Slovenia: A Case-Study in Happiness and Self-Portraiture

I had a few days off to celebrate the Feast of the Immaculate Conception (not a joke), so I went to Ljubljana, which is the capital of Slovenia.

Slovenia is like the central-European Delaware. Very few people know where it is, and NO ONE can name the capital . To help us all out I'll provide maps:


As a side-note, it still blows my mind that Delaware is so close to NYC, New Jersey, AND
Maryland.

I wasn't expecting too much from Ljubljana. Let's Go didn't have much to say about it and I had trouble finding an actual person who had been to tell me anything about it, BUT Rick Steves made it sound nice. Because I placed blind faith in Rick Steves a long time ago and Ljubljana is only 2 1/2 hours away by train, I decided to go. Alone. Just like Rick Steves does.

This turned out to be one of the best decisions I've made since I've been here. I was completely charmed by this city.

My first pleasant surprise, and the moment in which I knew I wasn't in Austria anymore, was when I started interacting with people. Did the man on the train actually smile when he checked my ticket? Did that woman just say "excuse me" when she bumped into me? Did the waitress at the restaurant really act happy rather than inconvenienced to have me sit at her table?

Slovenians are not only nice, but also proud to be Slovenian. They take a lot of pride in their language (Preseren, their national poet is pictured with a muse to the left), history, and culture. (A note about Slovenian history and culture [which is chronicled on the doors to the cathedral, pictured right]: Slovenia is a Slavic country, and the Slovenian language is also Slavic. They're a part of the former Yugoslavia but have historically had and have the most stable economy and governmental infrastructure of any of those states. Therefore, their break from Yugoslavia in 1991 only took 3 days, they are now an EU member state, and they are on the Euro). Certain things are particularly Slovenian: painted panels on beehives (thought to help the bees recognize which home is theirs) and roofed haystacks (yeah, I'm not really clear about what these are either). Ljubljana's symbol is the dragon, which Jason supposedly slew when coming back on his quest for the Golden Fleece. The dragon is even on the man-hole covers, which I thought were pretty awesome.

The second pleasant surprise was how beautiful Ljubljana was. I heard it compared to Salzburg a lot, because the city center is fairly compact, a river runs through the middle, and a castle sits on a hilltop overlooking the city, but for me the similarities stopped there. Unlike in Salzburg, I wasn't body to body with crowds of American and Japanese tourists. I actually had room to breathe and enjoy the city. Good ol' Rick described Ljubljana as the next, next Prague, meaning that in the coming years Ljubljana will become more and more popular and crowded (probably as more and more people like me tell everyone how great it is... which makes me wonder if I should publish this).
Much of the city was designed by an architect in the early 20th-c named Joze Plecnik, who combined classical form and modern function to create really beautiful and practical designs. He has lots of bridges and buildings throughout the city, including the Tromostovje, or Triple Bridge, which spans across the river and connects the Old Town to the New Town, funneling pedestrian traffic into and out of Preseren Square (the main square) in three congestion-free directions. I happened to be the only person to visit the house, so I got a private tour from a really nice girl who spoke really good English. We only spent an hour together, but I'd like to think of her as my Slovenian BFF.
The architecture in Ljubljana was an interesting mixture of Medieval, Baroque, Art Noveau, and Modern Classical, but it was colorful and added vitality to the city. Though Graz is considered a student town, Ljubljana felt much younger, and the streets and cafes were crowded with 20-somethings rather than old ladies with bad dye-jobs and their rolling shopping bags trailing behind them.

The third and last pleasant surprise Slovenia offered me was the most, well, surprising. After a full two days of sight-seeing, including visits to the National Museum, Joze Plecnik House, an over-night stay in a former military prison-turned hostel, Tivoli Park, the city hall, the Contemporary History Museum, Preseren Square, and many, many churches (including the sensory-overloading Serbian Orthodox church, pictured right), I stood up at the castle, looked down at the city, smiled and enjoyed a foreign, warm, fuzzy feeling. It was a vaguely familiar feeling and after a while I realized that I had felt it before. After a while longer I realized I even had a name for it... HAPPINESS. To document this emotion I took lots of self-portraits (special thanks to my camera's self-timer function and the guy who took the picture at the Dragon Bridge- unlike in Austria he smiled when I asked him and didn't stare at my camera as if he had never seen such a contraption before. How refreshing!).
Picture 1: Happy on the Triple Bridge!
Picture 2: Happy on the Triple Bridge going towards the castle at night!
Picture 3: Happy at the Dragon Bridge!
Picture 4: Happy on the Triple Bridge in the opposite direction!
Picture 5: Happy at the castle with the wreath I bought at the market!


