In the “pearl of the Adriatic”, enjoying some down time by the beach. This city is both more touristy and more expensive than we had planned, so we’re only spending two nights rather than three. Still, the interplay of light and stone at sunset is totally worth the hordes walking down the main drag. Like Venice, get a few steps away from the center and the feeling totally changes. We’re staying at a pension, run by an incredibly sweet old couple. The husband seems to only wear tank tops, which is totally fitting given the heat. It’s at the top of the hill, which doesn’t look so far on the map, but that only covers the horizontal distance. Hannah tells me it’s 213 steps from the old gate to our door, and I’m inclined to believe her. Went to a nearby island today, and got nicely sunburned. Heading inland tomorrow, toward Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Tag: Balkans
This is the world’s cutest moutain town. It’s got a castle on a cliff, overlooking a lake with a church on an island. Along the lake is a park, where ducks gather to feed from old men tossing them bread crumbs. Apparently it is also verboten to sleep in said park, as the nice uniformed Slovene policija informed us. After dinner of turkey Ljubljana-style (beaten down, breaded and fried), we heard a traditional band oompah-ing their way across the lake. This is some serious Slovenia right here.
Off to Zagreb tomorrow for the day and an overnight bus to Dubrovnik.
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Edit: found an internet cafe on, get this, Nikolai Tesla street in Zagreb.
They say that Ljubljana is now what Prague was ten years ago, and they may be right. It has all that Eastern European charm, the Habsburg architecture, the castle on a hill, the punked up kids in nightclubs, but with none of the Brits on stag parties and rampant prostitution.
Hannah and I meant to stay in the Hostel Celica, which was once a jail and is now an “art hostel”, but once again I booked it for the wrong night. Stupid off by one errors are why I’m not booking more than a few nights ahead on these freewheeling trips again. We stayed in the institutional but perfectly serviceable Hostel Tabor, which is a university dorm during the academic year.
Ljubljana is a beautiful city, with a great pedestrian zone filled with cafes along the river, and a nice urban planning mixture of historic buildings and new development. We strolled the promenade, perusing the weekly antiques market. Hannah kept wanting to buy old knives, and I beer steins, but we decided neither would travel well. Then we stormed the castle, where we found the inspiration for Trogdor the burninator. Then we got some of the best ice cream I’ve ever had; even though it wasn’t gelato, it fulfilled our church-sweets deal nicely.
At night we scouted around for a fast food restaurant that serves horse burger. However, the map we had was both precise and inaccurate, which made us do several laps of a garden park. We gave up and went to Jose Pena’s (Slovenia’s first Mexican restaurant!), but it didn’t satisfy my need for horse. Then, as we were wandering drunkenly home, we found it: Red Hot Horse! I strolled in and asked for a double horse, prosim. The guy asked “mustard or mayonaise”, but I thought he was speaking Slovene, so I responded that I wanted all the toppings. He rolled his eyes at me, but served me nonetheless. A horseburger franchise must be used to dealing with drunkards at all hours of the night. It actually tasted like a gristly hamburger, and I only ended up eating half of it, but now no one can tell me that I haven’t eaten horse (or pigeon, or rabbit, or boar, or sea urchin, or God knows what else I will eat on this trip).