January showers bring flowers too!

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We’ve seemingly slipped from an Autumnal sort of winter right into an autumnal sort of spring. We’re all confused, even the plants. We have lots of flowers making an appearance: the Primrose (Primula Vulgaris - top right picture) is in bloom everywhere, even under the shady pines, and there are crocus and snowdrops, too. The Forsythia shrubs are blooming in the sunny areas, but they are a bit show-off-y (I think I just made up a word there) anyway, having also bloomed back in early December. In the fields, the Dead Red Nettle (Lamium Purpureum - picture top left) and Yarrow (Achillea Millefolium) never stopped blooming, but they look a bit weary. The slopes in the woods are covered with a more recent arrival: hundreds upon hundreds of Helleborus Niger (picture bottom left), with the Winter Heath (Erica Carnea - picture bottom right) keeping it company. In people’s gardens the irises are well up and so are the daffodils; the pansies also hung right in there since the autumn and are still flowering.

As I started typing this update, we were having a thunderstorm. It’s a far cry from a Minnesota winter, that’s for sure! Right after the thunderstorm it turned colder for a few days and we finally saw some snow. It was one of those clingy snows that sticks to all of the branches. It only accumulated on the grassy areas and it was gone by the end of the day, but further northwest of us they got quite a bit more. We went up that way, to the little town of Planica, last weekend for some sledding (for the Minnesotans: ‘sledding’ = ‘sliding’ in your parlance . There are no snowmobiles involved.) Planica is the site of the world’s largest ski jump, but I am just mentioning that by way of information – we didn’t do anything crazy involving our toboggans and the ski jump. At Planica there's a few feet of snow on the ground. We walked for about an hour up a hill to a small gostilna where we had lunch. Then we sledded down the hill. It was fun, and Lucy had a blast running around in the snow and chasing the sled.

Now the temps are in the mid 40s during the day, and the sun is very warm. We went for a walk today and I think it was about 50 degrees or so; you just needed a light sweater. This is not typical, but the whole of western Europe is experiencing some unseasonably warm, or at least strange, weather this year. I understand El Nino is to blame (oh sure, always blame the foreigners) I think it’s affecting U.S. weather too, but you, my tens of readers, would know this better than me. In London a few weeks ago they had some very heavy rain and high winds. The wind knocked down walls and trees, and some people were killed. On the news they showed people hanging onto lampposts so they wouldn’t be blown away. We haven’t seen those here, thank goodness!

Hopefully our good weather will hold at least for a few more days. On Thursday we have a public holiday and it would be nice to go somewhere for the day and soak up some sunshine. 08 Feb 1849 is the date of the death of Slovenia’s national poet, France Preseren. While he was alive, Preseren was in love with a woman named Julija Primic. She never returned his love, even though he was not a bad-looking fella, not to mention he wrote her some kick-ass sonnets. Preseren Square in Ljubljana contains a statue of him which forever gazes on a bas-relief of Julija high on the wall of a building across the square. The seventh stanza of Preseren's poem “Zdravljica” (“A Toast”) has been the Slovenian national anthem since 1991.

God's blessing on all nations,
Who long and work for that bright day,
When o'er earth's habitations
No war, no strife shall hold its sway;
Who long to see
That all men free
No more shall foes, but neighbours be!


Not many exciting things happened over the holiday season. Here, the month of December is “Happy December” and there are Christmas markets and mulled wine to enjoy. We were battling some never-ending colds/viruses all through the holidays, and right through New Year, so we were not your usual party-loving couple. We dragged ourselves down to the castle for New Year’s fireworks (which were worth the effort) and then back home shortly thereafter. We’re feeling much better now, thanks to massive doses of vitamins and the large quantities of oranges and clementines we’ve been eating. It’s my New Year’s resolution: I Will Not Get Sick in 2007.

