot of collected items from the daily life, pretty cool, too. And a big contrast after seeing the exhibition on Slovene culture of course :-p

We finally managed to see the Behemot bookshop in the former Jewish ghetto part of town, a very small shop with a nice artistic vibe and with looooads of really awesome books on anthropology, philosophy, psychology, history, but also organic gardening or homesteading. So bad I will never have the time (or money) to read all the great books I´d love to read!!

And another “finally” – meeting our friend Iza, who is one of the few people in Slovenia interested in macrobiotics. We had a drink with her at the Sax pub, one of the many pubs on the Gradaščica canal, just one minute from our house… A few days ago we hosted another couchsurfer, who was on a biking trip from Austria to Italy, stopping here for a night. We had great discussions (especially on organic farming and self-sufficiency) and we also went for an evening walk to town and to grab a beer at the riverside. Ljubljana is charming on warm spring nights, with plenty of people sitting outside in the cafés…

The last week or two we had some pretty hot weather here, with temperatures near 30°C, and also some strong showers and storms. I even had to go to BTC market to purchase a big wide hat, because I didn´t bring any hat here with me. Luckily I found a really cool cowboy hat, and I got a big discount from the very friendly owner of the stand (who even gave us a little handmade wooden souvenir of Slovenia, he thought we are just tourists passing by :-p).  It was a very good idea to get the hat because the next day we joined a couchsurfing trip to the Alps, to the Velika Planina plateau, and it was really hot that day with the sun shining bright! There was about 10 of us, we went with two cars. Me and Nar went with Igor (our CS friend who we know mostly from the language meetings) and one more girl from Poland. The trip was advertised by one of the Slovene CSers as a “really easy” hike, but we learnt (or got confirmed) that Slovene people are a bit crazy when it comes to mountaineering, they have some sort of mountain goat gene which causes that they climb steep mountains very fast without almost any effort! 😀 So, ummm, the hike was quite certainly the toughest mountain climbing I ever experienced. Even though we were not so high up (the altitude was around 1300 meters above sea level) and most of the paths led through a forested area, the mountainside was extremely steep. I wished I had the Nordic walking sticks that some of the people took with them (not the Slovenes though). Also the hot weather made it more tough. It took us over 2 hours to get to the top of the mountain ridge, from the bottom where we left the cars. But we were rewarded with wonderful alpine views from meadows dotted with beautiful wild flowers of many colours and with old traditional wooden huts which are typical for this location. We unfortunately didn´t have time to see the “main” wooden hut area on Velika Planina, but even what we saw was really awesome – check out the pictures for yourself in my gallery. Since it would take long to go down on our own (we started quite late with the trip, and we would also have to go back the same, very steep way) we decided to take the cabin car. That took only about 5 minutes :-p There were some quite spectacular views on the way down, but the cabin car was way too crowded and the windows were not so clean, so I just got a few glimpses :-p

Nobody really wanted to go home yet so we still went by car to Kamnik, the closest town, where we sat for a while in the local “slaščičarna” (café with a big sweets selection) and most people ordered some ice-cream or other treats. Me and Nar resisted the sugary temptations, ordering just tea and apple juice 😀 On the way back to Ljubljana, the sky got extremely dark and dramatic with a big storm brewing up. There were many lightnings cracking and finally a downpour of rain came. But we managed to safely get home, running from Igor´s car to our house in heavy rain, just a few meters, because he dropped us just in the next street  where he could park 🙂 It was a great trip, but also really tough for us who are not in such great shape anymore! :-p

Next week we might be going to Zagreb in Croatia  to see the city, but most of all to visit the famous Makronova macrobiotic centre which has its own courses, a shop and a restaurant and everybody keeps telling me that it is the Adriatic mekka of macrobiotics which I certainly must visit 😀 So next report most likely about Zagreb!

Two days ago we returned from our Italian minitrip, so I owe you a little blogpost about the experience 😀 Be sure to also check my gallery for pictures – there are plenty, maybe more than I should have uploaded…but anyway, enjoy!

