Greetings from Slovenia or as the headline says “Moi”! Pok is a good word for hello to your friends in Slovenia but when you want to be more polite “Dober dan” works better. And well another thing I learned from my Turkish roommate is that in his language it means, well..shit. That’s all about the language studies because I can tell Slovenian is not an easy language for Finnish mouth and learning it wasn’t the main reason to do my exchange there.
Somebody has one time said that Slovenia is like mini-version of Europe because of the nature and I can only agree that. The country is the same size than Kainuu in Finland and population is not much over two million people. Slovenia got the Juulis alps, 45 kilometers of coastline, two beautiful lakes, turquoise green rivers, stalactive gaves, amazing green mountains and vineyards growing all over the hills and forests with huge old trees, historical castles and white churches can be seeing all over the view.
I am doing my studies in University of Maribor which is big old city near by the Austrian border. My faculty is however located in smaller and sympathetic town called Brezice and I study tourism there. Mostly my studies are individual work because all my lectures are held in Slovene but that is fine by me because I got more time to study tourism also in practice way in other neighbor countries. I still got few lectures with every subject and my professors are able to help if I need. We also got few conferences in our town and make field trips in surrounding places to learn about culture and nature. In this post I would like to tell little bit more about our one trip with some pictures in the end.
One of the greatest memories in Slovenia during stay was my field trip to the Alps to place called Logarska Dolina with other classmates and our professors. Trip lasted two days but because the country is not wide the distances are short and that thing is nice when you have used to the travel times in Finland. But yeah we did go few museums and had students presentations on the bus, saw the biggest waterfall in Slovenia, went to tasting local foods and guesthouses in the valley and heard the stories of local people. Our minibus drove us in the top of mountains to see the views, old church and drinking from the mountain creek. We had amazing weather all of the time and because it was early October it was really warm especially to a person who comes from cold snowy Finland 😉 That was the main thing that everybody did know about my country but maybe that is reasonable.
Trip was super and we had good time in the evening and many of the students had brought wines from their own vineyards and some kind of homemade blueberry and plum liquors. Slovenians are extremely friendly and nice people but as same than in Finland you will need to get to know them first that they really show their characteristics. I was surprised how good they speak English in everywhere and other languages but my classmate explained that if they want to speak with other people they need to speak foreign languages because 2 million people really isn’t big group of people.
I love the pictures I got from our trip and I knew that Slovenia was a beautiful country but the views still caught me. For many of people the country is relatively unknown, and in my opinion it is underestimated. For outdoor people I can only recommend to see these mountains in real. Let the pictures speak!
Hvala lepa and adijo!
-Roosa
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