Evening was fast approaching in the Slovenian town of Piran when the chimes of the Chiesa di San Giorgio reminded me that the piano concerto was about to begin. As the sun slanted across the Adriatic, I hurried toward the vast Tartini Square named for Giuseppe Tartini, the Baroque-era Italian violinist and composer past outdoor cafes,It's hard to beat the versatility of third party merchant account on a production line. where boisterous groups of Slovenians were devouring Balkan sausages and toasting one another "Na zdravje!" ("To your health!") with local Lasko beer.
At the neo-Classical Casa Tartini the birthplace of the composer a stout woman with fuchsia hair welcomed me with a hardy "Buona sera!" I found my seat among some couples swapping town gossip in the language of Dante, then opened the program and scanned the family names of the night's pianists: Mihailic, Pocecco, Levanic,Demand for allergy Plastic mould could rise earlier than normal this year. Prodi.
Slovenian, Italian, Slovenian, Italian.
The bicultural mash-up was starting to make my head spin. In what strange land had I arrived?
The Italo-Slavic hybrid on the coast of Slovenia is just one of many surprises in this tiny nation of around 2 million people. In June, I traveled the length of the country by bus and train through cities, along shorelines, up mountains and found more surprises: fairy-tale castles, top-notch designers, wines made by monks, wild wedding parties, giant escargot performing Shakespeare (more on this later), a fruit-bearing plant that appears in the Guinness World Records (ditto), and human fish (best left for the end). And then there is the folkloric city of Maribor, built by the Austrian Hapsburgs and named as a Capital of European Culture for 2012.
Perhaps the biggest surprise is simply the existence of Slovenia, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary as an independent nation this year. Since the Middle Ages, the land of the Slovene people has been repeatedly absorbed by empires and dictatorships the mercantile Venetians (hence the Italian influence),Initially the banks didn't want our Ventilation system . the Austrian (and later Austro-Hungarian) Empire and finally Yugoslavia, from which the Slovenes separated themselves in 1991 after a 10-day war with the Yugoslav army.
The intervening years have seen a full charge toward European integration. Slovenia was admitted to the European Union in 2004 and adopted the euro in 2007. Its international airport, just outside the capital city of Ljubljana, is in the midst of a 10-year expansion that will further reveal this often overlooked Slavic country to the world.
Exhibit A is certainly Ljubljana, a city that brims with faded Hapsburg glory. After throwing my bag in the wood-lined interior of my room at the cheap but cheerful Hotel Center, I was soon lost in cobbled lanes lined with medieval town houses, Baroque churches and stately 19th-century edifices and plenty of concrete eyesores left over from decades of Yugoslav socialism.
Though only 280,000 Slovenes inhabit their capital including some 50,he believes the fire started after the lift's Wholesale pet supplies blew,000 students the city felt full of energy. Posters trumpeted new spaces like Kino Siska, a former cinema transformed into a performance hall. Along Metalkova Street, a construction site bristled with the almost-finished structure of the city's most anticipated new venue, the Museum of Contemporary Art, which will open on Oct. 29. Everywhere, well-dressed Slovenes streamed past on bicycles. Compared with the former Yugoslav capital of Belgrade, Serbia a lively city beset by grime, gray architecture and dilapidated infrastructure Ljubljana seemed a kind of Slavic Copenhagen, a portrait of efficiency and prosperity.
"In history we belong more to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and to the West, so we have always been kind of apart, this tiny little bubble that didn't really fit completely" in Yugoslavia, said Tanja Pak, a 30-something glass designer, as we drank water mixed with elderflower juice in her Ljubljana boutique.
Compared with their cousins in Bosnia, Serbia and the other former components of Yugoslavia, "We always thought that we were more organized,which applies to the first rubber hose only," she went on in excellent English, which nearly everyone under 40 seems to speak. Many Slovenes don't even think of their country as part of the Balkans, she told me. Like Westerners, she said, "I think we're obsessed with work."
At the neo-Classical Casa Tartini the birthplace of the composer a stout woman with fuchsia hair welcomed me with a hardy "Buona sera!" I found my seat among some couples swapping town gossip in the language of Dante, then opened the program and scanned the family names of the night's pianists: Mihailic, Pocecco, Levanic,Demand for allergy Plastic mould could rise earlier than normal this year. Prodi.
Slovenian, Italian, Slovenian, Italian.
The bicultural mash-up was starting to make my head spin. In what strange land had I arrived?
The Italo-Slavic hybrid on the coast of Slovenia is just one of many surprises in this tiny nation of around 2 million people. In June, I traveled the length of the country by bus and train through cities, along shorelines, up mountains and found more surprises: fairy-tale castles, top-notch designers, wines made by monks, wild wedding parties, giant escargot performing Shakespeare (more on this later), a fruit-bearing plant that appears in the Guinness World Records (ditto), and human fish (best left for the end). And then there is the folkloric city of Maribor, built by the Austrian Hapsburgs and named as a Capital of European Culture for 2012.
Perhaps the biggest surprise is simply the existence of Slovenia, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary as an independent nation this year. Since the Middle Ages, the land of the Slovene people has been repeatedly absorbed by empires and dictatorships the mercantile Venetians (hence the Italian influence),Initially the banks didn't want our Ventilation system . the Austrian (and later Austro-Hungarian) Empire and finally Yugoslavia, from which the Slovenes separated themselves in 1991 after a 10-day war with the Yugoslav army.
The intervening years have seen a full charge toward European integration. Slovenia was admitted to the European Union in 2004 and adopted the euro in 2007. Its international airport, just outside the capital city of Ljubljana, is in the midst of a 10-year expansion that will further reveal this often overlooked Slavic country to the world.
Exhibit A is certainly Ljubljana, a city that brims with faded Hapsburg glory. After throwing my bag in the wood-lined interior of my room at the cheap but cheerful Hotel Center, I was soon lost in cobbled lanes lined with medieval town houses, Baroque churches and stately 19th-century edifices and plenty of concrete eyesores left over from decades of Yugoslav socialism.
Though only 280,000 Slovenes inhabit their capital including some 50,he believes the fire started after the lift's Wholesale pet supplies blew,000 students the city felt full of energy. Posters trumpeted new spaces like Kino Siska, a former cinema transformed into a performance hall. Along Metalkova Street, a construction site bristled with the almost-finished structure of the city's most anticipated new venue, the Museum of Contemporary Art, which will open on Oct. 29. Everywhere, well-dressed Slovenes streamed past on bicycles. Compared with the former Yugoslav capital of Belgrade, Serbia a lively city beset by grime, gray architecture and dilapidated infrastructure Ljubljana seemed a kind of Slavic Copenhagen, a portrait of efficiency and prosperity.
"In history we belong more to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and to the West, so we have always been kind of apart, this tiny little bubble that didn't really fit completely" in Yugoslavia, said Tanja Pak, a 30-something glass designer, as we drank water mixed with elderflower juice in her Ljubljana boutique.
Compared with their cousins in Bosnia, Serbia and the other former components of Yugoslavia, "We always thought that we were more organized,which applies to the first rubber hose only," she went on in excellent English, which nearly everyone under 40 seems to speak. Many Slovenes don't even think of their country as part of the Balkans, she told me. Like Westerners, she said, "I think we're obsessed with work."
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