On Tuesday we got up already at 5:30 a.m. so that we could start hitchhiking around 8 o´clock. A fellow couchsurfer/bewelcomer (Bewelcome is a similar site to CS) advised us how to get a ride from Ljubljana to Nova Gorica, the border town, as he goes this route himself pretty often and supposedly it´s very easy to do. Well, our experience was not so smooth, but in the end we DID manage :-p We first went by bus to the end stop of the line number 6, to a highway exit direction Italy, it was not too difficult to find the exact spot where people hitchhike from, there were even many footprints in the moist soil next to the road. We had a sign saying “GO” (abbreviation for Nova Gorica), so we were sure we´re doing everything the way we should be. It was a cold grey morning with a bit of rain at times, not too pleasant, and my hands were getting cold, holding the sign. We waited 55 minutes (we were thinking of waiting 1,5 hrs in total and then just opting for a bus or train) until finally one car stopped, with two Slovene guys who were luckily also going to Gorica. The journey took only one hour and we drove through some amazingly beautiful hilly landscapes, but also through heavy rain showers. We were not too happy about the weather, hoping it would get better at least the next day, as the forecast predicted… The guys dropped us at the Gorica train station from where we took an Italian bus which transferred us to the Gorizia train station, in just a few minutes (the towns are actually just one town artifically divided into two, you can´t at all see any clear border, just some signs in the streets showing you are already in another country). In Gorizia we had to wait about an hour for the train to Venice (we could probably hitchhike, but we were warned that in Italy that is not easy and also the weather was way too bad to stand outside). During the train trip there was again heavy rain, but also some sun…and when we arrived in Venice at the Santa Lucia station, it was already completely sunny and the sun didn´t leave us since that moment! What luck – we couldn´t have wished for more perfect weather! I did burn myself a little bit though 😀

In front of the station we met with a couchsurfer who offered us that we can leave our big backpacks at his place, just 5 minutes away from the station, extremely convenient (we were asking where to store luggage in a CS group on the website, where he replied to us – isn´t that amazing?). So we dropped off our backpacks there, taking just our small ones. We had a couple of hours to explore the city, as the guy needed to leave for Padova at 6 in the evening. That was great because so did we! Even in a few hours we managed to see a lot – mainly the Cannaregio district (with the Jewish ghetto, the oldest ghetto in Europe), but also a bit of Santa Croce and San Polo. I was very happy that I had my macro food from home 😀 I made simple brown rice sushi and black beans, plus I had some rice cakes – that way I could avoid buying the expensive and most of all greasy non-macro snacks :-p Nardo of course was very happy that he could be eating loads of pizza, as he didn´t bring any food with him :-p I managed to have my own food for most of our holiday – on Wednesday we had dinner at the popular Jewish restaurant in the ghetto (the food was reeeeally delicious, but – a lot of oil, my first oily meal during my 4-month healing diet…) and the next day in Padova we had lunch at an organic restaurant (I had a rice dish, very nice too, but also, VERY oily, I can´t believe how much oil the Italians use in ALL their meals! :-D).

We immediately fell in love with Venice!! I knew it would be a nice place to see, but I had no idea I would be so thrilled by the city! Of course, there are many parts which are just tourist traps, full of kitschy souvenirs and endless crowds, but at the same time there are really many quiet peaceful areas where you are (almost) alone and can fully absorb the history of this special place…At 5:30 we met up with our CS friend to pick up our backpacks and we travelled with him by train to Padova, where he went for work and where we had our CS host, for the two nights to come. Our host was a young girl, still a student, living with a bunch of other students in a shared flat. We had dinner together – my home food, plus I made a simple miso soup, from veggies that we got at a local grocer. Later that evening our host went for a party and she offered us that we can sleep in her own room, as she would be coming back home very late and her room would give us more peace to go to bed early than the common living room. We were definitely happy about that, because it was a long day!

