The City of Chestnuts and Accordions

Delighted to bring this notice to your attention: November is about to end, that month with a beautiful name and horrible personality is fading away slowly, but surely. Sometimes it stretches its pale arms all the way through December, breathes the gloom in your spine in January, or jumps on you on a March morning. You can never get away from your November.

Today I will fulfill one request I received from my friend, namely - to talk about our lovely Ljubljana, and this is what I am about to do now.

Wet, black pavement during the night looks like skin of some terrifying mystical creature, grudgingly reflecting movements of lights and shadows. The city that grows on it, the city I am living in, never stops fascinating me. I swear I have never been to a place that can turn so alive and so dead: this is something that puzzled me for my whole first year of discoveries.

University, conservatory and other buildings, dollhouse-like tiny castles, lighted against dark sky look almost surreal, too close and too naive under the surprisingly cold rain; worn out, but colorful rows of terraced houses growing out of the river seem like the warmest places to be (although we all know the troubles of heating and leaking the have, but the romanticism!), looking at you with unjust coziness of their lit windows; trees, plants, city benches and lonely lights left, as if someone forgot to turn it off, in empty shops, leaking through glass display and not finding anyone to illuminate - nor inside, nor outside... There is no one. Family evenings? Weather preferences? Did everyone decide to taking time for themselves, or to do a little cleaning around the house?
The city is empty. Tiny, tiny (how come they are so tiny?) sculptures are silent. Fences are silent, street lights are silent. A stranger passes, not pleased, swaying about the puddles with no expression on their face, no expression in their umbrella. A pair of stubborn tourists passes, they don't want to miss the evening just because some water was too bored up there and decided to land on some lovely places to see. And they will know that they didn't make a mistake when decided that a quite poor and nasty rain cannot make them stop exploring. An old woman riding a bicycle, wearing something like a giant plastic bag, passes me, and I feel older  than her, folding my umbrella the very next moment.
The emptiness cannot be accidental, for it feels rather mystical. Like visiting amazingly realistic theatre decorations, but not as an actor, with this familiarity and comfort of routine is his eyes, no; more like a child who, crawling, slipped on the stage after all the wine is drunk and all echoes of step-dancing are swallowed by the night sky.

The other evening, perhaps someday in August, I open my windows to the marching bands, so enthusiastic about something you've never heard of, but already feel connected to; I open my door to humid heat and warm smell of grilled meat, to voices and faces of strangers, moving, moving, waving, talking, singing, eating, drinking. The great celebration has fallen down on the town, and you cannot ignore it. A man with painted face and a girl in a costume looking like as if she stepped out that milk chocolate commercial give me a tomato and a paper. People, people, people, can so many of them fit in these narrow and previously so artificial and fragile streets? Oh yes they can - and they also cannot, at some points, so you have to make your way through smoke, through words you cannot even identify, through unjustified cheerfulness and some characters are not even getting of their bikes in this condense mass of celebrating bodies.
People of all kinds, all shapes, all colours and singing in all languages. Tourists, bikes, accordions, artists looking for some fortune or some change, with or without accordions, fancy people certainly without accordions... I can't name them all. All friends, all strangers.
Music finds you everywhere, you cannot escape it. Exceptionally good, exceptionally bad, sometimes it reaches you from three directions at the same moment, and I get both dizzy and happy. The smell, the light, voices, warmth, wind, life that is overflowing with no obvious reasons - and this is how it should be, I believe.

On some nights the smell of roasted chestnuts follows you. On some mornings, that deep white ghost of mist is your companion. On some afternoons, you just look up and see - bas-relief flowers blooming on the walls of modest heights, your eyes meet with hundred of pars of stony eyes - people of the altorilievo nation, characters, beautiful women, handsome men, displaying their graceful figures or beheaded above the main entrance.
How can you feel alone in this city?
I suppose, you can.

This is something I can now remember about that little area that I inhibit, not bigger that the Central Park, and still full of surprises and simple charm. I will add to it, because every day there is a new (often small, familiar, yet so fresh and vivid) sensation right in front of my eyes, waiting for me to let it be the greatest amazement in the entire universe, at least for some moments.
I will not conclude this entry, I leave it opened. Hopefully, for long and long days we still have together.