:)

čajna hiša is a tea house, like the name says… but there’s a lot more to it than just tea.

sure, the tea selection is endless and quite tempting. but there’s also muffins, for instance, lovely chocolate/banana muffins that look and taste like they’ve just been taken from the oven. or banana/walnuts/bran flakes/raisin yogurt cups drizzled with honey. or delicate apricot strudel. or huge cups of coffee with milk that we savour till the last drop.

you can probably tell how much we love the place. :) it’s got top marks across the board: it’s cozy, the food is delicious and served in cute looking cups/plates and the waiters are always nice – something that is getting hard to find in ljubljana these days. must be the summer season: dealing with tons of tourists is probably taking its toll on the service around here.

anyway, we highly recommend it. it’s in stari trg, 3 – right in the middle of the old town. enjoy! :)

you know when you have so much to do that you don’t even know where to start? i’m so behind in my slovenia posts that i don’t know where to begin. by the last thing we did, i suppose – the memories are still fresh, and green. insanely green.

yesterday we grabbed our recently found portuguese friend (there’s now 3 of us in the country!) and ran for the water. more specifically, the lakes (bled and bohinj) and vintgar. we’ve had some trouble finding this secluded gorge the last times we tried (the path from bled to vintgar is a narrow winding road across small villages) but i suppose third time’s a charm.

we found vintgar at last, and slowly covered the 1.6km wooden path along the radovna river, just taking it all in: the soothing sounds of the forest, the waterfalls, the pools and the rapids and the quiet deeper stretches of green. at the end, the path crosses the river over the šum waterfall, giving us a really nice top view of it. :)

the entrance costs 4 euros and it’s definitely worth the detour if you’re in bled or bohinj. for those who’d rather not get lost, the gps coords are: N46.3907 E14.0835. :) enjoy!

we’ve had the two of them visiting us last week – the first time they’ve come to visit us in a foreign country. :) we’ve toured slovenia from north to south for a full week, giving them all sorts of green/blue memories – and giving us some tips on how to see slovenia. i’m by no means an expert in the country, but i think i might write a sort of illustrated tourist guide to visiting slovenia, in a few posts. i’m hoping a clear plan will inspire people to spend more than just a day in slovenia before running of to austria or italy :)

“it’s my party
and i’ll cry if i want to
cry if i want to
cry if i want to
you would cry too
if it happened to you!”

this song has been stuck in my head the whole day. it’s the same thing year after year: i only remember it on my birthday! :)

this sounds strange, but i’ve actually been telling people i’m 28 for a whole year already… my brain somehow didn’t get used to 27, and skipped ahead. i didn’t mind. 28 sounded better than 27, the way even numbers always seem to. very chinese, now that i think about it!

anyway, to do something different today, we drove to murska sobota and had gibanica, slovenia’s national cake, disguised as a birthday cake. it’s quite heavy, but i enjoy the mixture of flavours:

and as you can see, i got a drawing tablet from paulo as a bday present, and put it to good use already! :)

the julian alps, around kranjska gora, and through the vršič pass.

ifitwasmyhome.com is a little google maps mashup that lets you visualize the bp oil spill by superimposing it on your current location.

these things are always tricky to visualise, for lack of reference points, but this map shows a very concrete term of comparison: slovenia. the whole of slovenia is engulfed in that stain (plus big chunks of italy, austria and croatia).

for us living here, and exploring this country, it surely puts things in perspective.