Home sweet home

It's been a week since I got back to Korea from my annual Slovenian trip and I am finally able to sleep again normally. I had a bit of a jet lag when I got back and I kept waking up every day at 5am - annoying. But it's all good now. 

Our Slovenian trip was great, it just went by so fast. I didn't even get to meet all my friends. But I was really happy to spend time with my family again and my boyfriend was excited because it was his first time in Europe.

On our way to Slovenia we stopped by in Amsterdam, because we had to wait 9 hours for our connecting flight. I love Amsterdam and I wanted to show it to my boyfriend, but... unfortunately the weather was terrible. First of all, it stays dark there really long. We wanted to wait at the airport until it gets light outside, but it was already 9:30am and it was still dark. And it was also raining... a lot. I checked my iphone weather forecast and it said it would stop raining so we decided not to buy an umbrella, but then it started to rain even more. My boyfriend was worried about his new (really expensive) leather jacket so we didn't have the best time there.

Freezing in cold and windy Amsterdam

 But Slovenia was great. My family and my boyfriend got along really well! He was worried that they'd have problems communicating since he doesn't really use English often, but there were no problems at all. At first I helped a lot by translating and later, my mom and my boyfriend spent a lot of time chatting together with no problems at all :)

I often said that Jeonju reminds me a bit of Ljubljana (capital of Slovenia - my hometown). It's not really the same, but I lived in Daegu before for almost 3 years and it is completely different from any place in Slovenia. It's so much more... Korean? But Jeonju for some reason seems a lot more familiar to me. And when my boyfriend and I went for a walk around our neighborhood the first evening he said it doesn't feel strange at all, that it's so much like Jeonju :)

My boyfriend was able to spend only about 10 days in Slovenia because he had to go back for work. But in those 10 days I tried to show him as many places in Slovenia as possible. And I think he liked Bled the most. Our lake Bled is one of the most popular places to visit and it really is beautiful. We also tried the famous Bled cream cake - yummy! ^^

Other than Bled we also visited a huge cave in Postojna, the Predjama castle, Slovenian coast, snowy Kranjska Gora and the famous Planica ski jumping hill. Oh, and our capital city too, of course.

LJUBLJANA

PLANICA AND KRANJSKA GORA

SLOVENIAN COAST - PIRAN

 PREDJAMA CASTLE AND POSTOJNA CAVE

My boyfriend was amazed at the number of castles in Slovenia. There are no castles like this in Korea so it was quite interesting for him to see. Although, after a while, he said, let's not visit any more castles... :) They are beautiful, but maybe we saw a bit too many of them :)

He loved our Slovenian food. Especially my mom's cooking. He made it clear that my mom is a way better cook than I am... :) And I think that especially, he loved Calamari - Mediterranean squid dish. Korea has a lot of seafood to offer, including squid. But he said he'd never seen small squid like calamari. Apparently squid in Korea is a lot bigger... but I'm not really a squid lover so I don't know. But anyway, he loved calamari :)

He was also surprised when he saw our city buses. I never noticed that before but ya, I guess it's true, I don't think you can find such long buses in Korea.

One thing we didn't like in Slovenia were the toilets. The public ones I think. They used to be free, but now you have to pay for a lot of them. Especially at touristic places like lake Bled. It costs 50cent per person and I thought I could pay 1eur for both of us. Unfortunately it wasn't 1eur, I paid 2eur by mistake and I was the only person to get in. Later we went to buy some chewing gum for 50cents to get another 50cent coin so that my boyfriend was able to go to the bathroom too. So we ended up paying almost 3eur (almost 4000krw) for the toilet!... The ones in Ljubljana were free but so dirty. Also, in Korea you can use the toilet at a cafe without buying anything there. In Slovenia you can't really do that.

After my boyfriend went back to Korea I spent most of the time at home with my family, enjoying my mom's delicious food and some of the things I really miss in Korea, such as our fresh Slovenian bread and our plain yogurt. It is so hard to find bread in Korea, it's all just toast and that's totally different. European bread is the best... so soft... and not sweet like this toast here. And yogurt... ah... impossible to find in Korea. Well fruit yogurt is not a problem, but plain yogurt. Plain yogurt in Korea (and in many other countries too) is sweet - yuck! :S No way... our Slovenian plain yogurt has no sugar at all and it's not all liquid either. It's impossible to describe the taste, you'd just have to try it. But anyway, I miss yogurt and bread the most and my mom can't really send it to me :(

And now we're back in Korea. In our cozy small home in Jeonju :) And Korea also has a lot of things that I'd miss if I moved back to Slovenia. For example norebang - karaoke :) So our first weekend back in Korea, we went to see a movie at Megabox (Taken 3), we went to norebang for 2 hours and we had some really really yummy dessert calles Sulbing. But that's something I want to write about in my next post. :)

Thank for reading my blog and feel free to post any comments and/or questions. ^^