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.