Ljubljana

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The train trip to Ljubljana was quite short and we had a compartment to ourselves, which made it quite a pleasent trip. When we were interupted by the border control people, we got the Slovenian stamp which showed that we were now back in the EU. Again we had not booked any accommodation in Ljubljana before we arrived as everything on the internet looked either too expensive or too far away from the city centre so we decided to again try our luck with tourist information at the station.

But before we did that we were expecting to have to change money into the local currency which was something called SIT and we had to work out what the appropriate conversion rate was so we knew how much to withdraw from an ATM. When Ross went up to the currency exchange window to exchange what little Croation money he had left, he was surprised to receive Euros in return. It turned out that Slovenia had converted to Euros back in January, more recent than what was stated in our Lonely Planet guide.

Again we got lucky with our accommodation and got something relatively cheap that was close to the station. Again we picked up a brochure that listed all the main buildings to see in the city and off we went to explore the town.

Ljubljana has an impressive castle located on a hill which overlooks the town which is accessed by a funicular railway which was only completed last year in 2006! The city is surrounded by mountains and there is a very good view from the castle tower. As it was a Saturday we even managed to see a few couples getting their wedding photos taken in the castle grounds.

When we went back down the hill into the city centre, we found it was very noisy as there were a lot of people about. It turned out that it was the last day of the Ljubljana Festival and we saw among other things a vintage car parade, an outdoor 4 on 4 basketball championship which at least Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia were all competing in, and numerous DJs pumping out loud dance music from caravans. When we eventually found a place to eat that night, Ross was surprised to find an item on the menu listed as "foal". He could not remember eating horse meat before, but it tasted quite nice if that is what it was!

The next day was much quieter with the festival over and we completed our walking tour and even had time to go for a walk in the forest behind the Tivoli gardens. At dinner after we sat down at our table, a Scottish guy sat down at the table next to us and started talking to us as he must have heard us speaking in English. He seemed to be asking Ross a lot of questions about public transport in Melbourne rather than Ross volunteering this topic as he sometimes does. It turned out this guy worked in the public transport industry in the UK so as you can imagine we had quite a long and interesting conversation with dinner.

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