Brighter Days!

Shortest Day of the Year
On the Solstice I took advantage of the rare sunny day to run up Smarna Gora (676m).  I had to stop and walk from time to time, but still made it from the trailhead to the bell in 25 minutes - not lightning speed, but my new personal best.   The views at the top were amazing!



Change is good... eventually
We've been in Slovenia a little over 4 months now.  It's been a positive, but very challenging, experience.  I've been overwhelmed by all the new stuff - new language, new job, new city, new culture.  I miss blue skies and really miss our friends and family.   But there have been moments when the sense of adventure eclipsed the stress, and those precious moments are getting more and more frequent.

This week two great things happened.  First, school is out for 3 weeks!  We had a good semester, but everyone was ready for a break.  Second, we have family in town to spend Christmas with us.  Yay!


 
We showed the cousins how we get milk from the Meklomat.  Yum!


Of course we brought everyone to one of our favorite sweet shops, Zvezda.


Later we visited the impressive Postojna Caves.  You take a train into the caves, then there's a 45-minute walk once inside.  They are truly the biggest caves I've ever seen.  But this time of year, they're even more special because every time you turn a corner, there's a live nativity scene, with music, dozens of actors, elaborate costumes, lights, sound effects, burning incense, Angels floating through the air and even an aerial silk performer.  Bizarre and amazing all at once.

  

Minor Frustrations

These happy things help me deal with the trivial frustrations of living abroad.  Like not being able to read any signs or understand the radio.  Like no postage stamp machines. Like trying to get a mattress delivered by Rutar.  

"Why do you keep postponing delivery?  

"We are so busy."

"Why don't you hire more people this busy time of year?" 

"This isn't America."   

Luckily, with help from some very nice Slovene customers, we stuffed both mattresses into the back of our small car.  Problem solved!

 

Efficient Ljubljana

Tonight we had a lovely leisurely dinner at one of our favorite Slovene restaurants, Spajza.  After dinner, the car nowhere to be found.  Turns out I had parked in a resident-permit only spot, ambiguously marked by yellow, not white, stripes.  Very hard to discern in the dark!

  

One taxi ride later, and 100 Euros poorer, I've learned another lesson.  

Exhilarated and Exhausted

So it's been 4 months of a steep learning curve, but I'm started to get the hang of things, starting to feel more comfortable, more competent - at work, at home, running errands.  

Georgia and Dahlia are great role models for living in the moment.  For 2015 I resolve to be more like them!

Gym Update

When you last heard from me I had given the old Yugoslavian "olympic" gym a try: http://ouryearinslovenia.blogspot.com/2014/09/pomilujem-sibka-americanski.html.  Some questioned my fortitude.  Would I stick it out in that harsh location?  The short answer is no.  If scary old equipment and harsh lighting makes one strong, I will have to settle for weakness!

The search for the right place resulted in a bit of a Goldilocks problem.  The NEXT nearest gym to our house is the 4P fitness club.  If the Olimpijia gym was too severe, the 4P was way too slick.  It's in this big, empty office building (sure sign of the burst Slovenian bubble: an almost empty, brand new office building) and has all new and shiny equipment.  The people who work there are aggressively ripped and good looking, as were most of the clients.  Here's the advertising on the side of the building:

Tragically, those two are actually emblematic of who comes to the club.  Weirdly, the second ad features a guy in a big wig with DJ headphones and a Borat swimsuit next to the same female model:

No idea at all why.  Here's a shot of the sad "for rent" sign. I'll do a post on the busted bubble some other day, but memo to banks: never loan money to build a "Mega-Center" office building 10 minutes from downtown and 10 minutes from anything else of use if your only tenant is the 4P fitness center:

The gym is nice, but plays deafening EDM on a loop and often has a long line of ripped and surly guys blocking the squat rack.  In short, not ok for me.

I finally found a gym that was "just right," the gym in the University of Ljubljana Faculty of Sport.  It has a 25 meter swimming pool and a small, but functional, weight room/fitness area that has a nice mix of professors and students and is never very crowded.  I mostly go in the morning and at that hour it actually reminds me a bunch of the gym at UT, which suits me fine.  And don't worry too much about me getting soft.  The gym has a bunch of inspirational photos on the walls to keep me strong:

 And yes, that is Arnold Schwarzenegger and Loni Anderson in evening wear.  If there is anything more inspiring than these three photos, you will have to show it to me!

A 10 year lag on the internet economy?

One thing that is super noticeable here in Slovenia is that the internet economy is running on a significant lag.  Examples?  Ljubljana is packed with bookstores.  Here are a bunch of pictures of bookstores, all within a 10 minute walk of the law faculty.  There are Barnes and Nobles style new bookstores and Antikvariat stores (antique books) and everything between.  Some are super likable, like the "House of Dreaming Books:"

Some are lovely at night:

 Some are filled with the coolest old books:

Some are small Barnes and Nobles type places selling new books:

They even have cd shops and video stores!

