NE Italy & Slovenia

---

Buongiorno.

A HUGE part of my time in Italy has been the ENDLESS kindness demonstrated by my two hosts. I will try to give this kindness justice and explain what's been going on in this area.

No pictures this time but eventually they will be AWESOME.

Quick travel update:
I'm sitting in my friend Laura's family house in Trevignano, Italy which is a short distance from Venice. The days prior, I was with Massimo in Trieste and various parts of the area, including Slovenia. Today, I was in Venice proper and tomorrow I'm heading with Laura to Bologna for a handful of days. I'll return to Venice the morning of the 8th and fly out that evening to Frankfurt. The World Cup starts the 9th. Control yourself.


Travel stories past:
Last I wrote on June 1, I think all I said was that I made it to Trieste, Italy, and that was about the extent of it. Since, I've road a train in a cave, drank sour wine, road a motorcycle, hung out at a squat in Ljubljana, witnessed an Italian mountain wedding with the couple carried by a donkey, and listened to a lot of Irish music. I swear, this will make more sense soon.

Watch as before your eyes, I get all chronological on you... BAM!

June 1

It was a Thursday, the last day before the long weekend. On Friday, everyone had work off in order to celebrate the post-WWII constitution. As this long weekend began, I met up with Massimo after my travel/Internet day in Trieste the last time I wrote. We really didn't even know where to be begin; it had been 3 years since we last saw each other nearly as we were colleagues for 2.5 years when I worked in Ireland. We were both foriegners there but since, we've each returned to our approximate homes since I'm in Vancouver but from Ohio and he's in Trieste but from Genoa. Conversationally, we just dove right into things and up until we said goodbye, we still were playing catch-up it seemed.

In Ireland, Massimo was one of a few people with a motorcycle. In Italy, things were a little bit different since everyone and their brother has a motorcycle, or some variant. When we first met in the central Piazza Unita d'Italia (the largest square on the seafront in Europe), on a short 10 minute ride carrying my full backpacker's pack I verified that Massimo had indeed successfully rode his famed motorcycle from Dublin to Italy. It was a little awkward carrying 20 kg of underwear, Band Aids, and deodorant but fun nonetheless. And this was not my last ride on the bike.

Trieste itself is set upon the coast in nearly the northeast corner of Italy. It's famous for its high winds and dynamic history. Even in the past 100 years, it has been a part of Austria-Hungary in pre-WWI (and was its major port), then Italy after WWI until WWII, then Yugoslavia during WWII. After WWII, it was occuppied by the US for about 9 years until it was returned to Italy with nearby Istria given to what was then Yugoslavia. The point is, Trieste has been through a lot of change, a lot of cultures, and a lot of languages in a short ammount of time. Certain influences of these respective cultures are shown, for example the cakes and building styles show Austrian influence, and as well you can still hear Slovenian in certain areas.

That night we zipped up the nearby hillside on the bike and had vast amounts of wonderful seafood and white wine at the excellent Trattoria al Faro, while overlooking Trieste. It was a meal for a king and before we left, they snuck us some complementary grappe, an Italian liquor remarkably similar to raki or ouzo. We planned our journies for the upcoming days and later we met some friends at a handful of bars before we went back to lay our pretty heads to bed.

June 2

Wake up! Go go go! We road the motorcycle to the nearby Miramare Castle (housing the US admiral during occupation post-WWII) and then towards the farming town of Osmiza. This village was in Italy but all the inhabitants spoke Slovenian amongst themselves. This was not to take away from their secret wine called terrano, known only regionally but having a sharp sour taste since it's made from grapes grown atop mostly limestoned earth. The restaurant itself had no flashy sign or menu. To the outsider (i.e. me), it just looked like we got off the bike at the sign written in two languages and walked into someone's backyard and stole their food. To locals, they can tell that they sell food because of the upside-down plants (frasca) hanging outside their gate.

After our feist, we went to get a rental car for our journies to come. After a quick pasta dinner at Massimo's, it was off to scout the Italian's in their friendly versus Ukraine. After watching this, it is clear that we will defeat them easily on the 17th ;-). Recently, there has been a lot of drama in the Italian soccer community. OK, well there is always drama but here it was more of a scandal. Match-fixing and agent corruption are the start of it and the result is that a lot of Italian soccer fans don't really care how they do in the World Cup due to general frustrations with the players, the team, and the game in general. Bdut nonetheless, Massimo and I met some friends for bowling, where I embarressed myself and my family. I don't understand how I suck so badly.

June 3

In a nutshell, June 3 = Slovenia.

Massimo told me about some cool caves in Slovenia so we decided to check them out. We ended up checking out a few other things too. I'm convinced that former Yugoslovia was all about having various combinations of items within other items. Croatia had its islands inside islands and monestaries inside islands, and similarly Slovenia has it's castles within mountain-sides and trains within caves. Why not?

First we made it to Predjamski Grad, the castle within a mountain. After winding around the green, Irish-like countryside, you stumble upon this strange structure. You are given the opportunity to climb in and out of its castle as well as the adjacent caves the castle protects.