The next day we made breakfast at the place, while everybody else was still asleep, and after 9 a.m. headed to the train station to catch a train to Venice as early as possible. Unfortunately, that day was liberation day of Italy, so the trains were very full, of Italian tourists all heading for Venice 😦 We were quite pissed that we picked a national holiday as the main day of our sightseeing, but there was nothing to be done…Luckily it was, again, mostly the main touristic sites which were heavily crowded, but there was enough of peace to be found on the side paths. Right after our arrival we bought a ticket for the water bus, “vaporetto”, which is a boat that serves as the only local transport in the city (yes, no cars or buses, the BEST thing about Venice, besides the architecture of course). We went for an about 30-minute boat ride, passing 15 stops, and we made loads of pictures of course. It was quite expensive, even this one single ride, but most definitely worth it, seeing the city from the water! We got off at San Marco, which is the most popular and significant square in Venice, with the San Marco basilica and the Doge´s palace and a bunch of museums and administrative buildings. Of course it was also the place where we didn´t want to spend much time, because it was incredibly full of tourists 😀 We didn´t even go into the basilica, because the queue in front was about 200 metres long which would mean maybe an hour or more of waiting – not worth it, in the scorching sun especially! It IS though the only church in Venice where you can enter for free, all the rest is paid…so we only saw the Venetian churches from outside. If we stayed longer, we would get a Venice card of some similar pass, but it would not be worth it for one and a half day of our stay… As you can imagine, we spent the whole day walking and walking, taking a million pictures…We managed to spot a cute little antique/art market which is otherwise not so easy to find. At the end of the day we were quite exhausted, and we were very happy to purchase some apples at a stand – it´s VERY hard to find any fresh fruit/veggies in Venice, as opposed to the hundreds of “gelato” stands…. After the awesome dinner (we sat outside next to the canal), around 7, we said goodbye to Venice and boarded the train to Padova, which was again very full.

Our host was out with her friends all day and came before midnight, so we didn´t get to talk to her much, we spent the evening planning the next day walk around Padova and reading our books (good idea to bring them!), waiting for the living room to become “free” so that we could lie down for a sleep (me on a couch and Nar on a mattress). The next morning after breakfast we sneaked out quite early again to see as much of Padova as possible – the city is rather busy, with a lot of traffic (contrast after Venice!), but the historical centre is very pretty. We saw a couple of less significant churches, the remains of the Roman arena,  the ghetto area, the Prato della Valle square (supposedly the second or third biggest square in Europe, it truly is enormous), basilica of Saint Justine (with the tomb of St Luke, the Evangelist) and most important – the basilica of Saint Anthony of Padua, which is a large cathedral containing the tomb of the saint. But for us the most interesting was the cloister complex with beautiful green courtyards, surrounding the large church. We spent quite some time exploring the maze. We also visited the central Padova market which is really huge, with a large fruit/vegetable section (we got some organic apples – hard to find organic produce here!) and an equally large indoor market with a lot of meat and dairy products and also some bakeries and typical Italian goods (Nar got a huge bread and I got myself some olives). Markets are always the place I want to see when I go for a holiday, the Italian ones are a real treat, with their beautiful artistic displays and the huge variety.

At 5 we went back to our host´s place to pick up our stuff and head to the bus station – earlier that day we asked how to get to the Padova Ovest highway exit, which was the place where we were supposed to meet our “prevoz” driver (we decided for the first time to use the “prevoz” service, which is a service run by the Slovene carsharing website, very popular thing). We had trouble getting any decent information about the best way to get there – the people at the station and tourist information offices (we asked at 4 places) told us each something a bit different. One of the ladies told us to take a bus to a bus stop from which it should be not too far to the exit, so we decided to try that as there was nothing else we could really do (googlemaps did not work for this case somehow). We went out two hours before the meeting time with the driver, so that we would have enough time to find the place – and what a good decision that was! When we asked the bus driver if the stop is near the exit he didn´t seem to understand us, so we just boarded the bus and kept looking outside to see where to get off. After maybe ten minutes a lady came up to us asking us in English where are we planning to go, that she overheard our question to the driver. She informed us that we are already quite far from the highway exit and that the stop where we want to get off is WAY too far from the exit, not a walking distance at all. We were a bit terrified. But it turned out that she was really an angel sent to us from above – like in a fairytale! She offered us a ride by car to the highway exit, so we got off with her at one of the coming stops and she took us in a few minutes to a parking lot at the highway exit, the only place where it was possible for us to stand and wait for the guy. We were incredibly happy about our luck, because otherwise we would have ended up in some village very far from the highway with no option of getting to the right place, because public transport simply does not come close to the exit! We had about an hour to wait, but that was ok, at least we knew that we are where we´re supposed to be. Around 8:15 our driver arrived, with 2 more people in the car, who were also using the prevoz. What bliss to be sitting in a comfortable warm car, heading to Ljubljana!! Of course, we decided that we WILL NOT agree anymore to meet up with somebody on the highway, that was not a good idea! 😀 But well, it worked out…in a bit over two hours we were in Ljubljana, safe in our home! It was a great great holiday! Just too short – we sure want to see more of Venice one day…

