Goodbye Again

Tomorrow we head home, and as always, we have mixed feelings about it.  It will be good to get back to family and friends and to our humble routine in St. Paul, but it’s tough to say goodbye.  Chantelle and I agree that this was one of our best trips here, mostly because we did so many things that were completely new, and just about all of them were with friends here.  As we look back, those have always been our best experiences by far.  It reminds me of something my dad says: what makes life special are the relationships you build along the way.

We have been so fortunate that what seemed like chance events led us here in 2011 and led to invitations to return five times since.  What we are most thankful for is that coming here has given us the opportunity to experience an incredible country and culture and to explore and grow as a family without the distractions we have back home.

We thought it would be fun to do a few "now and then" photos from the apartment under the castle with the spiral staircase.  It feels like yesterday that we arrived there for the first time, and we remember very clearly being terrified that the kids would kill themselves on those stairs.  But, of course, it took them all of two days to master the staircase and adopt it as their playground.  What is funny is that the apartment still maintains some of the touches we added back in 2011, like the cow placemats we bought to try to preserve the dining room table.

Of course, it wasn't just yesterday, and it’s tough to look at these pictures without a lump creeping up in my throat.   I love watching the kids grow up, but it really does happen too fast.  I guess I’ll take solace in the fact that they all still fit inside the cabinet at the top of the stairs, and in the fact that they still think I’m smart and fun and cool.  Or at least I think they do.

Thank you to Maja and Leon and Tim, to Rok and Petra, to Mijo and Drita, to Marinka, and to everyone else here who helped to make this trip special.  And thank you, Slovenia – you are beautiful in so many ways.
 

Painted Hives Landmarks

For those of you who have read the book Painted Hives, we hunted down a few landmarks you might recognize and took photos.  For those of you who haven't, well...  :)

Narin and Piran

We drove to the Slovenian coast this week to spend a few days with our dear friends, Mijo and Drita.  On the way, we decided to stop for a night at the Pri Andrejevih tourist farm, which keeps thirty hives of bees in a beehouse on a trailer, and (more importantly) has a swimming pool.  We swam and ate and wandered up to see the beehives, from which they harvested 1500 kilograms of honey last year!!  Although looking around, that really wasn’t hard to imagine, as there are flowering forests as far as the eye can see.  I got close enough to take some pictures of the beehouse, which had a few traditional painted bee panels, until a guard bee started buzzing my head and chased me down the road (I tried to tell her I was a friend, but she wasn’t buying it).  It made me think of Wilber in Painted Hives.  :)

As an added bonus, the tiny village of Narin right next door happened to be having a festival celebrating St. James, so we sat out on our patio that night, gazing at every star in the sky and listening to the polka music coming from the other side of the village.  When I woke up at 4 a.m., they were still going strong, and when we drove past the next morning it looked like it had been quite a party.

From there, it was on to Piran and our friends Mijo and Drita.  We first met Mijo in 2011 when he was a waiter at Café Divine in Ljubljana.  He quickly became one of our favorite people in Slovenia (see Adijo, Mijo! and Adijo, Mijo...Again!), and we were bummed the following summer when we learned he had moved to Piran.  However, in going to visit him there, we also got to meet his wife, Drita, and together they are among the nicest, most-generous people we know.  

We have been to Piran a few times now, but this was definitely our best visit.  Mijo and Drita invited us to stay in their apartment, which is a stone’s throw from Tartini Square.  We got to spend a lot of time with them, swimming in the Adriatic, wandering around Piran, having a lot of good laughs, and viewing some awesome sunsets.  We also went to an Exhibition of the World’s Largest Spiders and Scorpions at the Palace Trevisini, which was fascinating… and extremely creepy.

Unfortunately, Mijo told us we can no longer say “Adijo, Mijo” because “Ciao” is the preferred good-bye in Piran (which is very near to the Italian border), and “Everyone will think you’re from Ljubljana if you say ‘Adijo’.”

Adijo, Mijo is more fun, but if we must… Hvala in Ciao, Mijo and Drita!  Until next time!

 

Our New Favorite Hangouts

Every time we come here, we discover new places to frequent.  In the past, they have mostly been in old town, but this year our two favorite places are just outside of old town: the Cat Caffe and the Trubar.

The Cat Caffe is exactly as it sounds: it’s a café with lots of cats inside.  They make a great bela kava with the added touch of “Myou” written on top in chocolate, and it’s always entertaining for the kids.  If you go, don’t forget to bring a grocery bag – you’ll be an instant hit with the residents.  :)

The Trubar is a café with a smattering of small tables outside that sits on a street corner a half-block from where we are staying this year.  It is named after Primož Trubar, who is famous for writing the Abcedarium in the 1500’s, which was the first book printed in Slovene.

We had only been to the Trubar a two or three times before this summer, but maybe it’s appropriate that it has become a favorite of ours.  It used to be more of a dessert café with exquisite cakes and pies, and it is actually the café where Nina and Wilber share a piece of chocolate cake in Painted Hives (although it is called something different in the book).  While they don’t still have the cakes and pies, they do have some of the best ice cream cones in Ljubljana (trust us, we’ve tried them all!) and some of the friendliest staff as well.

 

If I Were a Cow, This is Where I'd Like to Be

On Thursday, we made the trek up to Velika Planina to spend the night with the cows.  Our good friends, Rok and Petra, had rented a herdsman hut with a wood-fired hot tub for the week and invited us to visit.

It’s a bit of an adventure getting there:  you need to take a tram to get most of the way up the mountain, and then an ancient ski lift to get to the top.  And there isn’t much there once you’re up: a single restaurant, a few tourist huts, the herders’ village, a small church, and cows (and cow piles, which far out-populate everything else).

We hiked around, bought fresh milk and cheese from the herders, picked wild strawberries, and, of course, enjoyed the hot tub.  Rosetta, Celia, and Sy made great friends with Rok and Petra’s daughter and son, Kaja and Bine (Bine even started calling Rosetta “Mommy”). 

It is absolutely beautiful there, and we’d highly recommend it.  Especially if you’re a cow.