Slovenian Miscellany

Edited twice (see bottom)

I just wanted to ramble on about a few things here.

Overall, the people are very friendly.  And there are dogs everywhere.  Every day we see people walking their dogs.  About a third aren't on a leash.  So it's very dog friendly.  There's also tons of strollers, too.

There are a lot of bicycles and they are usually in a hurry.  So you need to stay out of the bike lane and keep an eye out for them.

Several restaurants have given us a side of bread with the meal, but none of them included butter.  I guess bread is more for sopping up.  But as Americans who are used to crappy bread, we would happily eat the bread with just butter on it.

The restaurants are fairly inexpensive by European standards, but they like to upsell.  For instance, when we got our chicken meal at Eksperiment, the waiter asked if we wanted potatoes or french fries.  That was a separate dish, not included in what we had ordered.  In the US, they generally only ask you what you want if it's included.  Or they'll say, did you want to get anything else with that, like blah blah blah?

This is a coffee country.  Many places do have hot tea, but it's usually some kind of berry tea.  It's quite good, but if you want caffeine, go for a Coca-cola.  Even the supermarket had 1 package of black tea and a whole floor to ceiling shelf of berry style teas.

Edit1:

Ljubljana definitely has the cafe culture.  You can sit at a cafe for an hour and that's considered normal.  Because of that, the service can seem slow to Americans.  Sometimes we'd sit at a cafe and it might be 10 minutes before they notice you.  After you get your order, you can sit for a long time.  We sat for about 45 minutes.  After you finish your order, you'll probably have to flag down a server to get your bill.  Even at a restaurant, they expect you to sit for a while after you eat, even if you don't get an after dinner coffee.  It's really bizarre, compared to the American culture where they just want you out of the restaurant as quickly as possible.  I like the cafe culture much better.

Edit2:

We've seen tourists from all over the world.  There's been a handful of English-speakers, mostly American and a few Brits.  Some Italians, which makes sense, considering the location.  And lots of Asians.  There's been several tour groups of Asians, including a Korean Airline group.

Most of the cafes here are also bars.  And they're open at the same time.  I don't mean bars, like, they carry a few beers.  I mean cafe-bars like they have a huge booklet of drinks, starting with hot drinks (coffees, teas), cold drinks (coffees), non-alcoholic drinks (water, juices), then moving on to beers, wines, spirits, vodkas, cocktails, etc.  Sometimes including smoothies.  It's not unusual to see somoene drinking a beer at 10 am.