More Words.

Okay, here’s the sequel to the last post. Like I said before, we took a night train to from Split to Slovenia and got there without any interesting happening (which really I suppose is a good thing). I guess the one exciting thing is that we got our passports stamped since we were reentering the EU (Croatia hasn’t been allowed in), but even the stamp we got is kind of plain and boring looking. Which is actually the exact opposite of our destination, Ljubljana (pronounced loo-blee-ah-nuh). Even though it’s the country’s largest city, it's actually quite small and can be pretty easily covered by foot, although there were bike lanes everywhere on the sidewalks and lots of bikers, few of whom actually used their designated lane.

I really don’t know how I can describe the city in a unique way, but I’ll give it a try. There’s a castle up on a hilltop looking down on the city, a small tranquil river that cuts through the city, various bridges connecting each side of the city and an abundance of popular outdoor cafes and bars that run along the side of the river. There are also a lot of big green parks where people go to spend the afternoons dog-walking, rollerblading, picnicking and other various wholesome family activities. I loved getting to wander around on some of the foresty tree-filled paths and enjoy some non-beach scenery. Another thing I liked was walking through the daily outdoor market… yeah of course there were overpriced tourist items, but only in one section – the rest of the stalls offered delicious looking and smelling produce, lots of flowers (I think especially b/c we were there the weekend before Easter), some odd looking sausage and meat products, and freshly made cheese. In an odd sort of way I almost felt like I was home (river, farmer’s market, lots of green all around), but at the same time everything was still very European and very clearly not the Pacific Northwest.

One of the days we took a bus to two different lakes a couple hours outside of the city. The first was a place called Bohinj, a lot more secluded than our second destination (Lake Bled), and one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. You’ll have to look at the pictures, but basically we were at a huge lake we pretty blue water with the Alps in the background. There are a lot of different hiking trails you can do from there, but unfortunately we didn’t know that beforehand and didn’t exactly come prepared for that sort of activity, so I very begrudgingly tried to satisfy myself with a short stroll along the lake. After taking pictures and puttering around for a couple hours, we caught another bus to Bled, about 30 minutes back in the direction of Ljubljana. This lake is much more geared towards tourists – there are hotels, cafes, restaurants, boats/canoes for rent, etc etc. Here we did pretty much the same thing – walked around, took pictures, pretty much just enjoyed the great outdoors. I should also mention that Lake Bled has a couple unique features. The first is a tiny island in the middle of the lake with an old church built on it (you can take a boat out to the island, but can’t enter the building), and the second is the castle located on a tall cliff overlooking the lake. We missed out on going in there, but really I wasn’t that heartbroken about it.

The last destination before heading back to Spain was Venice – a sharp contrast to the other places we visited earlier, but we found a cheap flight home from there and it’s actually a relatively short train ride from Ljubljana to Venice, so it actually made sense in a random sort of way… anyway, we were just there for a day, so we spent as much time as we could walking around the sidewalks and crossing over canals and watching other people pony up the 80 euro it costs to take a gondola ride. We wandered through a lot of different markets (food, fish, jewelry, more touristy trinkets), went to Piazza San Marco, ogled the Basilica there from the outside (a multiple hour wait to get in!), ate delicious gelato… yep, that’s about it. I was glad we were only in Venice for the day – there were too many big crowds and everything there was expensive… not my favorite combination.

Okay, so in regards to picture posting: first off, I’m warning you, there are a lot of them, so if you get bored, no offense taken. I got bored looking through all of them trying to decide which ones were worth sharing and then fighting with my internet to make them load properly. Second, my camera is going through a rebellious phase in its life and while at Lake Bled decided to have some sort of “Lens Error” that won’t go away. I’ve been hoping it would just fix itself, but it’s been days and still no luck. Anyway, this means I’m missing pics of Venice, but I’ll try and post a few of Erin’s just to make things a representative sample of the trip.

That’s all for now, adios!

Photos:

Semana Santa

Spring Break, Round 2

Last week was Semana Santa, or Holy Week. As an overwhelmingly Catholic nation, all sorts of pasos (parades) take place in pretty much every city all over Spain. However, I missed out on this cultural experience and decided to stretch out my traveling legs and hop around Europe for a bit. One of the girls I work with, Erin (a fellow Oregonian!), and I flew out of Sevilla and hit up Dubrovnik and Split in Croatia, Ljubljana in Slovenia, and Venice in Italy. It was a fantastic trip and there’s a lot to tell, so I’ll try and share some of the highlights:

Dubrovnik:
Located in Southern Croatia, it is a gorgeous city right on the coast of the Adriatic. The old town is surrounded by large fortress walls and only has a only a few main entryways that can be shut off through simply by closing its heavy metal doors. The buildings in the old part all have red-orange wavy shingles on the rooftops, so everything is quite picturesque, especially around sunset, especially when looking down on the city from above. The hostel we stayed at was outside the old town, up in residential area which was tucked up in the rocky foothills above the coastline. It was a fantastic place to stay – we had a great view of the city and ocean below, were outside of the typical touristy atmosphere, and best of all, actually staying in one of the upper floors of a Slovenian family’s house! The woman who ran the hostel didn’t speak much English, but fortunately her 16 year old daughter (who could pass for at least 20 what with the crazy beyond-her-years poise she possesses) spoke excellent English and gave us helpful suggestions about what to see and where to go and how to get where we needed to be.

A few things we did in Dubrovnik:
Took a day-trip to a few of the nearby Elaphite Islands in a small tour group. (Kolocep, Lopud, and Šipan are the three we visited…) The islands were beautiful, the water was unbelievably clear, and we even lucked out and got sunny weather that followed us to all of our travel destinations throughout the trip! There wasn’t a whole lot open on any of the 3 islands we visited (it’s not quite tourist season), but given the large accumulation of junk piles and hotel/beachfront restoration going on, it was pretty apparent everyone was getting ready to get things ready for the summertime vacationers. One of the most hilarious elements of the trip was our boat captain. Now, I know you aren’t supposed to make fun of how people look, that judging by appearance is a shallow way of evaluating a person, but oh man this guy was a real character … a short wiry Croatian man in baggy pants and worn sweatshirt, with longish hair that hadn’t been washed let alone brushed in so long I think the sea, wind and sun turned it all into dreadlocks which ended up sticking out in all directions like a case of perma-bedhead. The fact that he was alternately texting, rolling cigarettes and smoking while controlling the wheel are all humorous little descriptive details, but one of the most surprising things he did was shortly after we set sail. In his broken English, our hospitable captain asks if any of us if we want anything to drink. Without waiting for a response, he opens up a compartment and whips out a bottle of some sort of homemade (?) hard alcohol complete with seaweed and snail in the bottle. This, along with a couple liters of coke and orange soda along with a sleeve of plastic cups are placed out in front of the group free for the taking. The stuff smelled downright nasty, but a few brave souls went ahead and tried it because really, how often in your life are you offered snail alcohol?

Another highlight of Dubrovnik was getting to walk around the perimeter of the old city on the (aforementioned) giant walls. Not surprisingly, it provided some great views of the city and the surrounding area. A final thing we saw was the war memorial there. It is located on the top of a hill and is located in a building that was actually a fort/look-out used during the fighting. The museum had a lot of information (unfortunately only about 15% of it was translated into English from Croatian…), but a lot of the visuals – pictures taken during the fighting, old weaponry and even some video clips of some of the battles itself – were quite powerful. More than anything, it’s crazy to imagine that there was fighting going on right where we were standing as recently as 1991.

Split:
From Dubrovnik, we took a bus up to Split, which is in the middle of the country longitudinally but still on the coast. Despite being just over 200 km, the ride still took 4.5 hours due to semi-frequent stops in other cities along the way and the drifting two-lane coastal highway that the bus took. It was a pretty ride though, and interesting to see the subtle changes in the landscape. The landscape mostly consisted of rocky hills and cliffs (not large enough to be called mountains) that rise up fairly quickly from the coastline and a wide variety of trees and other sorts of greenery, which kind of surprised me from how rocky the surrounding land seemed. Off the coast were sprinklings of islands, mostly small formations inhabited by vegetation and not much else and, of course, the incredibly clear blue-green waters of the Adriatic.

There wasn’t really a whole lot to do in Split, but it was and interesting place to see and we met some cool people in our hostel and got to spend time sitting around playing cards and swapping travel stories. Anyway, a bit more about the city itself: the oldest part of Split was constructed in/around the walls of a castle built by the Roman Emperor Diocletian in 293 AD, so everywhere you go are old walls and arches and such. Split also seemed to be big on hawking a lot of tourist crap to, well, tourists, and had a large maze of stalls selling various forms of jewelry, shot glasses, postcards, and a million other overpriced trinkets that are fun to look at for 15 minutes or so and then make you really disgusted/bored because everything being sold is the same and the sellers all try and jump on you once you touch one of their products (“Oh, I give you good price…”) when really all you wanted to do was look. We only spent a day and a half here, and while it is a cute city, that’s about all we needed…

… soooo we decided to take the night train to Ljubljana, Slovenia, which I loved, but am going to have to write about later because this post is long enough and I’m sleepy. Laku Noch! (Good night in Croatian!)