Ljubljana 2

Its well after midnight Thursday night, and I finally got my bag over 50 hours after leaving Dallas. I immediately brushed my teeth and took out my contacts, and tomorrow I may even change clothes...

(Dear Robert) This evening we sat down for a beer outside and watched part of the Poland-Austria Eurocup game. We also watched part of the Croatia-Germany game before. Here, there are dozens of cafes where people just sit outside and everyone faces the flat screen to watch soccer. Its really neat. I had an amazing hot chocolate at one place where our server pointed out that she loves how Americans feel obligated to tip. We asked her proper etiquette and she explained that students or people with less money dont need to tip even if the service was good. As for herself, she said that she would probably leave 10 or 20 cents on a 5 dollar tab, as a student or young worker.
At another cafe - we stop a lot because John loves coffee - Evan and I tried the Union beer, the other local beer. Union and Lasko are like the Miller-Bud powerhouses of Slovenian beer, only they are way better. They are also served in half-liter bottles...
For dinner we went to Compa, a restaurant John and Evan read about in some book. It is run by a family - father, mother, daughter - and they are the only workers. We ate around 9:15, which I guess was still early for around here. We were also basically the only ones in the restaurant the entire night, which probably should have been a red flag. Everything in the restaurant was homemade, including the wine, of which we ordered a liter, and alright Ill just cut to saying that the entire occasion can only be labeled as an experience. There were no menus, but the mother just presented us an option of a plate of meat, then brought us several pounds of mixed meat. There was cheese that John and Evan disliked with the bread, a salad bowl that was respectable, the meat plate, an after dinner cheese thing that John disliked, and an after dinner shot. We tried to ask questions but Im not even sure they knew what they were giving us. The mother declined Johns invitation to take a shot with us on account of her being married (she said the shot was an aphrodisiac). Evan went into a Shakespearean love sonnet about wanting to be with Anna, which threw off Johns game (the daughter declined a shot on account of not drinking). The food was decent but incredibly greasy or heavy or both.. the wine was pretty bad at first but somehow grew on us. We stayed for a couple of hours; no matter what it was incredibly entertaining.
Ill skip most of the rest of the night, but it included the wine at least affecting John, who at one point camouflaged into a wall, and at another point intentionally threw our leftovers from the restaurant off the bridge and into the river, then said I did it. We also ran into those people from before, and ran into a couple of guys playing frisbee in a street; we each took a few throws. Mine amateurishly hooked right, bouncing off a store window and leaving me with the foundation for nightmares.

Tomorrow we are getting up bright and early to go to Zagreb. More on Evan Davies later...