A few old pictures

 I took a picture last night at the wine festival, but just now I realized that I didn't have my SD card in the camera. Hate it when that happens... So I pulled it up from the camera's memory, and found a few other interesting pictures also saved on the camera's memory...

Graffiti in Ljubljana, Slovenia. It says: No Nazism, No Communism, Only SLO patriotism. Kind of ironic that Slovenian patriotism allows defacing Slovene property with the English language, but I think it's nice of them to share their thoughts us.

Hot air balloons in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Seen from the window of my flat in July 2011.

A whole pig on a spindle! (is that the right word?) I was way impressed!

The wine festival was pretty interesting. A good time for me to listen to a lot of Slovak! Listening and trying to pick up what people are saying in a totally new language where you only know numbers 1-19, a few cognates, and a few verbs is challenging, but a lot is communicated non-verbally, through facial expressions, gestures, reactions, and tone of voice, so there is hope for picking up some things. It's good for my language development though, to just listen and get used to the sound of it and kinda watch how people are forming the sounds in their mouths. It's also a good time to practice looking like you're listening when your mind is somewhere else (ok, not always a good skill). And a good practice in patience. And a good motivator to really learn the language.  We ate lots of street food, and drank some Burčiak, which is a "young wine" that's produced in some 5 hour window of time on a specific day in the wine-making process. If I understood correctly, after the grapes are smashed (still done with feet, by the way) the juice goes into a barrel to ferment for about a week, then if you want to produce Burčiak you have to know when it's going to be just the right time (and they do know because their families have been making this for years and years) and you stay with your barrel and taste it every hour until you recognize that it's Burčiak. Then you have 5 hours to pour it into bottles (the bottles used, by the way, are washed out 1.5L plastic bottles that you can buy bottled water in; sometimes they don't even bother to peel the old label off). The Burčiak has less alcohol than wine, but it's much sweeter too, and it has yeast that settles at the bottom of the bottle.
The street food was mostly potato-based items... fried potato and garlic patties, potato pancakes rolled with meat or Nutella, and potatoes cut into a spiral and fried on a stick; and other fried meats and sandwiches and candies.