To an American this seems crazy.  ALL of these businesses were crushed by Amazon, iTunes, or EBay years ago in the USA.  And yet here they are, all in close proximity to each other in downtown Ljubljana.  

I have no photo of one more piece of evidence.  In more than one gas station I have seen porn magazines stacked along with newspapers and Slovenian gossip magazines.  Physical pornography!  At one of the places I actually got out my phone to take a picture and was shooed out by a scandalized clerk.  I tried to explain that it was "for my blog," but unsurprisingly that did not help much.  But seriously, an actual real live magazine!  Another business model that the internet killed 5-10 years ago.

There are at least two possible explanations for this.  On the one hand maybe Slovenia is just on a short lag.  It is a small country with a hard language, so maybe internet entrepreneurs are taking their time getting here.  But time waits for no one, not even Slovenians.  

I gave a presentation to Slovenian lawyers, judges, and students about the internet and legal services and a Slovene student noted that Slovenian was a weird language and that Slovenia was a "different" country, and that people would never pay for a computer lawyer when they could have a real one.  I noted that right there in downtown Ljubljana at some point in the nineteenth century a group of tailors were sure that factory made clothes would never catch on in Slovenia.  Slovenian styles were different than German or French, and that Slovenian people were different and would always want tailored clothes.  This was a particularly American response I thought.

But maybe, just maybe, people here value things differently.  Take a look at this photo of fresh apples from the Market:

And here's the old man who sells them:

This guy has been selling apples in the market in Ljubljana for fifty years at least.  And his Dad did so before him.  I know there are Farmer's Markets in the US, but the market in Ljubljana is where regular people shop, not just fancy farm to table people.  It is a part of an uninterrupted history of small farmers selling directly to people, a history which ended in the USA in the 1960s and was only revived on a boutique basis recently.  Maybe this little piece of Europe is just more interested in hanging on to some things like fresh fruit and books and CDs and video stores.  

Or maybe the internet will swallow a bunch of this stuff eventually regardless.  I can tell you that a book from Amazon reads the same as a book from B. Dalton, while this guys apples crush American supermarket apples, so maybe only the best will survive.

Thankful in Ljubljana

We had some firsts yesterday.  It was the first Thanksgiving we have not spent with either my extended family or Indya's.  It was also the first Thanksgiving I have ever had to work.  I teach on Thursdays and am canceling class three times over Christmas (when they continue classes with only two days off for Christmas and one day off for New Years!), so I just couldn't pull the trigger and cancel again.  We let the girls stay home from school, but poor Indya trooped off to teach as well. My parents and my brother and sister-in-law and my niece and nephew are ALL coming over for Christmas and New Years, so Thanksgiving was bound to be one of the lonelier days of this year. 

We actually had a great Thanksgiving dinner hosted by U.S. Embassy folks and attended by Slovene and American families.  We had roast turkey and cranberry sauce and the cornbread sausage stuffing I made, so the food was great and pretty traditional, and the company was excellent (and of course the wine was better than we drink at my family's house!). 

But still, it wasn't the same as a family gathering.  I think it is safe to say that it is one of the days we have been most homesick since we got here, especially Dahlia who is a tradition hound.  Just last year my whole family came down to Knoxville and we borrowed a deep fat fryer for the turkey and then made some french fries in the turkey infused gallons of grease.  Mmmmmmmm grease.

Regardless, being away for a year is a sharp reminder to be ever grateful for what we left behind.  We have had some great talks about returning to the USA with open eyes, extra grateful and more aware of all of the amazing people, places, and things we have surrounded ourselves with at home in Knoxville, Tennessee.  we are always big on expressing a list of our "thankfuls" at Thanksgiving.  This year we are grateful not only for this year's adventure, but also that we get to go home at the end!  It's a funny lesson for Thanksgiving to remember to be thankful for what you don't have, but it's a good one.

China and America in Slovenia

This is a picture of the Chinese Embassy in Ljubljana.  It's a converted large single family home in a residential area about 10 minutes from downtown Ljubljana. It has a flag and some cool round windows, but it is remarkably low profile.  I only spotted it because I sometimes bike past it when I am going to the indoor swimming pool.  It's a weirdly small and out of the way little spot and I'd passed it three or four times before I figured out what it was.  For comparison purposes, we live in a different residential area also about 10 minutes from downtown and the Romanian embassy is around the corner from us:

Weird, right?  The Romanian embassy is maybe not quite as nice as the Chinese, but they're remarkably similar.

The US Embassy, however, is a different animal altogether.  Right downtown, it is accross from the Museum of Art and the Museum of Slovenian History and a 5 minute walk from the Parliament and all of the relevant government buildings.  It is the star of embassy row and is right next to the German Embassy in a beautiful old building:

Here's me and my family in front of the massive Embassy Seal after we met with the Ambassador (one of the Fulbright perks!):

America has a massive footprint in Ljubljana.  Believe it or not I've heard the US Ambassador on the morning drive radio show TWICE in the three months we've been here, telling jokes in English with the Ljubljana morning zoo.  He's in the newspaper all the time.  