Well, there´s still not much going on when it comes to jobs (or more precisely – we are more and more convinced that trying to find a job here is just loss of  life energy :-D). We even had an appointment with a lady from EURES, which is a EU organization that helps with providing information about working abroad in general, giving advice both to citizens who wish to work in another country than their own and to foreigners who are looking for a job in the given country. The lady was very kind and friendly and she asked us to send her our CVs and to get in contact with another lady from the employment office (the EURES office is in the same building as the ESS, the Employment service of Slovenia), but basically she confirmed our impressions of Slovenia being a place where it´s extremely hard to find a job if you´re not a)fluent in Slovene, b) a student, c) wealthy enough to run your own business d) very lucky, because the unemployment rates here are increasing.  At least we now have clear conscience that we went to the office, which we were planning to do for  a couple of weeks already…

We got to do some more fun stuff though in the last days… Last weekend we went wwoofing to a little family farm some 20 kms from Ljubljana, in a mountainous area of great natural beauty. Incredible that it´s so close to the city, and such breathtaking sceneries! Sandi, our wwoof host, picked us up at our place (as he often goes to LJ) and drove us through winding roads to his farm near Litija. Sandi and his wife raise their three children, 2 teenage sons and a younger daughter, in a beautiful wooden house which is actually a reconstructed stable – we saw the pictures from the building process and it´s truly incredible what you can create out of a ruined old building! They live in the forested hills, in the corner of the village, with 2 donkeys, a pony, a bunch of chickens, three cats and a large Newfoundlander. We talked a lot about their simple down-to-earth lifestyle, about their trial and error farming methods (they moved to the country straight from the city without knowing almost anything about growing food), waldorf schooling etc. The weather that weekend was very grey and quite chilly, luckily there was not much rain – only when we were leaving it started to rain more. We spent the whole weekend weeding little “hills” of raised vegetable beds and another patch of the garden on a steep hillside, preparing the soil for new plants. Somehow weeding is very often the task for wwoofers, unfortunately it´s an inevitable part of farming 😀 But if you set your mind right, it becomes a sort of meditation when you can really switch off your mind and connect with your surroundings and the peace around you…On Saturday when our work was done we went also for a short walk through the pretty and very clean village with wonderful views of mountains and valleys. And we could pick our own stash of wild nettles, dandelions and some cabbage, to take with us 😀 There was a large consumption of dandelions at the farm! I certainly never ate so many dandelions as here in Slovenia – they´re really popular, which is a good thing, because they clean your liver nicely in this time of the year.

Too bad our own herbs are not doing so well, constantly fighting with mold 😦 Our apartment is just too damp and dark for them I am afraid…I had to completely throw away the dying chives and plant new seeds, so we´ll see if they come up…The parsley is doing quite ok. And the recently planted basil – meh…Trying to survive :-p We have a lot to learn about growing herbs!

We have recently decided that we really want to see more of Ljubljana, especially in terms of culture, so we went to our first cultural institution from the “list” – to the National gallery 😀 We were the only people there! Well, maybe except one or two other people (at least that´s what Nar says, I completely missed them…). The National gallery is nice, especially the section of Slovene art, covering the period from early middle ages until the half of the 20th century, is a beautiful collection, but to be honest, the lack of any famous painters in the (very small) European section of the gallery was a bit disappointing, if you are used to big galleries where you can always see a Van Gogh or Picasso…Here I didn´t know anybody :-p But we enjoyed this little gallery anyway.

We again met up with our friend Goran, who likes to regularly take us for walks around Ljubljana and show us all the stuff we are missing when we don´t go that much for strolls on our own – we really have to walk more, not only to know “our” city better, but also to get more fresh air and exercise…The weather is a bit crazy though this month! Truly April weather…some sun, but very often also storms with strong rain, and we even had some hail once. It changes every half an hour…But we are for sure getting plenty of rain after the very dry month of March.

