Impressions

Today marks our two-month anniversary here.  Crazy.  We knew the time would fly, but we are only two weeks from the half-way mark.  It's going much faster than we ever imagined.

Someone asked us the other day what we missed the most from home.  Believe it or not, there isn't much.  Life here is simple, but nice.  We have to do a little more manual labor -- for instance, clothes dryers haven't caught on here yet, so everything has to be hung to dry (it seems as though the general take on dryers is "we've lived without them this long, why do we need them"...kind of like my parents and cable tv).  We also have to go to the market just about everyday given the size of our refrigerator and we walk pretty much everywhere we go.  However, in a way these things make life more relaxing: we know nothing is going to happen very fast, so it's tough to get impatient.

Something else that's struck us is the general stock people here place on trust and doing the right thing.  We experienced it right when we got off the plane:  our taxi driver couldn't fit all of our luggage in his van, so he simply said he would leave half of our luggage there on the curb, under the watch of another cab driver who happened to be standing there, and deliver it later.  And off we went.  And our luggage was delivered an hour later.  A day or two later, we got some soup from a small restaurant to take home for dinner...they put it in some plastic containers and said nonchalantly, "Just bring these back tomorrow," as if it never crossed their mind that somebody might not do that.

The most significant example from our standpoint was when we left Chantelle's duffel bag at the train station in Ptuj.  When it didn't arrive on the train in Ljubljana the following morning, the Ljubljana station director was visibly perturbed.  He apologized that someone had told us this would happen and didn't follow through on it.  He also said, "It is your bag and we need to get it back to you," even though it was completely our fault, and he took it upon himself to arrange for its delivery.  He actually took my phone number and called me later in the afternoon to tell me which train it would be on.

It's difficult not to like a place when you have those types of experiences.  And life isn't bad when your biggest complaint is having to stay up all night to watch college basketball.  From our perspective, this is a very easy place to live.