A Couple First Impressions

As I try to remember our first couple weeks here, a couple memories stick out.  When we arrived in February, it was still gray, overcast and foggy.  Ljubljana (there seems to be little consensus even among locals how it is pronounced) is know for being gray and a bit depressing from roughly ~mid-Nov to the end of Feb; it's in a valley and the fog just seems to sit for days on end.  However, through some internet searching I found a guy that rents out a two-room apartment on Gradaška Ulica, which really we really grew to love (aside from the "Wild West Saloon" which kept live music going until 2 AM on Thursdays).  It borders a stream which dumps into the Ljubljanica (main river through Ljubljana) and is a very "normal" neighborhood for the city - schools, a nice church, bakery, alleys filled with restaurants, etc.  Also, I remember from my morning jogs on how small Ljubljana really is (Slovenes often refer to it merely as a big village) with around 270k people, and how it just seems to peter out in certain directions.  Coming from the states, cities seem to dissolve in suburbs, and finally into highway rings or countryside.  On some of my jogs, I would find that some neighborhoods would start to thin out a bit (there also seems to be an "unfinished/destroyed" house ratio that would increase from 1 in 20, to 1 in 8 or 10) and then abruptly end in back roads or farm fields