Some days ago we also had an episode with broken tubes under our kitchen sink – they just fell down, something I have never seen before. Apparently they were really clogged up and too heavy… For two days (but not whole days, luckily) we had to wash our dishes in the bathroom sink, which was quite adventurous (or Nardo would say that it was very annoying, since he´s the one who does dishes :-D). But luckily our landlord´s boyfriend was able to fix it by getting the proper gel for cleaning out icky tubes.

This weekend we spent hosting our (already third) couchsurfers, this time even for two days and two nights. They were both Dutch, students from Delft, hitchhiking from Holland to the Balkan. I cooked dinner twice for all of us, so I got to practice cooking for more people, and the next day after their arrival we went to see the historical centre of town and the Ljubljana castle. Me and Nar were there last time in 2009 during our holiday, so it was nice to see the place again, there´s always something new to see because they install all kinds of interesting art exhibitions in the underground part of the castle (yes, Ljubljana castle has a very large underground part with huge rocks and some modern architecture which surprisingly fits in). There are also nice views from the castle, but unfortunately going up the lookout tower is expensive, so we didn´t do that…you still can climb up a bit at some spots though…After lunch we went all together to the “Experiment house” in Trubarjeva street which is a sort of hands-on experience museum of natural science. There´s over 50 experiments where you can use all your senses to get to know the world of chemistry, physics and biology, in a very playful way. There were a bit too many children all over the place and a lot of information to absorb, so I was pretty tired towards the end, but all in all it was a very interesting place to visit and we might go there some day again, to really take in all that it has to offer (and maybe we can pay more attention to the texts, which, for us, social scientists, are a bit overwhelming :-D). In the evening we played some card games with our surfers, and then on Monday morning they left for Bled lake. We are again getting plenty of CS requests (which we have to carefully select from), so there is sure some more hosting in our near future.

But for now it´s us who is gonna be using the hospitality of CS hosts, as tomorrow early morning we are off to our big Venice trip. We will be hitchhiking (hopefully) from Ljubljana to Nova Gorica, the town bordering with Italian Gorizia. From there we plan to take a train to Venice, where we should be meeting up with a couchsurfer who will store our luggage (and maybe also show us around). We are staying for 2 nights at a host in Padova (roughly half an hour by train from Venice), as in Venice itself it´s practically impossible to find a host. The next day of our stay we will have the whole day for exploring more of Venice and then on Thursday we will have a lot of time to see Padova, apparently also a town “packed” with cool stuff to see. We arranged a carshare to Ljubljana from Padova, for Thursday evening, so let´s hope that works out!! It will be our first experience with the popular Slovene “prevoz”, carsharing organized through the website of the same name. Report from Venice and Padova in the next post, so stay tuned!

I´m not lately too motivated to write into this blog, as there´s hardly anything to report 😀 So don´t wonder if there is some more silence from me in the next weeks, unless something memorable happens. Actually… maybe it will get better, because tomorrow we are off to our first Slovene wwoof farm, which is just some 20 km from Ljubljana, and where we are supposed to stay the whole weekend. It´s a Slovene family with 3 children (and it´s the place where our Bulgarian friend Bogdana was wwoofing last year). They should pick us up here in Ljubljana tomorrow morning as they are by accident coming to town. We are very curious about this experience, we haven´t wwoofed since Portugal and haven´t done any serious physical work since leaving Sweden almost a year ago! But god, I really am in need of being out in the fresh air, giving my muscles some exercise and absorbing some quiet and piece of the countryside! Let´s hope that it´s not a rainy weekend as the forecast says! Lately we were having some very rainy and cold weather, the temperatures even dropped to around zero some of the nights. It made us stay indoors a lot, which can be relaxing for some time, but honestly I am a bit fed up with it by now. Luckily today was mostly sunny again, so hopefully it could stay during the weekend!

