Adijo #4

Early tomorrow morning, we leave here for the fourth time, and for the fourth time we have no idea if we’ll have the opportunity to come here again.  So, we spent the past few days thinking through what we should do one last time before we go.  Of course, there was one last trip to Tivoli Park, of course there was one last Saturday morning at the open market, and of course there was one last ice cream cone at Cacao.  And we’re sure that tonight, for one last time, we will hear the WHEEEEEEEEEE of our neighbor racing his remote control car up and down the empty streets at 4:30am…except this time we will already be awake.

What I’ve come to realize most on this trip is how blessed I have been to have this experience with my family.  Sure, I can gripe about how the kids are so jacked up about leaving tomorrow they won’t go to bed and about how many clothes my wife packs for a 30-day trip (although she did admit she over-packed this time…you have to be pulling on my leg!), but it’s because of them that I have taken so much away from our trips here.  And I have a lot more puke stories to tell.

As we packed up today, we laughed about how the first time when we were leaving, we found a closet full of stuff we had forgotten about as we were on our way out the door…and had no place to put any of it.  We sort of feel like veterans now…pretty much everything was packed and in order by noon today.

So, until next time, enjoy a few final pictures below, of the blow-pipes Marinka gave the kids, of the cricket t-shirts Lelantha gave the kids, of the slides at Tivoli, and of our final ice cream cone.  And thanks once again for joining in our journey…Na Zdravje!

Evolutions

Our last week here has been relatively quiet.  We had planned to go spend a day or two in the mountains, but given the weather, our budget, and the energy spent getting back from the seaside on Sunday, we decided to stay put and enjoy Ljubljana.

One of our obligations here is a trek up to the castle.  We went up a new way, the super-secret path on the south side of castle hill near our apartment, which nobody knows about but us.  Very sneaky, and very exciting.

At the castle, there was an exhibit showing the evolution of all of the main squares in Ljubljana, from 2000 years ago (when it was the Roman city of Emona) to today.  It was a great exhibit, really making us stop and envision how all of these squares, where we’ve spent so much time, used to look and feel way back when.

In our four years here, we’ve noticed a micro-evolution of Ljubljana, as it becomes more and more tourist-friendly.  Stores have started to stay open later at night and some are even open on Sundays – four years ago, we quickly learned that if we didn’t have something by 7:00 at night, we wouldn’t have it until the next morning, and if we didn’t have something by 1:00 Saturday afternoon, we wouldn’t have it until Monday.  There still isn’t a Starbucks here, but there is a “take-away” coffee shop that has opened in Preseren Square – four years ago, you couldn’t find a to-go cup of coffee, which I thought about every morning I hustled to the bus stop to get to class.  And Kellogg’s and Coke have arrived in full force – four years ago, it was tough to find boxed cereal and Cockta was the biggest cola.

At the same time, we still don’t have a dryer here (but have evolved to be efficient clothes hangers).  Maybe in another four years…