We have recently gotten a new neighbor. They are two roommates and they both are members of the orchestra. The boy (age 17 or 18) is from Romania or Lithuania...I’m not sure exactly -- someplace small with an ‘ia’ on the end. He plays the violin. He practices here at the house sometimes although we haven’t heard him much since we don’t always have the windows open. Joe met him the other day. He speaks English well and studied in Michigan for a while. The other roommate plays the viola, or at least I think that’s what she plays – she hasn’t been practicing here since she doesn’t carry her instrument back and forth. She’s 18 or 19 years old and is from Russia. I haven’t met either of them yet but I think I saw them at the bus stop at the corner. The boy was young, wearing very pointy cowboy boots and carrying a violin, so I guessed that was probably him. I based this on the violin he was toting -- the cowboy boots could mean anything. The girl wasn’t carrying anything outwardly musical but they were obviously together, and they were paying with bus tokens (a sure sign of a recently arrived foreigner). I would have introduced myself but the bus was just pulling up as I arrived.

Speaking of the bus, let me just say that there are few sights more depressing than that of your bus pulling away from the stop as you run down the street. On most days I take the bus four times a day. The least number of times I’ll take it is twice, and the most is six. One ill-fated day I missed the bus five times out of five. The only reason I didn’t miss it six times that day is because Joe gave me a ride for trip #6. Some days are like that. On the other hand, some days I stroll to the bus stop taking my own sweet time, lah-tee-dah, and there it is, just down the street and I only need to wait half a minute or so. I love those days. The bus at our stop is a bit capricious. In spite of the encouraging timetable posted at the bus stop, there doesn’t seem to be an actual schedule..it seems to show up whenever it pleases and you just thank your lucky stars if you were fortunate enough to be there when it did. In its defense, it does show up every 15 minutes or so, but I’ve been left staring at the back end of it often enough that I feel entitled to complain a bit. (sigh) I feel better now.

Work is still busy, so that’s good. Our school hired a new batch of teachers to replace some of the ones that moved on. We were the last group of non-EU citizens to be hired, so it’s a good thing we made the move when we did. All of the teachers now must be from within the EU, so all of the native English speakers will be from Great Britain.

I’ve got to do some class prep now, so I’ll end here. I’ll try to update more frequently, even if it’s just a few words.

Ciao

And now you can consider yourselves FULLY updated :-)

Another note to say "hi". No, nothing new has happened since I last posted, since that was just two days ago and life is just not that exciting.

Since some of you have been asking, I'll tell you a bit about my classes. I teach mostly adults.
For adult students I have:
-one group of seven students who are studying for an English certificate examination -- on a scale from level 1 (beginner) to level 7 (advanced) they are about a 4.
-one individual level 4 student,
-one individual level 2 (barely!) student,
-one group of three people at level 2 (this group is quite clever),
-one individual level 1 (VERY beginner!) student,
-another individual level 2 student who is also quite clever

I teach two childrens classes:
-one class is just two girls, ages 8 and 11, who are about a level 2 (but slightly more advanced). I really enjoy this class.
-the other class is a group of seven kids, all age 7 (5 boys and 2 girls), beginning level 2. I pretty much dread this class - sometimes they are monsters and making sure I have enough interesting stuff to keep them from being monsters takes a lot of time.

Most students' classes are 2 hours and 15 minutes, and most of them meet twice per week.

At the beginning, class prep was taking a lot of time, but that has gotten better. Since some of my students are learning the same things, and they are not all at the same pace, that means I can sometimes re-use lessons. You'll have to ask Joe about his classes/students since I don't know much about them. I mean, I have an idea what levels he is teaching and I know which ones he complains about, that's for sure (!), but mostly I think he has a mix similar to mine. I know that his kids class (he has just one) has kids in it that are about age 11 or so, and they can be a bit bratty sometimes, but that's about all I know about them.

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Tomorrow we are having Thanksgiving at Ernie and Jozi's house. I am making a sweet potato and carrot puree and I am really not sure what anyone else is bringing. Ernie was supposed to find a turkey somewhere, and he was also making some pie. Hopefully someone will bring a soup -- the soups here are the BEST! I made a KILLER sour cabbage and vegetable soup last week - YUM!

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I started taking a Slovene class. It's just one hour, once a week, but it's better than standing at the bakery or deli counter pointing at food and stammering out numbers for the rest of my life. It was tough to cram it into my schedule but I figured if I forced myself to study and to go, I would make myself find the time for it.

