What language do they speak here?

As I'm sure y'all know, I went to Slovenia with Kayla and McKinley this weekend, making this something like the 4th or 5th time I've gotten on a train with nothing more than a hostel reservation (and certainly no idea of what we were going to do when we got there). By this point I'm willing to admit that it's a surprisingly liberating feeling not to have every square second of your trip planned out.

Thursday evening, we headed to the train station to start the Slovenia adventure by way of a EuroNight train. The train itself was comprised of sleeper cars (compartments of 4 or 6 bunks) and a few cars that just had seats (where we spent our 5 hour ride). Our car was an interesting one...the most notable characters include a girl who slept so hard that the ticket and passport inspectors had to literally shout at her and shake her and also a group of 4 laughing Italians (2 separate couples who didn't know one another beforehand, but found something absolutely hilarious). It was a pretty noisy and frigid ride, so I had a hard time sleeping, but I expected as much. When we got to Ljubljana, there was another sketchy passport control, this time in the form of 2 sweat suit sporting, bicycle helmet wearing "police" who only looked at McKinley's passport and wanted to know the name of our hostel. Then we set out at 2:30 am in search of our hostel.

After getting sidetracked only a tiny bit by a sign that made us turn too early, we found the hostel nestled among graffiti-coated buildings. The guy at the desk was really nice and handled our sleep deprivation induced confusion pretty well. Once we got our keys, sheets, and towels, we headed up a few flights of stairs wondering "will there be other people in our room at all? will they be asleep?" McKinley opened the door to the dorm (a 12 person, mixed dorm, mind you) and the first thing we hear is a serious snore. Then we realize the room is practically full. Of guys. And we can't see our open beds. It turns out one was against the lefthand wall while the other two were squeezed in underneath a really slanty part of the roof. McKinley took the solo bed while Kayla and I decided to get cozy underneath the eaves of the roof and try not to knock ourselves out on the wooden beams. Since it was pitch black, almost 3am, and our beds were box-springs on the floor, getting our sheets on the beds and in to our pjs was a comedic affair considering that we were trying to be quiet and stealthy. Despite it being pretty chilly in the attic, I crashed and we all slept until 9:30ish Friday morning.

Friday started off with a bang when I got yelled at by an Australian guy for using the men's bathroom within our dorm instead of the women's (I knew I was using the wrong one, but Kayla was in the other one, so I wanted to save time). Kicker is, he got out of his bed to tell me I was using the wrong bathroom, so I assumed he was planning to use it...nope, he got right back in bed. Anyways, we then took advantage of the free breakfast and headed out to see what Ljubljana had to offer. First we walked around the area near the hostel, which is comprised of the graffiti covered art galleries. Then we headed towards the city center, relying more on our sense of direction than the map because we had all day to explore. We came across a really beautiful church on our way to Ljubljana Castle, then went up to the castle. The views of the city from the castle were amazing and we paid a few euro to go up in an old tower to get even better views. After touring the entire castle, we decided to skip the steep, winding road back down the hill and took a little cable car instead, which was much quicker. From the castle, we went towards the main square and stumbled on a market in the process. The vendors were selling everything from fruit to flowers to clothes and we bought a few peaches as a snack while we investigated some of the clothing booths. By then we were pretty hungry, so we started looking for a restaurant that had inside seating (it was a pretty chilly day) and found a really cute glass enclosed patio type deal where the girls got sandwiches and I got pasta. Once we had warmed up and filled up, we went to a park that had a few "castles" that really turned out to be modern mansions, but as we were trying to find a bathroom, we found a little tennis park where men were practicing, so we ended up sitting there watching and eating a snack. Then we tried (and failed miserably) to find the "Cultural and Congress Center" to see either the Slovenia Philharmonic or a traditional Slovenian Ballet. We asked probably 5 different people how to find it before we finally gave up and went in search of dinner instead. We found ourselves at a traditional Slovenian restaurant being served by a waiter whose English was limited to "thank you for you" and where we had our first brush with fire of the night...a candle had been set on an antique baker's rack type deal and the flame was so high that it was burning the upper part of the rack. The second brush with fire came later that night at the hostel. When we got back, there was some type of cocktail party going on inside the hostel, dozens of teenage Slovenians hanging out right outside the hostel, and major parties going on within the graffiti buildings that made up the neighborhood. So we decided to check our email and hang out downstairs for a bit, then go up so we could shower and go to bed early. I took one of the colder showers of my life, which was sad mostly because I'd been so chilly all day and was really looking forward to warming up. Then I climbed in to my pallet on the floor under two massive quilts and got settled in. It was really loud outside and people kept coming in and out of our room, so I was kind of in and out of sleep and looked up at one point to see people scrambling around on the floor near the bathroom so I just figured someone spilled something. Nope. McKinley told us the next day that a fellow dorm-mate of ours draped his towel over the beam in the room, managing to set it on wires and a light all at once...and it started flaming. All the people awake at the time threw it off the beam and into the sink to douse the flames...hence the frantic clean up shortly thereafter.

