Three weeks in Slovenia….already

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 😀