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!
Walking on Moss 
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