And of course almost everyone under 40 speaks excellent English and many American tv shows and movies are aired here in English with Slovenian subtitles. I see American brands and American language and American styles everywhere I go. This does not mean that America is 100% popular.  To the contrary, there's a bunch of grumbling that comes with being so high profile.  

But it is super weird for me that China is comparatively so low profile.  In America we are continuously interested in, and worried about, China and its meteoric rise.  It's almost like Russia and Japan from the 1980s rolled up into one, with better food (at least better than Russia).  I guess Slovenia is a small country without a lot of useful natural resources, so why would China care.  But still, being here is a reminder that China has a ways to go if it wants to be a global superpower. 

It is also a reminder that the EU is a much more protected market than the U.S.  I've heard a bunch of complaining here about cheaper labor in Croatia or the Czech Republic or Estonia, but almost nothing about Chinese labor costs, which I feel confident are waaayyyy lower than any country inside the EU.  Maybe there are strengths to having that kind of protected market, although Slovenia and the EU are pretty clearly in the economic doldrums right now, so it's not the best time to make that argument.  To the contrary, the idea that the biggest threat to middle class workers in state owned industries in Slovenia is Croatia (or any other country in the EU) is a deep misunderstanding of international labor economics.  But that is a post for another day.   

An American Dog in Slovenia and the Joys of Being Local

When we decided to move to Slovenia for the year we struggled hard with whether to bring our dog Bobo with us.  He's a huge sweetheart and a member of the family but it was going to be a large expense and massive hassle to bring him.  How big a hassle?  We would have to fly to Munich rather than directly to Ljubljana, because we needed to fly only on planes with a pressurized cargo hold, i.e., only huge planes.  Also, the Fulbright program would only pay for tickets on a US flagged carrier, so we had to fly on a codeshare Lufthansa/United flight, and Air Adria (the Slovenian airline) did not count.  Also, we needed to get him a doggie passport, which included another round of rabies shots and a new, international standard i.d. chip, and of course all of that had to be done within ten days of our flight, so the USDA could stamp "approved" on the reams of paperwork.  The USDA office conveniently located in Nashville, mind you.

And of course there was the question of whether Bobo would even want to come.  His "B" option was pretty solid: he could stay with our (and his) best friend Tina, who is like a second mother to him, and miss a transatlantic flight in a crate.

When push came to shove we could not leave him.  We knew moving to Europe would be hard for the girls, and nothing makes a rental in a foreign country homier than bringing your dog.  Here's Dahlia and Bobo as proof:

Bobo has been great.  He's missed Tina and all of his doggie buddies from Knoxville, but he's got a whole new round of sniffs and spots to pee on.  He also has a new favorite place to walk/swim: Koseve Pond.  It's a 20 minute walk or 7 minute drive from our place, on the north end of Tivoli Park.  It's a pretty spectacular spot.  On an early morning it is often empty, with gorgeous fog on the pond.

 It's got this big wooden deck that can be quite crowded on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

It has this modernist apartment complex behind it:

And an AMAZING view of the nearby foothills of the Alps.  and yes, that's Bobo out there chasing a tennis ball that I've thrown:

But the main reason we love it is because Bobo loves it.  Here he is awaiting a toss into the pond:

And here he is swimming:

It turns out it is sort of weird for a dog in Slovenia to be so into swimming and fetching.  If the park is crowded and I start tossing the ball for Bobo we draw a legitimate crowd that oohs, aahs, and even giggles as Bobo jumps headlong onto the water and swims as hard as he can.  Here's a Mom videoing Bobo while her son leans in for a better view:

Bobo does have some natural enemies though.  There is a pretty tough gaggle of geese that do not care for Bobo's interloping.  Here they are on land hissing:

Even more frightening was this battle formation as they swam towards Bobo in the pond:

Seriously, they swam very aggressively right at Bobo and only turned around when I almost hit their fearless leader with a rock.  Bobo was, needless to say, totally oblivious.  he even started swimming towards the swans to check out the splashes my rocks made.  Safety first for that dog.

And by the way, because Slovenia is super into exorcise, the park has a little area of exercise machines.  When Georgia comes with me, she takes advantage:

And of course Indya needs NO equipment:

Dahlia just comes and looks fashionable, wearing her pink boots, my jacket to stay warm, and her fake Elvis Costello glasses:

The great thing about this little pond is that we NEVER would have found it even if we'd spent a month in downtown Ljubljana.  The only reason we found it is because we're local and we're here for a while.  Aaahhh the joys of being local.  Yes, it's been quite a find for all of us.  Georgia captures the spirit of the place quite nicely: