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So I am here in Ljubljana in a hostel which used to be a prison. Cool as that is, it wasn't an aesthetic choice, more a practical one as it was the closest budget accomodation to the train station, where I have to get a train from at 6.20am tomorrow morning. However I have heard this place waxed out by plenty of backpackers blogging about Ljubljana on here, so I was hoping to be able to see it.

The train journeys here were mostly hell, to be honest with you. I was denied buying any food to bring on to me because no cash machines in Praha hlavní nádrazí were working, on the Praha - Salzburg train (6 and half hours) there was no food full stop, and I wanted to massacre my compartment at one point as the other 3 occupants of it pulled out huge carrier bags and started making baguettes out of their contents right in front of my eyes, and turn my head and I would be watching this crazy group of campers whose every other word collectively was "ty vole", "hovno" or "jezíš maria" and usually preceeded by a sleeping bag or other camping instrument flying through the air at one of them or our window.

I then had some pretty unpleasant experiences at Salzburg Hauptbahnhof, when I did go and buy some food from someone they epically short changed me and ignored me when I protested about it (probably because every time I try to speak that language of theirs, every other word comes out in Czech). The next steed whose epic as hell route was - I kid you not - Frankfurt to Zagreb (total journey time 13 hours), and which I took for 4 of them from Salzburg to here, was not only therefore packed but also boiling hot for some reason despite being air conditioned, and though I managed to pass out for a bit of it, I was starting to feel really dizzy by the time we came out of the tunnel which led us into Slovenia.

I got my ticket for Rijeka the next day straight after arriving, then headed off to this place - weirdly, this was the only time ever while travelling that I've stayed in the first place in a city which I've come across. In Slovakia for example, there was a consistent pattern of us only staying in the second place we tried.. the first place is always the "wtf are you doing kurva, get to know the town properly first" one, so anyway this time around I got it right.

After dropping my stuff off and taking a shower, I went out in search of some much needed food. The hostel had a kitchen and I was planning on just cooking something, however I couldn't even find any shops, so I went instead to this pizza place selling slices of pizza as big as normal pizzas. A search for some good ice cream was also quite obviously in order.

Getting around in Slovenia was quite fun. I don't know the next thing about the Slovene language beyond the fact that "please" is the same as in Czech and "thank you" the same as in Croatian, the latter of which was of course impossible to cleanly adjust back to, and beyond this I was definitely just speaking random slavic guesswork but people understood (and were greatly amused for the most part). I can tell I will have fun remembering not to say "hvala" any more when I get back from this trip, which in Czech means something more like "praise the lord!" but in south slavic languages "thank you".

My linguistic ignorance did me some favours when I nearly got busted by the police after this pizza and ice cream, for the heinous crime of crossing the road on a red man, which is such a damn easy mistake for a westerner to make in central and eastern europe, where it is illegal and in Slovenia carries a penalty of €100. As far as I can tell he let me go purely because I was playing completely dumb and he couldn't even communicate with me.

I didn't stay out long as I was pretty tired, just went for a short walk around the town centre and back via this open air concert going on in a park, to the hostel where I just started drinking myself to sleep (to be honest, I don't rate Slovenian beer very highly). After a couple of these I went up to the room, and shortly after this I was joined in my room by a french woman called Annabelle who I had been noticing in the bar as she was the only other person drinking alone and therefore very nearly went and spoke to. It turned out we were dorm sharing after all, and she turned out to be quite a character. So, we spent the next 3 hours or so just chatting, laughing and swapping stories, since a large crowd of 16 year old Geordies outside on the floor made sleep impossible until about 2.30am.

When they finally calmed down our conversations did too, and I nodded off to sleep for about 2 hours to the newly assimilated wisdom that next time, I should remember that when one gets an intuition to talk to someone one should just do it. It also gave me a rather renewed enthusiasm to maybe stay in one more place on the way back from Novalja later on in the week, now teetering between doing the journey back to Prague (which I have absolutely zero plans for, by the way) backpacker stylee as opposed to antisocial zombie vlak stylee. A bit of a radical change of heart.

It's very important to always stay black and white. Last line somewhat related.

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