A short distance away is the Postojnska Jama, the longest cave in Slovenia (longest in Europe is in Ukraine and in the world is in Kentucky (Mammoth caves)). After dodging the tourist shops and peeing on the sign that says it costs half a Euro to pee, you arrive at a sort of waiting room where you don't really know what you are waiting for. Every hour, a magical door opens and you decent slightly and board some amusement park-like "train" which is like a meter or so wide. The "ride" begins and instead of seeing robotic versions of your favorite Disney characters, you instead are exposed to various caves and cave formations throughout the 3 million year old cave.

At some point, you disembark the ride and then go stand under the large neon sign that has written the language you understand best on it. The awesome part is how under the English sign we have every single race represented. We totally kicked the other languages ASS. But once your guide gathers you, you explore the surrounding areas. Some caves look like spaghetti hanging from the ceiling, some look like drapes, some look red, some white, some falloc, some also falloc and then you even get to see some strange animals that have adapted to living without light and food. The one was called the "human fish". They called it human because it can live to be around 100 years old. Unrelated to the name, the human fish can supposedly go up to 12 years without nourishment of any sort. Their eyes are completely empty and they "see" only like bats do, requiring motion or electromagnetic fields of some sort (ok, I'm not a physicist). Anyway, it's all quite interesting.

We made it to Ljubljana afterwards to hang out for the evening. The town itself is the capital of Slovenia. Its spelling changes every 20 minutes. You can rearrange the letters in whatever way you want and it still has the same name. This is traditional of the region and is not a lie at all. So we ran from place to place and ate a nice dinner then had a ton of Union beer, the local brew. Eventually we made it over to Metalkova. This area is a squat with pretty cool art and music, something like a miniature version of Copenhagen's Christiania. I snuck a few minutes of Internet time there, but only non is this blog entry taking form!!!

We finished up at the Bachus-Center and made it back to Trieste at 4am, after waking up the boarder guard to return to Italy.

June 4

On the 4th, we went through a variety of car tunnels towards the pre-Alps NW of Trieste and past Udine. We targetted Sauris, a tiny malga (summer farm for livestock) mountain town with a regionally known famous ham and a nice beer named Zahre as well. The region has its own dialect of Italian and, in fact, Zahre is that language's version of Sauris. The area also is famous for its cross country skiing as some famous Italian Olympian skier turned politician is from near there.

While entering the town, the street was filled with people awaiting our arrival. Oh ya, and there was a wedding. The couple arrived on a small cart pulled by a donkey and driven by a man with a hat with a feather in it (looking very Alpine). We waved and wished them well.

After seeing mini-Switzerland, we made way to Montebelluna to meet my friend Laura, who I met in Turkey. She had some free days near now and we established that I was going to be nearby these dates so she has taken me under her wings to show me the area. Massimo, Laura, and I had pizza in Montebelluna as a sort of hand-off, as Massimo returned to Trieste and I stayed with Laura's family in the nearby town of Trevignano, where I type this now. It is a handy location for visiting Venice, as we discovered....

June 5

This is TODAY! I am kind of sick of typing actually, no offense. And I know no one has made it this far, haha. But ya, today we went in to Venice. Venice is as beautiful as I'm sure you've seen on TV. Gandolas everywhere. Canals weaving in and out of neighborhoods. Bridges and squares everywhere, as well as lions with wings, the sign of the old Venezian republic. My favorite sights were Piazza San Marco as well as seeing random kitchen appliances in the middle of the graceful piazzas. I can't wait to upload these pictures!

Laura gave me a pretty awesome tour, and the local merchants raped me as I had a 5 euro .3 L bottle of beer and paid 7 euro for two shitty sandwiches after they added some stupid "cover charge". I sound bitter, but Venice is actually quite bitter. Just don't buy anything and enjoy the sights. For me, it was my first taste of Italian tourism really. I have only been hanging out with Italians so it was shocking to see 85%!t(MISSING)ourists, despite the towns history and beauty. In this sense, it was similar to what Dubrovnik was to me in Croatia, and in touristic ways, is quite similar, except the netcafes in Venice are 12 Euro an hour (insane!!!).

SOOOOOOOOOOOO..........that being said, here's a look into my crystal ball.

Travel stories (near) future:

June 6 & 7

travel to Bologna and hang out there

June 8

return to Venice to fly to Frankfurt

June 9 - 22

World Cup in (and around) Germany!

June 22

Fly back to Zagreb!

---

Photos

Piazza Unita d'Italia
Piazza Unita d'Italia in Trieste

Concepts in Italy
Miramare Castle near Trieste

my bike in Osmiza
me pretending I an drive Massimo's motorcycle in the Slovenian/Italian village

Predjamski Grad
Massimo and I at the castle in the mountain in Slovenia

evil American
all Americans have horns

Postojnska Jama
taking pictures in Slovenian caves is difficult

prealpi wedding
en route to a wedding in the pre-Alps in northern Italy

typical Venice
my favorite gandola in Venice

Comments

[gali]

did ya get a pic
human fish that see like bats, spaghetti hanging from a cave ceiling... what planet is slovenia on? cooool.