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…