We had only one “set” of couchsurfers since my last post (we first got loads of CS requests, but now it´s rather quiet again). In the end we didn´t host the German girl I was mentioning, but instead, the next day we hosted two Ukrainian girls, Ksenia and Ira, who were here in Ljubljana for a couple of days to meet Ksenia´s former classmates. We met up with them at the weekly couchsurfing meeting which we were planning to attend, for the first time, already before they contacted us. There were quite many familiar faces – among them our CS friends Eva and Blaž, and some people from the Language exchange meetings. It was actually quite a big bunch of people, we had a drink at the Green Space, which is a bar owned by a French couchsurfer, and the meetings take place there every Wednesday. It was quite fun, though a bit too many people so we mostly talked to the people we already knew, and I also chatted a lot with Ksenia. The next day the girls headed to town in the morning to do some last sightseeing and in the afternoon they had to catch a train to Vienna, from where they flew to Kyiv. It was again a short stay but a nice one.

Now it is us who is looking for a CS host – we thought that since we´re in Slovenia, it would be a shame not to make a trip to Venice which is just about 3 hours from Ljubljana, and we might not be so close to this famous city anytime soon…However, we had no idea it would be so difficult to find a host there! There are not too many couchsurfers and a lot of them are people who we would probably not have much in common with…There is still the option to stay in a hostel or at a campsite, but we have to consider the financial aspect, whether it would still be worth it. We´re also still thinking whether to use carshare (very popular way of transport here in Slovenia, loads of people advertise every day rides on the carshare website, thus saving some money on gas and helping out other travellers), or whether to hitchhike to Gorizia, the border town, and from there take a train, which would again save some money (even though the carshare is still quite a lot cheaper than “normal” means of transport). So let´s see if we manage…we wanted to go near the end of the month, but of course only if we find some good options for transport and accommodation…

Due to the weather we haven´t done much sightseeing or walks outside – we very much enjoyed going to the market early in the morning last Saturday though. Usually we head out around ten when the market is at its peak and way too crowded, but this time we were there already at 8 when some of the stalls were not even totally ready yet and it was very peaceful, and a bright crisp morning. We were also much faster with our vegetable errands! A few days ago we also went to the forested hills east from our part of town, to a place called Golovec. It was so nice to walk for a few hours in the spring forests with beautiful new leaves! Too bad we don´t know the area and there are almost no signs or marked trails, and also it was Easter Monday (and very sunny that day) so loads of people were in the forest besides us 😀 But it´s cool that there´s a lot of nature just within 15 or 20 minutes walk from the house. Check my gallery for pictures.

Our flowerpots with herbs were not doing well lately, still fighting with mold on the surface of the soil, despite our attempts to remove it 😦 But now the situation is quite stabilized 😀 We even planted some basil and the sprouts are coming up! We have to be really careful with watering plants in this flat because it´s constantly kind of damp here (probably because of all my intense cooking and the lack of sunshine in the flat).

Nardo recently succeeded in his big project – creating a sourdough starter and making homemade sourdough bread. He did a lot of research on the internet and then made his own conclusion 😀 I was actually quite amazed that it worked – creating a starter just from flour and water! At first the starter was not too active but after a week it had quite a lot of bubbles, a nice sour smell and it was expanding a lot in the glass jar. It had to be fed every 12 hours! Then Nar made the bread, the first one just after one rising of the dough (it was ok but a bit too dense and we also baked it for too long), the second one went through two risings and the result was much better – more porous and nicer tasting. Cool!! Now we are self-sufficient in our bread (as long as we can get flour, that is) 😀

As to our job hunting…it´s not really worth mentioning…With the dogwalking company it didn´t work out as in the end we didn´t find any solution that would be affordable for the company 😦 And I don´t know much where to search anymore, I spent a lot of time online looking for all kinds of possibilities. Nar mailed also a lot of hostels, again not receiving many replies. He´s also going to schedule an appointment with a Eures advisor, which is a EU employee who should advise people about working abroad, but from what I heard, it´s not too useful, as they also can´t really give you many tips…Lately we are considering whether it will be possible for us to stay here if nothing changes…Apparently, in the Czech Republic, it´s much easier to find a job as a Dutch native speaker (or jobs in English, as well). We have also been e-mailing with a Czech macrobiotic family which runs a small-scale self-sustainable farm, sounded like a wonderful opportunity (they were looking for two long-term wwoofers), but unfortunately we can´t just pack and go even if we wanted to…I feel we´re right now really at a crossroads, sorting out our priorities, our plans for the future, and we´re forced to be more realistic and less adventurous, now that we are facing such challenges that we didn´t anticipate (or not to this extent). I hope my next post will be more optimistic! 😀 If not job-related then at least thanks to some nice trips and farmwork!

