My first time...

Yesterday was my first day of work, my first taste of traditional Slovene cuisine and my first experience of not being able to understand ANYthing that people are saying around me. It gave me this odd paranoid feeling that they must be talking about me for some reason. Maybe thats why Americans have such a bad reputation overseas, because we can never understand anyone else and then we always act paranoid when other people are talking.
After I met everyone in the office (˝this is the American student, A-cah-dia˝...˝Aahhhh˝ was always the response with raised eyebrows) we talked about the project I would be working on, a gymnasium addition to a school. So to give me an idea of what I would be doing, we went to see a school addition that was under construction around the corner from the office. It was pretty cool seeing it halfway done, the shell was complete with a few interior finishes. Then we saw a giant hole in the ground where they were building foundation walls which will soon be Maribor's courthouse. And then Andrej (the guy in charge of me) showed me a 150 unit housing project that they did which was pretty nice. All of this was within a 2 minute walking radius from the office. While we were on the construction site, Andrej didn't stop smoking. at all. It was chain-smoking like I've never seen before, one would finish and he would use it to light the next for an hour straight. Another guy I was with asked incredulously why I didnt smoke and before I could answer, Andrej says, no one in America smokes. Obviously, we're not cool enough.
Andrej took me to lunch at a local restaurant where they serve lots of traditional, Slovene food. Every meal starts off with a beef soup, which is actually a beef flavored clear broth with noodles. Andrej had meatballs with tomato sauce and mashed potatoes and I had a turkey roulade (?) with pasta and vegetables. I guess there's lots of potatoes and meat and cheese in the diet here, pretty heavy, and I think parsley is their only spice.
I have a pretty nice office space on the 5th floor of a building, huge windows overlooking the city and the mountains (hills) and vineyards beyond. And its right in the city center, just a 20 minute walk from my dorm.
I still need to figure out centigrade temperatures because people keep on saying its going to be over 30 all week. Thats hot, hotter than I thought Slovenia got, but Im not really sure exactly what it means.
All in all things are really nice here. Nothing terribly exciting, which makes for kinda boring blog posts (sorry! I'll try to find or make up good juicy stories) but I cant complain.