Ljubljana

Before coming here I couldn't even pronounce the name of the city (LOO-BLEE-YANA). Ljubljana, the capital city of Slovenia, is a small, beautiful town. The old town reminds of Prague, but far less touristy.

I spent my first full day there walking around the town, around the university area. While relaxing on a park bench and writing post cards, I struck up a conversation with Tina, a university student studying urban planning. She had a sheet of paper with a map of the park and it was her job to record the movement patterns of everyone passing through, then manually enter in all of the information into a computer. The point of this exercise is apparently to analyze the data and then find out ways to make parks more efficient and well-utilized. Slovenians take their parks quite seriously.

While we were chatting we were approached by none other than a Mormon missionary from Utah, the first native english speaking voice I had heard in days. He was quite polite but it was nonetheless interesting to see that Mormon missionaries are inescapable even in the middle Eastern Europe.

Later that night, I went back to the hostel and met up with Blue and Sian (two Aussies working as bartenders in London), Chris (from New York), and Issac (from Texas). We then proceeded to go out and get some drinks and socialize at some pretty interesting places: First stop was the "skeleton bar", an underground venue with fake skeletons rotating on rotisseries under the floor and a bathroom located behind a secret bookcase in the wall. Second stop was a cave-like place next to the river that was so dark and relaxing that we had to get out of there before all of us fell asleep.

The final stop was Metelkova Mesto, a former area of town that used to be a military barracks and then a squatters colony. When we arrived, I felt like we were trespassing into someone's crazy idea of a backyard house party. There was a beat up wooden porch with a bar, a group of Germans spraying graffiti onto the wall, people gyrating spastically to reggae music, all set in a neighborhood that looked like it had been bombed out and should have been vacated years ago. At first we were a little bit spooked, but once we started talking to people they all seemed pretty friendly, like a group of peace loving hippies.