What makes Slovenia unique?

Inspired by Ronaldo's wonderful What makes Brazil a UNIQUE country my class travelled in our minds a bit to the sandy beaches of the sunny Brazil. When we returned home, we created two responses. One with the informatics group and one with the mechatronics group.

As set out by Ronaldo, my students came up with a word or phrase explaining what makes Slovenia unique and 2 or 3 cc licensed photos in Flickr supporting it - they posted their answers in this Google form.

Here's a video created with the help of the informatics group:



And here's a video created with the help of the mechatronics group:


Nice, aren't they? Here's a wiki, where such Multicultural Uniquenesses are brought together by Carla Arena, who is responsible for the spreading of this bug. ;-)

How do others see Slovenia?

Have I mentioned here a class in Argentina participating in the Walls Talking project decided to learn more about Slovenia?
They set up a website where they pool their finds and invited me to talk to them about our country - I'm really looking forward to this - we are meeting tonight on Skype. :-))

It was at their site that I came across this interesting article in Slovenia Times by Diana Evans (a Brit living in Maribor). The text is her observations of life in Slovenia - she has been living here now for almost 5 years. She says she likes our lifestyle:

The lifestyle. This is hard to explain, but let me tell you there is an advertisement running in UK newspapers saying that British people throw away a quarter of the food they buy. I just cannot imagine Slovenes doing that. People are more careful with their money, with what they buy and about what they throw away. People use the things they have and pass them on to others if they don’t need them any more. In our area, a twice a year collection of large unwanted items is enough for most people. People seem to care about the environment. There is little litter lying around and the country as a whole is clean and tidy. People look after their homes and gardens and take a pride in their own appearance. There are a lot less overweight people than in the UK due I believe to eating less processed food and also exercising more; less TV watching; more sport and other healthy activities. (I have lost weight since I moved here!).

There are many other interesting observations - for example she considers us kind and open and willing to help a foreigner. ... We thought a bit different about us here and here ;-).

Another non-Slovene explorer of our country living in Slovenia 6 months a year and beautifully writing about this in her blog is our dear Kay Raplenovich. Our current class unfortunately did not have the opportunity to meet her, but we were lucky to have had her with us on a number of occasions with previous groups. She's an American and lives part of the year in Šempeter, Slovenia and part of the year in Ohio, US.

Another very interesting site along these lines I bookmarked ages ago was also created by an American - nicknamed Pogoer. He used to live here and has posted very interesting observations and tips for foreigners interested in exploring the life in our neck of the woods.

Any other non-Slovenes out there willing to share your impressions of Slovenia? We'd love to hear from you. :-)

More glimpses of Slovenia

Just thought I'd post this Flickr slideshow here too because it fits in nicely with the previous post - it's glimpses of my home town Nova Gorica and other parts of Slovenia (from our family trips, mostly by my husband, whose fingers are usually glued to the camera wherever we go ;-)).

Slovenia's talking walls

Ok, we wrote about Argentina here, it's time to also post our ramblings concerning Slovenia and Slovenian walls. This is what we came up in class awhile ago:
Slovenia is a small but beautiful country criss crossed by many scenic roads. The landscape is very diverse - it only takes you a couple of hours to travel from the Adriatic coast all the way to the high peaks of the Alps (mountain range stretching across the borders in also to the neighbouring Italy, Austria and Switzerland) - we call our side of the Alps the sunny side of the Alps.

Another natural beauty is our Kras area with one of the biggest underground Karst cave system. Vojko said he heard somebody say if you ironed Slo it would be bigger than Europe. Nicely put, isn't it? :-)

Landscape diversity reflects also in many different Slovene dialects, some are quite challenging to understand also for Slovenes not coming from the same region. We think we are reserved people, need to get to know somebody a bit before we get friendly with them.

I think that some aspects of this are nicely shown on the graffiti on this train - with rainbow stretching above the beautiful green hilly landscape and fences delimiting people's property below. People here say 'čisti računi dobri prijatelji' - meaning people have to have their affairs in order (money, property...) if they want to be good friends - what is mine is mine and what is yours is yours.

Our country is on the territory where a lot of blood was shed during the WW1 and WW2. Older generations still tell stories of those times. Times and politics have changed now though, and some of the people who used to be national heroes are not everybody's heroes anymore. I posted this photo and the story to our Wallstalking site - not quite a graffiti on the wall, but the actions associated with it bear many resemblances to what we typically associate with graffiti art.

As far as sports is concerned, many like football here too though we think it cannot be considered national sport, like in Argentina. The conditions for practicing it are rather poor, skiing, snowboarding and other winter sports seem to be more popular. Skiing has a long tradition here. It's interesting though that while football related graffiti are quite frequent on our walls, I can't remember seeing a single skiing one.
Our typical foods are meaty ones like pršut and kranjska klobasa, dishes like jota, žlikrofi and mlinci, and sweets like potica, štruklji and gibanica - the assortment of foods differs a bit according to regions, but these are usually listed as typical Slovene foods. Some of the Slovene regions are wine-producing areas. Wine and wine drinking has long been part of our culture, something our walls testify about too.

sLOVEnia

Street performer, originally uploaded by Saša Sirk.

I feel Slovenia is the latest slogan launched to represent us and our country abroad. Unfortunately I couldn't find the new logo which accompanies it. It is a green and blue combination symbolizing green spaces and clean water… I saw it on the news earlier this week, placed above a photo of a young couple kissing in the street. I’m just curious now how you see our country.
Numerous slogans have been used for promoting it so far; Slovenia invigorates', 'Slovenia : your perfect getaway', 'Slovenia a diversity to discover' … My all times favorites are still the ancient 'On the sunny side of the Alps' and 'Slovenia, my country' with its linden leaf logo.
Erik found a very nice ad on YouTube. I like it. It looks good. Like a story from a fancy in flight magazine, like a National Geographic excerpt…
The Slovelnia I feel though is something else. It's my grandma’s fairy tales and a backyard garden full of strawberries, it's the smell of freshly baked bread and a pot of hot herb tea, it's roads to be explored and meadows full of mushrooms. It's old friends and neighbors I know.
When talking to non-Slovenes, the first thing I tend to point out about our country is its smallness. And then its diversity, greenness. But that’s ok I guess; small is beautiful.
Thinking of our national character, on the other hand, I come up with the following: we generally don't think much of ourselves, like staying close to our families and don't tend to move around much. We feel safe at home, kind of as if the big problems here were less dramatic than those beyond our borders. Kind of like Tolkien's hobits.
Also it seems to me that we prefer sticking to things familiar to us, that we don't like big changes. I see us as moderate, not used to expressing our emotions too openly. For expressing these, we like using foreign languages, e.g. we hardly ever swear in Slovene, but do this without blinking an eye in Italian, German, Serbian, Croatian, or English…
What is the Slovenia you feel? And what is your view of our national character?