Slovenia is one of those countries that I'm treating really shabbily. It wasn't on the list until quite late in the planning, when an overnight train I was counting on to get me from Croatia to Prague didn't quite line up exactly as I wanted it to. Part of Slovenia's problem is that it's part of the Schengen zone: an area of 28 or so countries without any border controls. That's great for Slovenians, who can go to Austria or Italy without any fuss. It's also great for most Australians, who can visit Slovenia, Italy, Austria and 25 other countries without having to worry about visas or passport stamps.
It's not great, though, for Australians who are trying to travel around Europe for a long time. You can spend 90 days out of any 180 in the Schengen zone without a residency visa, which sounds like a lot. And it is, until you actually try to cover Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Poland, Austria, Portugal, Greece and anywhere up to 20 other countries in the space of three months, when you could easily spend three months in many of them alone. I spent a scant 12 days in each of Spain and France, and 16 in Italy: 40 of my 90 days gone, in just three countries.
Croatia isn't yet in the Schengen zone - it's obliged to join eventually, but the refugee influx a couple of years ago seems to have halted things indefinitely - and so I was able to lavish nine days there. Because Slovenia is inside, though, when it became clear that my best path from Croatia to Prague lay through Ljubljana, carving out a couple of days to at least check out the city meant making painful, agonising choices about where those days could come from.
Ljubljana, by the way, is pronounced 'loob-lee-yah-na': it's clearly the best-named capital city in Europe (with all due respect to Reykjavik and Andorra-la-Vella), and it's up there with Asian winner Bandar Seri Begawan and Africa's Ouagadougou. The latter probably wins out because it's the capital city of Burkina Faso: "Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso' is a city/country naming double act that's impossible to beat.
I eventually worked out that I could have about 30 hours or so in Slovenia, by the time I got an early bus from Zagreb (much better than getting a bus the night before, and chewing up another Schengen day for no good purpose), and then caught an afternoon train to Vienna the next day, where I would stay overnight before getting a train to Prague. I hoped that would be enough time to wander about aimlessly in Ljubljana for a while, make the obligatory zoo trip, and then have a short day trip out to Bled, a town an hour out from Ljubljana, which has a fairytale-esque church built on a little island in a big lake. The Swans were playing Richmond at 5:45 in the morning, which felt like an outright hostile move by the AFL, but at least meant the game wouldn't encroach on my explorations.
The first step after arriving was to find my way to the hostel. I'd checked the location the night before and been horrified: how had I missed that it was way out in the outer suburbs? It was going to take two buses to get from the main coach and train terminal just to drop off my bags: that day trip to Bled suddenly felt a lot less tempting. Things got even more complicated when the first bus made a wrong turn: I jumped off at the first available stop, found an English speaker (as always, nowhere near as difficult as I deserve) and learned that the bus network had been almost entirely upended by the Tour of Slovenia, which had a combined professionals and amateur race stage in Ljubljana that day. Just when you thought middle-age men in lycra couldn't be more annoying, they go and get you lost in Loob-lee-yah-na.
I hung around the bus stop long enough to establish that the bus wasn't turning up, and turned to Google Maps. The hostel was still 1.2km away, and it was 30 degrees. What's more, I only had a €20 note to get me through the weekend, and it would be a month before I used euros again so I didn't want to have to withdraw more money: having a lot of euros tucked away would just make me a tempting target for any Ukrainian or Russian border guard who asks me to open up my bags in the next couple of weeks. There was nothing else for it: backpack on back, insulin bag in hand, I walked halfway across Ljubljana.
Well, not quite half-way, but close enough. Ljubljana, I learned, is tiny - you could walk across the entire city, from the equivalent of Melton to Pakenham, in perhaps two to three hours. Into a city less than half the size of Ballarat they manage to pack almost three times as many people, and yet it's not at all crowded: most of the suburban areas are still detached houses with yards. It might be the perfect sized city: small enough to stumble all the way home from evening revelry in the CBD, but big enough to have everything you need. There's relatively little traffic and every second person gets around by bike, and it's apparently the most environmentally-friendly European capital into the bargain.