To conclude, I'd like to share one last thing that made me happy: this woman, sitting in a front pew in the cathedral... reading the newspaper.

Salzburg and Waking up Early: These Are NOT a Few of My Favorite Things

Last Saturday I woke up at 4:30.

AM.

Why and how could this possibly be necessary? Because I went to Salzburg with my Slavic friends on a mission to confirm my dislike of the city.

Two years ago I visited Salzburg by myself after European Studies and before going to visit Meggy. I had pretty high expectations for it because everyone I knew who had been there raved about how beautiful it was. Books and people told me that it was charming and the most pure example of a Baroque city anywhere in Europe. Even my beloved Let's Go led me to believe that if you have any sort of interest in classical music, you'll love Salzburg.

But both times I was just not impressed. Even on a sunny day Salzburg was monochrome, and not even an exciting chrome, but gray. Don't be fooled be the pictures- I picked the most colorful ones. And it's only exciting if you're obsessed with Mozart and/or the Sound of Music. I've never been a huge fan of Mozart, and because of Amy's aversion to Julie Andrews, the movies we watched as kids were Scamper the Penguin, the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and George of the Jungle (this last one because my mom seems to have a thing for men in loin cloths), so Salzburg holds no niche-interest for me.

We walked into the city center and started at Mozartsgeburtshaus (birth house- it's big and yellow). I didn't want to go in (I went the last time I was there and the exhibits made use of too many trippy neon lights. Frankly it kind of creeped me out.) and hoped that none of my friends would either. Luckily it turns out that Slavs are a thrifty people and no one was willing to pay 6 Euros for a ticket.

Our next stop was St. Peter Friedhof (cemetery), which has the graves of both Mozart's sister and the torso of Joseph Haydn's brother Michael (I don't ask questions, I just read the guidebooks). The graves are all extremely well kept, especially considering the fact that many of these people died over a hundred years ago, and the tombstones are iron-works. My most well-spent euro bought me entry to the catacombs of the cemetery, although "catacombs" isn't really the right word for them. They're more a tunnel that's been dug into a mountain and go up rather than down. There are a few chapels along the way and the whole thing has a really covert, cave-like feeling. The catacombs led to a little overlook, where we stopped to take a gemeinsames Foto ("group picture"- my new German phrase!). The Russians are missing from the picture.At the Residenz (palace) most of us went to see an outdoor nativity set exhibit that Mom would have loved, while the Russians (whom I had never met before) took picture after picture in semi-clever poses with various sculptures. According to Yasha Russian girls love to do this more than any other nationality.
We saw other things, like the Mozartswohnhaus (the house that he lived in and the Slavs also didn't care to pay to visit), Mirabell Palace and its gardens, Getreidegasse (a famous street with lots of iron-worked Medieval signs- pictured above with the Russians in the foreground), and the cathedral (even though it's not heated we ducked in to warm up- it's also pictured above), which are all ok, but the highlight of the day was the fortress (Festung Hohensalzburg). It was only 5 Euros to go in, which included entry to the grounds and fortress itself (it's huge! and part of it is pictured), a visit to the Marionette Museum, and an audio tour that I would have paid a lot more for just because it was in English. I also have to admit that the view, of both the city and the countryside, from the top was great. On the way down (the fortress sits above the city, you can see it in the very first picture) I got a really pretty picture of the cathedral.
After all this sight-seeing our feet were frozen, even in boots, so we stopped to have a warm drink. The problem with this was that all of Austria and most of America seemed to be in Salzburg this weekend, and every tourist seemed to want to warm up at the same time. When we finally found a cafe there was only one table open with four seats for eight of us. Europeans are used to not having any personal space, though, so this wasn't a problem for my friends. Katinka and I shared a chair and I pretended that having a tiny Slovenian on my lap was normal for me.

We walked around the Christkindlmarkt (Christmas market) to kill time before our train left, and as we were leaving there was a countdown and light show (Austrians seem to go crazy for those) because the Christkind was visiting (an angel/spirit who comes on Christmas Eve and brings presents to good little Austrian children). Unfortunately we had to leave before the countdown was over, but I would have loved to have seen what the he looked like.

We got home around 11, totally exhausted. I did have a nice day, but mostly because the people I went with are really nice. The fortress and catacombs are well worth a visit, but I wouldn't have gone all the way to Salzburg just to see them. I think so many Americans go to Salzburg because they know it from the Sound of Music, and if the sights had a more personal meaning to me in such a way, I might like it more too. I think Graz is much prettier and pleasant than Salzburg, though, and I was happy to get home. When I have my midlife crisis and quit teaching to become the female Rick Steves I'll make note of all this in my guidebooks.