Rationale: There are many ways to navigate through a foreign city to learn about its culture, people, history, and its future. Resting on the edge of the Mediterranean, snug between Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Croatia, Slovenia’s many cultural influences, both historically and presently, can be evidenced in its local food.

Proposal: We propose that food, and the culture that produces it, is not best experienced in a restaurant, but rather in the homes of those people who cook it on a daily basis. Visitors become more than tourists: they are guests. Invited into the homes of the local community, a meal is prepared, recipes shared, and a cultural divide is bridged. One can learn far more from this experience than from a tour bus, a restaurant, or any packaged tourist program for the simple reason that traditional tourist ventures only allow a glossing of the surface of the culture. Ours is about sensory, cultural, and interpersonal interaction that speaks the present, the past, and future of Ljubljana.

Aims: This project aims to give short-stay tourists an alternative to current mainstream tour packages, communicating the culture of Ljubljana in a clear and concise fashion, without the feeling that one is getting only a superficial ‘gloss’ of the place and people.  It immerses tourists in the culture through direct interaction with people, the physical space, and the history of the area by allowing them to participate rather than simply observe from the sidelines, or the seat of a tour bus.