Yes, another week has passed and we are both still jobless 😀 Nardo has sent out about a gazillion e-mails to all sorts of companies, with a very poor reply rate…I was focused on the interview that I was supposed to have last week, in the end it was rescheduled for today morning. My first success, at least some hope has appeared on the horizon! 😀 The interiew (with a dogwalking company that also runs a dog hotel, does dog training and behaviour correction etc.) went well and I´d love to get the job, but it seems that a lot of companies in Slovenia are struggling with the obstacles that the state imposes on those who would like to employ somebody 😦 So for now I still don´t know the outcome and am hoping that we (me and the lady) will figure out some solution that will work for both of us…

Meanwhile we were having a reeeeeally busy week when it comes to meeting people and we even hosted our first traveller guests through couchsurfing! Nardo met up on his own with a Dutch guy (from the village neighbouring with his home village :-p) who lives here for a couple of years, we had our friends Blaž and Eva over for dinner (we met Eva a month ago before her trip to Sri Lanka, but her friend Blaž we haven´t seen since our 2009 holiday!), we went for a short walk with Goran (and his Belgian friend) and we also had tea with Bogdana, a Bulgarian girl who is planning to relocate to Slovenia one day, as she fell in love with the country just as we did a couple of years ago. Bogdana found me surprisingly through this blog and only later we found out that we are both couchsurfing members and both wwoofers (she even wwoofed at a farm where we might be volunteering this month!). We had tea outside in a café at the Ljubljanica river, the best place to sit for a drink in Ljubljana, the river banks are full of cute cafés!

Since we updated the location on our couchsurfing profiles and put our status to “maybe hosting”, we get plenty of couch requests, usually every day we get one or two…it´s a bit overwhelming and naturally we have to say no very often. But sometimes we have the time and mood to host somebody – this Friday we had our very first guests over for one night, Nasko and his friend Monika, both from Bulgaria, who explored Ljubljana for a day and the next day headed to Maribor and later to Vienna and Prague… And tomorrow we will probably be hosting a German girl for one night. Nice to get to know new cool people, and most couchsurfers are pretty cool! 🙂

We also went to our first expat club meeting, a meeting of the “Internations” which was held in the Dvorni bar, a specialized wine bar in the centre (where I ordered tea, of course :-D). There were quite many club members there, from all over the world, and it was fun to share our experience of life and work in Slovenia. We even met some Dutch people, as usual! :-p But nobody was in the same situation as we are – pretty much everybody came to Slovenia already having a job arranged, and often for a specific time period, such as two or three years, some of them even receiving a salary from their home country. So none of them could really relate to the lifestyle we are living here at the moment, which is, in the eyes of most people, pretty adventurous 😀

I really hope that after Easter we will manage to go wwoofing again, after a year and a half (our last wwoof experience was in Portugal…). We already contacted a couple of farms and one of them looks very promising, plus it was recommended to us by Bogdana who worked there last summer. Luckily it is a farm located quite near Ljubljana, so we won´t have to travel far. We miss gardening and animals…and just being in the countryside again! Nardo was really obsessed lately with getting some indoor plants, so one day we went by bus to Obi and got four pretty plants in flowerpots which made our place so much prettier! I really hope they survive here, as the apartment is not sunny. Our parsley in the flowerpot is doing quite ok, but I am not sure our chives will survive 😦

Be sure to check my gallery for some pictures of our neighbourhood that we took yesterday – we decided to finally grab our Lonely planet tour guide and see the places that are listed in the “Trnovo” section (which is the name of our area). We walked through some picturesque old streets (with houses with large flower and vegetable gardens attached) and explored the Roman wall from 15 A.D. which is quite long and there are some pillars and other stone objects to be seen (together with some more modern additions by the Slovene architect Plečnik and some sad cases of vandalism).

