Not much going on here…

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!