Speaking of grocery shopping, if there had been such a thing as a prize for the Most Dairy Purchased In One Shopping Trip, I would have won it tonight. I bought two packages of butter, one tub of sour cream, heavy cream, kisla mleko (which is sort of like sour cream/creme fraiche but not exactly), three hunks of cheese, yogurt, milk, and cream for coffee. Somewhere, there is a very tired cow.

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This past weekend we went to Martinovanje. This is the celebration of the new wine for St Martin's Day. So where else would we go but to the village of St. Martin? Actually, we went to the next village down the hill, but let's not nit-pick. First we went to a small village, Brje, where we saw a presentation for Gregorciceva, a famous slovene author/poet who died 100 yearts ago. He was born in Brje and they put a plaque on his house, which is now a museum that houses many of his original manuscripts. There were some speeches which I am sure were very interesting (although I can only guess what they were about in a general sense) and some singing. Then we all went down the hill and had a little bit of food and tasted all of the wines they make in that village. I think there were about twenty of them. I lost count after I tasted the tenth one or so. Ha ha. I really only tasted a couple because the night was still young!
We then went to a fabulous restaurant called Arkade, in the village of Crnice. We had a typical Slovene dinner for St Martin’s: duck, red cabbage in a sweet kind of sauce, and some noodles with gravy. It was fantastic! This restaurant was written up in Gourmet magazine last February, and I would love to go back there to have something off of their regular menu as well.
Then we went back to the tourist farm where we were staying the night and we danced up a storm. I haven’t laughed that hard in such a long time! The next day, we had breakfast – well, lunch, to be honest (we got up late since we stayed up dancing until 3:30) and then we visited two great wineries in the area. We spent a long time talking to the wine makers and they gave us snacks and tours and samples and loads of information. It was a great weekend, and now we are well stocked with good memories and good wine! Oh, and we can go back to either – or both- of those wineries to help them harvest next year. Harvest time, although it’s hard work, is kind of a party in itself, and also earns you an invitation to their big, private shin-digs for next Martinovanje.

So, that’s all for now. I have a few more pictures, mostly from Halloween, to upload to Flickr and then I’m going to call it a night. I hope everyone is doing well and has a happy Thanksgiving of their own.

Hugs, -S

OPROSTITE!!!!

This means "SORRY!" I haven't been able to post anything in a while. We have been super-busy with work and haven't had much time. A good deal of the time we spend at home is doing lesson prep, which means that one of us is using the computer for work and so we can't kick the other one off for non-work-related things (i.e. blogging). I did upload some new pictures to Flickr so you should take a peek in there and look at all of the things I uploaded on October 30th and so far in November. I also had some time to add a few comments along with those so you'll get an idea of some of the things we have been doing in our spare time (read "Sundays").

For those of you that had our old address on Ane Ziherlove and don't realize or remember that we moved in August, please remember to send us an email asking for our new address. For obvious reasons, I don't want to list our address here.

Weather is still decent although we've had a couple of frosts. There are still flowers blooming here and there, and the grass is still green so I can't complain about the weather, that's for sure!. We put the snow tires on the car today. Hopefully it won't snow anytime soon, but if they're not on by tomorrow we'll get a ticket; I also drive up and down a pretty steeeeeeep hill/mountainside to go to and from a client so there's that to consider as well.

The city will put up all of their Christmas lights on December 6th. An interesting thing I learned today: almost all of my students will put up their Christmas tree on Dec 24th. Most of them will leave it up until Feb 6th-ish as they generally take it down on 3 Kings Day, unless they have a live tree and it is just too crispy to leave up without people making fun of them. I told them that Joe and I usually put up our tree in the beginning of December and take it down in the beginning of January -- this was astounding to them! We're not sure what we will do about a tree this year since I don't like the idea of buying one at a grocery store. Maybe we'll just go into the woods in back of us and cut some branches.

I'll end here since it's very late (midnight) and I have an early morning (8 am) class. This weekend our friends are hosting Thanksgiving at their house on Friday evening so we'll be squeezing in yet another USA holiday (we did Halloween at their house, too).

Hope everyone is doing well.

Hugs, -S