And So It Begins

My short holiday is over, and now it is time to work.

God willing.

I had my first day, today, in beautiful Plečnik's Palace. I thought I was getting there before the crowd to meet the boss at 8:30, but apparently he works the 6:00 - 3:30 shift. I will not be getting in at six. Eight thirty I can do. Six is ridiculous. And when I tried to leave at 5:30, I realized I was locked in. (A visibly irritated guard who was leaving let me out.) So 8:30 to 4:30 it is...I guess?

My boss seems like a great guy; talkative, knowledgeable, helpful, and generally sunnily disposed. He's the only man in the entire division (and, by my count, one of three on the entire floor). I'm slightly weirded out by that; I tend to get along much better with young men than young women, but hopefully I'll get to know the gals on the floor and like them. Although one of them did describe the Court as "lonely." Right-o. My office mate is out for the month, finishing up her master's degree, so I have a fairly large office to myself. It's a great space, but now I have to fill it with work. Work!

I spent today getting oriented, which will probably be my task for tomorrow (and the rest of the week?), reading random things about Slovenian government, the Slovenian Constitutional Court, Slovenian human rights legislation, and the Slovenian National Anthem. Yup, their national anthem and coat of arms are proscribed in the Constitution itself. (Shout out to the city of Ljubljana's awesome coat of arms.) Also in the Constitution are such guarantees of rights as "Everyone shall be free to decide whether to bear children." I haven't yet asked whether that just means "To hell with you, Oliver Wendell Holmes: The state can't sterilize people," or whether "whether" is actually "whether or not." Still, it's kind of crazy.

In any case, that was all fine, and I'm good with doing that for another day or two...but I really hope there's work after that. Apparently a LOT of the stuff they do is in Slovene. When they need to do comparative con law, I'll be all over that, but I'm not entirely sure how frequently that happens. Well, worse comes to worse, I'll just tell my boss I want to prepare comparative reports on issues that we think are likely to come before the court. Like gay marriage (they already have civil union-type things) or transgender rights or something else with that Mosque that still hasn't gone up. Ideally, however, there will be real work relevant to pending cases. Wish me luck.