After recharging both phone and physical batteries at the hostel, I ventured out into Loob-lee-yah-na, and because it's so tiny I walked all the way back into town. Wandering aimlessly, I lobbed up in the government area, across the road from the parliament building. It's curious both for the near total absence of security forces - the armoured cars and machine guns that have become ubiquitous in Western Europe are nowhere to be found here - and for its a-bit-out-there-for-parliament decoration:
I imagined Cory Bernardi's face as he walked to work through that entrance every day, and for the first time ever I imagined Cory Bernardi's face and smiled.
Shortly after that the heavens opened, so I fled inside the National Museum. I'd hoped to find a good exhibition of Slovenian history, of which I know next to nothing, but it was more or less the same museum I've seen everywhere else - there were Palaeolithic tribes, then the Romans turned up, then the Germanic tribes turned up, then blokes with steel helmets and armour turned up, and so on and so forth. I've started to significantly dial back on museum visits, because I'm not getting as much out of them as I'd like. But I at least had a roof over my head during the storm, and there was a temporary exhibition of prehistoric, ancient and medieval musical instruments that had an audio guide so you could listen to the music they made. Much more interesting than anything the museum had about Slovenia, alas.
After the rain stopped I headed into the historic town centre. It's small - a couple of streets either side of the river - but might be the prettiest I've seen yet, and I'm getting increasingly injured to the charms of charming old towns. The first thing I noticed was this sign in the middle of the road:
As it had been raining, I couldn't make head or tail of what this was supposed to be. It was only when I went past the next day, in the sunshine, that I worked out there's a sprinkler hanging above the road to make it 'rain' in that particular spot, and the idea is presumably that you walk underneath and get wet. Ljubljana's a small, quiet place... I guess the local kids have to find their fun however they can.
Picturesque though the town is, there isn't really any particular iconic sights. The closest they get is their bridges. There's a 'Triple Bridge' that is basically three pedestrian bridges that radiate out from one point at one end. There's the Dragon Bridge, imaginably named because it has dragons on either side:
I'd already given up on my plan to go to Bled by the end of my first day in Ljubljana. I'm sure it's very picturesque, but I doubted it was worth the hassle: I'd need to leave the hostel in the morning, find luggage storage at the train station, and get the train out and back, all of which was for the sake of seeing and taking photos of a church on an island in a lake. I'll see it one day, but one thing I've learned by the half-way mark is to keep things simple. There's the occasional day trip ahead, for unique and important places, but for the most part I'm sticking closer to base: I might miss out on some things, but so be it. Bled's not disappearing anywhere soon.
I had to wake up at stupid o'clock - 5:40AM - to watch the Swans play Richmond, but it became stupidest o'clock by the time I had dorm mates wake me up at 2:40 and again at four, and there was no way I was getting back to sleep the second time. So it was through a fog of exhaustion that I watched a first half that was perhaps the worst they've played all season. I must have been tired and grumpy because I was urged by fellow Swans supporters in a group chat to go and do something else in Slovenia instead of watch the game. I didn't, of course - you know I couldn't do that - and we got up and won. So there.
I love that I can always depend on Richmond. It doesn't matter what other certainties in life fall by the wayside - that Santa is real, that carrots are orange, that Presidents aren't - because we'll always have Richmond. Never change, Tigers. Meanwhile, the Swans remain unbeaten while I've been in ex-Communist countries and at this stage I think I'm going to have to over-stay my visa in Russia to ensure we win the flag. What could possibly go wrong?
The terrible night's sleep might have contributed to the near-disaster that followed. I wandered about without much focus on time - I had until 7PM before my train - so went back to sleep briefly after the footy, headed to the zoo and then back into town for a brief final walk before getting back to the hostel to collect my things, charge batteries and print out my train ticket. I went into my email to do the latter at about 4:30PM -
The train had left at 4. I'd missed the train.
Insert as many four-letter words here, at whatever volume you think is necessary, to accurately capture my response to this news.
thumbs up: swans
ReplyDeletethumbs down: train