One afternoon we also went to read under a blossoming pink tree in the Tivoli park – the weather here is almost all the time very warm and sunny (we had temperatures over 20°C for a couple of days). Spring has come very rapidly this year and it´s so so beautiful. At the same time I´m worried because it hardly ever rains and that can´t be good for the nature…

Well, hopefully next time I´ll be reporting about some progress in our job hunt!! For now – the programme is enjoying springtime 😀

 

Yep, you read that correctly, our intense two-week Slovene language course is over…It was overall a great experience, with great teachers, and I must say we both miss it. It was a little bit overwhelming, going to the course every single workday to spend three and a half hours there, and every afternoon we had a fair amount of homework, but thanks to that we were trully immersed in the language and we managed to learn an impressive amount of Slovene in a very short time. At the end we received cute participant certificates, although we didn´t have to pass any final exams as they do in the longer courses :-p Now we have basically two options – continuing on our own with the book from our course (which we didn´t finish and there are also some exercises that we skipped), with our “old” Colloquial Slovene book, plus I have a book for Slovene language students from the Czech Faculty of Arts; OR we can arrange some private lessons, possibly with our teacher from the course, if she has time to teach us privately… Hopefully we will get more information about that next week. But one thing is certain – if we don´t study every day at least a bit, we will not keep up the level we achieved (and improve it)…

Last week we sort of finalized our settling in the new apartment by purchasing a double bed for our mattress (I mentioned last time that the bed here was too short). We thought we would buy a secondhand bed frame, but that didn´t work out in the end, so we just went to a Jysk shop at the BTC centre and got a very well priced bed from real pine wood, a good deal I´d say! We´re very happy to be lying on our mattress without it sinking into a second mattress underneath, which was very uncomfortable! 😀

Last weekend we really wanted to go for a trip to the nature and get out of the city, unfortunately we picked the worst possible day of all – the ONLY day when it was truly ugly, during the two weeks we are here 😀 In the morning it was grey and cloudy, but we thought it might get better, and that in the Alps it might be fine. So we went by bus to lake Bohinj, which is already in the Triglav national park. The bus goes there 2 hours, but it´s a very nice trip towards the end, as you also pass the beautiful Bled lake and many cute mountain villages. But already during the bus ride it started raining and when we arrived to Ribčev Laz (located at the eastern tip of the lake) it was raining quite steadily and heavily. We went to the local tourist centre and bought some very cheap simple raincoats (we didn´t bring any…) and after having a cold lunch (with rain spraying us under the roof even), headed out into the rain. Luckily it stopped raining after maybe half an hour, but still it was cold and windy. The scenery was pretty though in spite of the grey weather, with a lot of mist rolling on the mountain tops and we took some pictures. We went only about 5 km, to the western tip of the lake in the village of Ukanc. Unfortunately we didn´t pick the nicest route (though probably the least wet one), the path ran along a road where cars were driving….hmmmm…what a day of bad decisions 😀 At least we got some good mountain air into our lungs and got some exercise, so it wasn´t a complete waste of time, but it wasn´t worth the money we invested into the trip 😦 Next time – Bohinj only in sunny weather and choosing the path on the northern shore, where there is no road!

The first week we didn´t manage to go to the regular Thursday language exchange meeting, but last week we went, and there were some people we already knew from last time and one new guy from England. We didn´t discuss Slovene too much, but we did talk a lot about searching for jobs in Slovenia and about the horrible bureaucracy here :-p On Friday our friend Andreja came for dinner, we haven´t seen her since our holiday in Slovenia back in 2009 (when she hosted us for a couple of days in lovely Piran at the sea). And today Jelena, our friend from the health shop, stopped by for lunch, together with her husband. Also next week we will be busy – probably again the language exchange meeting, maybe a regular Couchsurfing meeting, Nardo is meeting up with a Dutch guy (who grew up in the village next to his home village!), we have an Internations (expat) meeting on Tuesday and Friday we will probably be hosting some couchsurfers (our first time of hosting!). A lot of social action, yup.

Everything is going really well here, and we are enjoying the life here…all except for job hunting 😀 Nardo has an interview tomorrow and I might have one too soon…more about that next time…please think of me, of us both 😀 We need some luck right now.

BUT hey, the weather is gorgeous here, I can´t believe we´re getting so much sun! 😀