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.

Super!

Marinka, who makes us sandwiches for lunch most days, has become a dear friend of ours.  Actually, she fell in love with our kids, but we think she likes Chantelle and I too.  She doesn't speak much English (although "Super!" is one of her favorite expressions), but she still asked for our email address last summer and sent us broken messages every so often, wondering if we would be back this year.

Last week, she told us she had gifts for Rosetta, Celia, and Sy, and today she delivered them:  personalized wooden dolls, note pads, Ljubljana pencils, and Smurf chocolate bars.  How super is that?

PS - Apparently Celia and Sy are celebrities here...Marinka said she saw them on the news crossing one of the bridges.

Srečna Obletnica

Today is my parents’ 50^th wedding anniversary.  In honor, I dug up some pictures from 2011, when they so graciously volunteered to help us move over here for the first time.  On that trip, they endured twenty hours of travel with three tired, jetlagged toddlers, and then ten days of mostly cold February rain, including a couple of freezing nights when the heat in their apartment went out…the apartment that we found and reserved for them.

Yet, in that small, trying microcosm of their nearly fifty years of parenting (sorry, Cheryl), I like to think they took away at least a few good memories.  I know that I sure did, not the least of which was staying up with Dad until 4am watching the Packers win Super Bowl XLV.  It doesn’t get much better than that.

Our hearts are in Madison today at the big VandenBurgt-Ebben celebration.  Mom, Dad, have a beautiful day.  You deserve it.

Na Zdravje!