We woke up Saturday around 9 and had breakfast before checking out and stowing our luggage at the hostel for the day. Then we walked to the bus station to buy tickets and wait for the 11am bus to Lake Bled (about an hour outside of Ljubljana). The bus ride was uneventful, although it took us through some great countryside. When we got there, we were pretty hungry and went in search of a restaurant that wasn't too expensive. McKinley led us to a pizza place and when we first went in, we were the only 3 customers, so the waiter, who we've decided to call Boris, got pretty friendly. He sat at our table to take our orders and was making jokes with us and generally being a boy. The restaurant got busy pretty quickly, so we were spared too much more of his attention, but, he definitely took a liking to McKinley and kept trying to flirt with her even as we were leaving. Before attempting to find the lake itself, we stopped back by a bakery that we'd seen on the way to the pizzeria and got a couple of traditional Slovenian desserts and tiramisu. Once we were sufficiently stuffed, we decided to follow a tour group towards the lake since we didn't have a map. It was fairly easy to find, given its size and the fact that we were following people...but the views were amazing. We opted for the 2 to 2 1/2 hour walk around the lake instead of riding a tourist train and saw the lake, surrounding mountains, and tiny island from every angle. We even happened upon a rowing contest and rowing club on the walk. We decided we were too tired to hike up the one big hill that offered the best views of the entire lake and couldn't find the way up to the castle (seen in my pictures), but it was still a great little day trip. It was nice to just wander around the lake, taking our time instead of trying to rush and do everything possible. We got back to the bus station early, so we had a snack and rested, then headed back to Ljubljana until our 2:30am train back to Venice.

We had been worried all along about killing that much time, but, we didn't have a choice based on the train schedule and we were determined to make the best of it. We originally wanted to see a ballet, but, didn't think we were dressed up enough, so we headed back towards the little side street where we had lunch Friday because we remembered there being a tapas restaurant. The plan was to get margaritas and tapas, then go get wine and a real dinner later (and still have hours to kill). But the tapas filled us up and the margaritas were expensive enough that we didn't want to go buy another dinner, so we figured we'd go back to the hostel to hang out. On the way, we stopped in at a 24 hour bakery that we'd found the day before and this time we each bought 2 pastries to get us through the looooong night. Back at the hostel, we drank hot tea, played a few games of crazy eights, checked our email again, played uno, read for a while, and played a game that's basically like "six degrees of separation" but with movies. We all were exhausted, but didn't dare shut our eyes because we were so worried about missing our train. We somehow managed to stay up and headed for the station around 1:45. The train back was about as uneventful as the way to Ljubljana, but once again there were a few really noisy people plus it was pretty chilly again, so my sleep was a little rough. At one point, I woke up to find 3 boys walking down the aisle away from Kayla and I and holding giant cans of beer only to see them walk back towards us 30 seconds later, this time clutching a fire extinguisher...so it's possible we had a 3rd fire-experience and didn't even know it...

We got back to Venice around 8:30am and saw an absolutely beautiful sunrise on the way. I ate a small snack, took a super hot shower, and fell in to bed by 9, but only slept until 12, which was much less sleep than I'd hoped to get. I ended up doing laundry, skyping a little bit, and making an epic trip to the Billa where I spent a painful 30 Euro on food. Despite the big bill at the grocery, I'm pretty excited to throw a few different foods in to my rotation...instead of turkey sandwiches for lunch and penne with pesto for dinner, I've now got in my refrigerator a roasted chicken (which I myself roasted and carved this morning, thank you very much), some ground beef (to make bolognese sauce), salad fixings, peas, fruit, yogurt, and raw gnocchi. I made gnocchi with meat sauce last night and had a baguette with pesto and roasted chicken for lunch today with my leftover risotto (from yesterday)...my body definitely needs to detox after the way I've been eating...however gelato is still totally allowed (I even had some last night since I missed it so much while we were in Slovenia). I really enjoyed Slovenia more than I expected, but it's good to be back. It's so weird that Mom and Dad will be here in less than a week and I'll be on my way to Greece and Croatia! I'm getting a little travel weary, but, I don' t think I'll be traveling anymore weekends outside of my two 10 day breaks...between wanting to save some money and not wanting to fly (and having seen most places within train distance) and wanting to spend a few weekends relaxing in Venice...it just doesn't make sense to rush out of town every open weekend like I did last time I was here.

(Pictures from top: the type of buildings that made up the neighborhood of my hostel, the Dragon Bridge, and the view of Ljubljana from the castle)