The Last Lasko

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” – Mark Twain

I saw this quote the other day and it’s made me think a lot about our three stints in Ljubljana.  We arrived here in January of 2011 with strollers, diapers, and the simple hope of surviving five months here, and we leave tomorrow with three kids who will be in school full-time come September and the realization of how blessed we have been with the opportunity to spend eight of the past thirty months here.

As we walk around Ljubljana now, it doesn’t take much to spark the memories.  Usually, they’re goofy little things from our early days, like walking forty-five minutes to get a tax ID number only to find the office closed and then Celia wetting her pants on the way home.  But, whether big or small, all of the experiences that have created vivid, lasting memories have been the new ones.  And we can’t go back and experience them again…we’ve tried on occasion (not the wetting pants, of course) with mostly disappointing results.

So, as tempting as it sometimes is to try to “recreate the nostalgia”, we've found that it’s better to experience life here as it is today, as we are today.  Because it’s not the same…Don and Cindy are no longer here, Mijo is no longer here, we weren’t able to see Mirko this time, Rok and Petra are experiencing life with a newborn, and many of the places we used to frequent have changed hands.  And, of course, we’re not the same…we're a completely different family than we were two years ago.

Three things have remained consistent, however (in addition to the daily ice cream cones, that is).  One is that we were able to once again have some of those unique experiences that we’ll always remember like yesterday, like staying in a tree house and being served a four-course dinner by a Slovenian family at their country cottage.  The second is that our friend Marinka bid us farewell today with big hugs and very thoughtful, personalized gifts.  And the third is that I will enjoy one last Lasko this evening to celebrate another successful trip.  To new experiences, to new (and old) friends, and to Lasko… er, growing as a family.  Na Zdravje.

Rabac

We continued our tradition of ending our stay here with a trip to the sea, spending the past three days in Rabac.  Rabac is a small village on the eastern side of Istria, the Croatian peninsula that is very popular among Slovenes.

We thought we were going to have prime real estate with the apartment we rented there, as Google Maps showed it to be on the third street in from the shore.  What Google Maps didn't show was that the hillside in Rabac rises almost straight up, so the third street in was high above the bay (see below) with a demanding walk down to the water (and an even more demanding walk back up!).  But, we had a great view and got plenty of exercise hoofing it up and down to the beach.

There was plenty of sun, plenty of swimming, and, of course, plenty of ice cream cones.  But, the highlight of our trip was the last evening, when a student of mine from last year invited us to have dinner at her family's cottage in nearby Labin.  Her parents put out quite the spread for us and we sat outside eating dinner until nearly midnight, in typical Slovene fashion.  We prepared the kiddos by napping before we went and they had a blast - they got all the attention/juice/desserts they could handle and ran endless circles around the field behind the cottage.  Everything about the evening was charming, and it is just one more example of the incredible hospitality people have shown us here.

Super Hot

My class officially ends tomorrow, and on Tuesday we head to Croatia for a few days on the Adriatic.  Just in time.  While we hear that the mercury is dropping toward 40 back in Minnesota, here it's been on the rise toward 40.  Celsius.  And although that doesn't result in the same humidity here as in Minnesota, the sun is far more intense, and when it bakes the concrete and cobblestone it gets...well, super hot.  This weekend, it was too hot to play frisbee in the park for more than thirty minutes, pay proper homage to the Tomb of National Heroes, too hot to do pretty much anything other than eat ice cream cones.  So, eat ice cream cones we did.

Ljubljana Date Night

It’s been a quiet week for us, but Chantelle and I actually managed two date nights (likely our only two date nights while we’re here this time), while the kiddos played hide-and-seek and made paper boats with our babysitter, Sara.  On Sunday evening, we happened to catch about fifteen minutes of a documentary that was being shown on the street about life in Ljubljana in the late 1970’s.  At that time, there was nothing here: no restaurants, cafes, or shops, and as a result there were no people…it looked like a gray, deserted city.  Interviewees in the film talked about how they went to the train station to drink because there was nowhere else to go.  It’s difficult to picture this given the center of activity the old part of town has become, from the open-air market to a three-on-three basketball tournament in Preseren Square to a Friday evening of packed cafes and live music all along the river.

