Slovenia, continued.
Part Two: Lake Bled
One of the overused phrases in travel is picture perfect or just like a postcard. Yet I’m not sure what else one could say about Lake Bled. It has a small island in the middle of a lake, with a church built in the 1600s rising 99 steps above the lake. It has a castle up on a hill, overlooking the lake, and mountains on all sides. Even in the pouring rain, Lake Bled looked special. When the sun finally broke through the clouds in the early evening, it looked surreal.
Close to Bled is the Vintgar Gorge, where a rickety wooden path first built in 1893 leads you into the gorge alongside the rushing river. In places, the water was completely clear, and more often than not, it was a turquoise shade. It was really awesome.
Slovenia and Slovakia are two different countries.
Before we went on this trip, I must confess that I really knew absolutely nothing about Slovenia. For some unknown reason, I just assumed it was some provincial country in Eastern Europe and I never could keep it straight with Slovakia.
Apparently I am not the only one. We’re from the United States, I told the very friendly and chatty receptionist at one of our hotels. This is our first time in Slovenia. We didn’t know much about it before we came, but we really like it. She smiled and said, Oh, I am so glad you like it. Most people from the United States do not know the difference between Slovenia and Slovakia. Um, guilty, as charged. I guess it is all good though because when we told her we were from Pennsylvania, she asked if that was where Dracula was from.
Most of you are probably smarter than me, but in the off chance you have not kept up with your world geography since elementary school, let me introduce you to Slovenia. It became a country when it dissolved from Yugoslavia in 1991. I am not sure where I got the provincial idea from, especially considering Slovenia had the strongest economy in Yugoslavia, obtained membership in the E.U. in 2004, and in 2007, was the first former communist country to adopt the the euro. Slovenia borders Austria, Italy, and Croatia. Its landscape includes mountains (the Julian Alps in the northeast), lakes, caves, and a small coastline on the Adriatic Sea. Slovenia is a tiny country – most destinations can be reached from the capital, Ljubjlana, in a couple of hours. Yet even though we spent a week there, we didn’t see any of the eastern part of the country. For such a small country, Slovenia has a lot to offer.
Part One: Ljubjlana
For starters, the capital, Ljubjlana, is an adorable city made all the more easy to enjoy because of its big, yet small, size. It is by far the biggest city in Slovenia, but it only has about 300,000 people. (By the way, best we can tell, it is pronounced something like Lube-blahn-ya. Locals seemed to differ. It took us the better part of the week to figure out how to say it, which made it interesting when we were trying to ask if we were at the right train station. Is this Lub…um, where are we?) Lively bars and cafes lined the river. In the center of town, a trio of bridges crossed the river. There was some sort of festival going on when we were there, so every night you could take in a free outdoor ballet performance of Madame Butterfly. It has a large fruit market, which we heard expands on Saturdays. There are still some relics of communist buildings (such as the hotel in which we stayed our second night), but for the most part, Ljubjlana is an attractive city that definitely warrants a visit.
If you go, do check out Compa, which serves homemade beer and a mean platter of grilled meat, vegetables and cheese. Don’t check out Hostel Most until their renovations are finished. For some crazy reason, we took a room there and we even saw it first. Located along the river, it will be very nice when it is finished. They are actually renting out unfinished rooms. And people are actually stupid enough to pay for them (albeit getting a discount). I guess it didn’t occur to us to keep looking because prior to the trip, we grew accustomed to living in a state of disarray. It didn’t take long to start having flashbacks to our four years of renovations, most of which were spent living much like Hostel Most: dirty floors, no baseboard or casing, wires sticking out of walls, plastic sheeting hanging from the walls, and drywall dust everywhere. Sean says I was starry eyed over the magic words: private bath, free wifi, and discount. When we realized we had no place to hang our laundry to dry in fear that it would touch the floors, and that we were constantly wearing shoes in the room, we moved to a drab, communist looking hotel. We sold our house for a reason, after all.