Jani Bizjak

Yes that is sea where she is standing. :)

Merry Christmas everyone!



Yesterday I had to go downtown to buy some things that cannot be bought in the store here. For some reason it was -17 so my face had a pleasure to be freezing for 3 hours (walking). The weirdest thing happened when I arrived home. In just about 1 hour, temperature jumped to 0 degrees. It’s incredible, I don’t remember that big of a temperature change in such a short time, ever.

In the evening we had a Christmas dinner together with all (or most) people who are still here. Each of us prepared a dish, I made “French salad” (literal translation from Slovenian, don’t know English name). Others made everything from turkey, ham, chicken, all kind of deserts and cookies. We were around 30 people, so there were just as many dishes. Too many to try them all! :)

Today I’ve been preparing for Veronika’s arrival most of the day. I still need to clean my room before I go wait her up to the train station, everything else is set. By the looks of it we are going to have a fun trip on Saturday to a land where sun never rises. =)

I’ve just spent last 8 hours updating my expense list. In total I had to read, translate to English and Slovenian, choose appropriate category for item, the store I bought it in, currency and date for a total of 600 items that I’ve bought over the past 5 months.

This must be one of the most boring / frustrating jobs there ever was, is, will ever be. I don’t know how people can do it, respect!

Short trip back to the numbers. So far I’ve spent a bit more than I was hoping for. Besides rent which was 1400€ for all 5 months, I’ve spent most of my money on trips and travel, plane and train tickets to come here and go home are also included here.

If we deduct this traveling expenses and trips (since I could have done that in Slovenia as well), the total price is around 1.5k€, which is not that bad. I will post a more detailed post at the end, when I’ll return home to Slovenia and analyse everything in details (with graphs & stuff).

The only number that really surprised me is how much I spent on food (note drinks are not included here). But from the looks of it I’ve spent around 150€ / month on food. Not sure how I managed to do that. :D



Today was finally cold again. Finally? Yes, because there is nothing worse than melting snow that freezes over night. If the temperatures are low enough there is no ice here (at least on the roads). And hopefully we will be able to go walk over the sea when Veronika comes.

The weather forecast has as well gotten more pleasing. If the most optimistic forecast is true, we will have 4 days of not snow until New Year’s. Very good indeed, since I think it has been more than 3 weeks since I last saw the sun. Sadly it won’t be -30 when Veronika comes here on Thursday, pity…

Last Friday we had our last dinner together before everyone left. This was organized by us in our apartment and is not to be mistaken with farewell dinner from previous post. =)

As usually each of us prepared his own dish. I finally got a chance to taste paella from Mikel. I must say I was looking forward to this for a long time and it was worth the wait. Besides paella I got a tried salmon with cream, some French dish I forgot the name of, chicken, really spicy Chinese soup, wheat and last but not least my dumplings (Å truklji).

As usually, food was good except my dumplings, which have merged into one gigantic dumpling when I left them in a pot for too long. =)





At the end someone actually brought up real champagne. It must have cost a fortune up here. This was the first time I’ve tried it and it was good, appropriate for the occasion.





Despite burst of laughter between intense chatter you could feel that sad sub-tone where everyone knew this is the last time we will be together. At the end we took our final picture together and that was the last time I saw most of them. Now they are already thousands km away… hopefully I’ll be able to visit some in the future.