One of our favorite places for date nights is Mackalonca, an outdoor café down below street level on the river, where the view to the south is weeping willows on the river bank leading to the Cobbler’s Bridge, and the view to the north is the lighted Triple Bridge and Preseren Square.  And of course, perched above on the opposite side of the river, in the midst of the trees on the hill, sits the castle.  We spent a good portion of last night at the Mackalonca reflecting on our experiences here, the changes from the spring of 2011 to today.  As vivid as it is, it is still hard to believe the level of naivete with which we operated when we first arrived here.  It may not be night-and-day difference, but it's at least night and early morning.  We could spend an entire blog reflecting on this (and maybe we will), but a single sentence from last night sums up the basic sentiment:  “I will miss this when it is finally over.”  Whenever that is, for whatever reason.

I cherish everything about my experiences in this part of the world in the past two-and-a-half years, not the least of which is that I got to share them with my wonderful bride.  We haven’t had many date nights here, but they always seem to reaffirm why we came here in the first place.

Apartment Art

One of the things we like about coming here is that is forces us to simplify and to get out of the apartment as much as possible.  This year, we really simplified, only bringing a few things for the kiddos to do when they’re stuck inside.   They do watch their share of TV, like an afternoon viewing of Despicable Me during a thunderstorm yesterday.  But, the limited “things to do” has also (for better and worse) brought out their creativity.  They have invented games like Hello Kitty, which consists of tying a mini Hello Kitty doll to a paper airplane and tossing it from the spiral staircase, and the Ghost game, which consists of running around the apartment with ghost masks shouting “BOO!” (our poor neighbors below us).

And they spend a LOT of time drawing.  We are on our way to having a stack of artwork, several meters high, that has been torn out of drawing pads and coloring books.  We’re thinking of submitting it to one of Ljubljana’s many galleries.  We are also certain that our kids are good fits for the Cirkus…

The Joze Plecnik House

We visited Joze Plecnik’s house last week, which has been turned into a small museum to commemorate the architect’s life.  He gained some fame outside of Slovenia for his work on the Prague castle in the 1920’s, but he is a true icon here in Slovenia.  He spent the 1930’s redesigning Ljubljana’s city center, including the National and University Library and just about all of the bridges and other architecture on either side of the river, as well as the cathedral a few doors down from his house.  He is known for using angles and lines to trick the eye; a great example is a stone staircase near Preseren Square that from the bottom appears to get much narrower at the top, while from the top appears to stay the same width all the way down.

His house was quite modest for someone of his stature, although he did have a few luxuries, like a wood-burning water heater attached to his bathtub and another in his receiving room to serve hot water to guests.  It also held several of his own creations…apparently he liked to design wooden chairs that transformed into desks, so that if he came up with an idea while sitting he could easily get to work.  In his drafting room were chairs that students had taken from the university during World War II, when they came to Plecnik’s house for private classes when the university was shut down.

From the kiddos’ perspective, the coolest part was all of the old-time tools laying around, that there were pretty purple flowers in the gardens outside, and that there was a place to get ice cream cones around the corner.

A Tree House in Luče

We’ve had a lot of great mini-vacations here in Slovenia, but few can match the past couple of days we spent in the tiny village of Luče near the Austrian border.  Luče is a picturesque smattering of houses (with the requisite church planted in the middle) along a crystal-clear mountain stream, surrounded by Alpine forests, and completely off the beaten path.  And to top off our visit to this idyllic little village, we stayed in a tree house. 

A couple of qualifiers: 1) As a family of five, staying in a tree house for two nights was a lot of fun; three nights and the novelty would have certainly worn off.  2) It wasn’t really a tree house, it was an old hayloft that was converted into a cottage, but the kiddos were a lot more excited about a tree house than they would have been about a converted hayloft.

In any event, it was about as unique an experience as we could ask for.  The mountain stream ran right by our cottage, and even though it was ice-cold we did our fair share of swimming, generally followed by a warm-up in the hot tub underneath our cottage.  Celia and Rosetta got to sleep in the prime real estate cubby-hole bunks, while Sy got the second-rate beanbag bed (although he was perfectly happy in it) and Mom and Dad got the low-headroom loft.  Breakfast was included, but rather than the Holiday Inn Express continental style, we had a table full of fresh ham, sausage, prosciutto, five different cheeses, yogurt, bread, homemade marmalade, over-easy eggs wrapped in bacon, hot chocolate, milk, coffee, fruit…ten times more than we could possibly eat.  Dinner was similar, five or six courses, and they didn’t even charge us for the kids.  The second evening during dinner, a polka band stopped at our Inn to eat and then got out their instruments and entertained us and the other eight or so guests – it reminded me of the Essen Haus minus the boots.

So, one more successful adventure in the books:  we had a great time in a beautiful part of the world and met some wonderfully nice people.  And none of the kiddos needed ER visits and we didn’t drive off the side of a mountain.  Life’s good.