It Means Beautiful, Llubjana, Slovenia (Sep 2003)

We missed the bus to Croatia by about 10 minutes.

I’m in Trieste, a little city in the northeast corner of Italy’s Adriatic coast. I’ve been traveling with Steve for the past week, and for today we are joined by his colleague Maggie. They’re at a conference, I’m just along for the ride, and with a full day off we decided it was time to take a day trip out of Trieste, Trieste not being all that interesting. Given the opportunity I will always choose a border crossing, and Zagreb is just a few hours away by bus so we were headed for Croatia. Unfortunately, Maggie held us up and was 10 minutes late, and the next bus isn’t leaving for another six hours. If we did that we’d have to turn right back around once we got there.

I’m kind of pissed off about this, as far as I’m concerned she’s a tagalong and if there’s one thing a tagalong shouldn’t do it’s mess up the plan. I’m trying not to show it though, since she works with Steve and he’s the reason I ended up here in the first place. So I’m having this conversation in clipped tones, the way I talk when I’m angry but am still being polite. I do not want to get stuck in Trieste for another whole day, so we’re at the station examining bus and train schedules trying to figure out a destination within striking destination, just about anywhere will do.

There’s a train leaving in 10 minutes for Slovenia, but getting back may be an issue and I have to be back in Trieste tomorrow morning so I can pick up my train to Venice and on back to Milan to fly back. We have 10 minutes to figure this out, now down to 9. Catching the train back won’t work, but wait there’s bus that leaves Llubjana at 5am. If we get on the train right now and I mean now, we’ll be there by early afternoon and have at least half a day to explore, maybe we’ll find a room for the night or maybe we’ll just crash out in the bus station but we have to go right now if we’re going to do it.

The train pulls out of the station barely a minute after we’ve boarded. There are compartments on this train, so we find one that’s empty and spread out. Smoking is allowed out here on the edge of Western Europe so I light a cigarette, Maggie doesn’t like it and she’s conveying that quite clearly without speaking a word but I don’t care, she’s the tagalong and we’ve already rerouted once because of her and I will smoke if I damn well please.

A guard or train official opens the door to our compartment, starts yelling at us in a language we don’t understand. We figure out that he’s mad at us for putting our feet up on the empty seats, we think he wants us to pay for those seats as well but we use our magical powers of American ignorance to shrug our innocence as we take our feet down. He stamps our passports, his yelling has subsided to grumbling, and leaves. We share a shocked laugh, yes we have definitely just entered Eastern Europe.

We are watching the countryside slide by outside the window, and I can’t help but think about staying on this train and going further, another few hours after Llubjana and we’d be in Istanbul and then further still, this train goes all the way east. I have a plane from Milan tomorrow evening though, and Steve and Maggie have their conference, and we get off the train in Llubjana.

We don’t know anything about this place at all. Maggie has a guidebook that has a few pages on Slovenia but she hadn’t looked at it, we didn’t know we were coming here until we arrived. We exit the train station and look around, no idea where the town is from here or if we should take a bus or a cab and we don’t have local currency either, that’s the first problem. We thought there’d maybe be an ATM in the train station but no such luck. Wait, there’s a bank across the street. We cross and go visit the ATM, the currency here is the tolar as Maggie’s guidebook tells us and the denominations are bewildering, it’s one of those currencies where the exchange rate is something like 200 to 1 against the dollar and we don’t know how much things are going to cost here, don’t want to end up with fistfuls of useless tolars when we leave. We pull out some cash and hope that it will be enough but not too much, and then huddle around Maggie’s guidebook, theoretically we can walk to the city center from the train station so that’s what we do, headed up a busy road on the shoulder and just kind of hoping that we’re going in the right direction.

It takes about half an hour until we reach the compact spread of alleys that makes up the center of the city, and navigate until we find the tourist information booth. We’re lucky, people here seem to speak fluent English, their language is impossible I don’t even know how to pronounce it and I forget it immediately anytime someone tells me. The man behind the counter gives us tourist maps of the city and helps us book a room for the night. He calls around and makes the reservation for us, and then marks the location on our maps. We’re just hoping that when the time comes we can find it.

We walk out and head towards a restaurant he recommended for lunch. The weather is absolutely perfect, a warm fall day with brilliant Mediterranean sunshine still even though we’re now inland a bit, just a touch of a breeze to keep the temperature just right. There’s a central square with an al fresco café by the river, and we sit outside watching buskers and jugglers and the occasional itinerant musician. Service is slow here and we can’t understand the menu but fortunately end up with something like a plate of olives and proscuitto along with foccacia bread. It’s good even if its not very exciting, and after we’re done eating we wait for the check, we’re anxious to look around while we still have enough light to do so. We wait for a while and then finally go inside, spend another ten minutes trying to chase down a server or staff person of any kind, and then wait a little longer until they can finally present us with our check. Sometimes it’s hard to spend money, and we joke about just walking away without paying, clearly its more important to us than it is to them and its not like we’ll be in this city for long. It’s just a joke though, we want to be good American tourists.

Maggie wants to go up to the castle, and I don’t. She splits off to explore solo, and Steve and I go to find the dragon bridge. We agree to meet at our as yet unseen hotel at 6pm. None of our phones work here, so there’s no way to contact each other if plans go awry. Plans will simply have to be maintained, then, there’s no alternate options.

It’s truly a gorgeous day, almost magical. We’ve been told that as Prague was the new Paris in the 1990s, Llubjana is the new Prague, a beautiful European capital with a burgeoning boho community and as yet undiscovered by package tourists, a new frontier of the expat avant garde. It doesn’t look that undiscovered to us, everyone speaks English and there are tourists around but maybe its worse in Prague, I know its way worse in Paris that’s for sure.

We walk along the river road, following the sweeping curves back and forth through this picture-book town. The Dragon Bridge is the main sight to see in town, other than the castle. It’s just a bridge over the river, but on each side the bridge is flanked by two 8’ dragon sculptures. They’re beautiful, but I don’t know what they are supposed to mean or represent, these streaky green stone sculptures or maybe they’re made of iron. What were they supposed to guard against, who were they meant to protect? It doesn’t matter that much to me, I just want to play so I muck around until I figure out a way to climb up on the plinth, I am almost certainly not supposed to do this but how can I resist a chance to ride a dragon?

Once I get up there I see there’s not really any way to sit securely on this thing’s back, if I try I’m most likely going to end up in the river. I peek out from behind it’s wings though, whatever it was meant to protect right now it’s protecting me. From what I’m not sure, as far as I’m aware I don’t need much protecting at this exact moment in time but if I did this dragon would have my back.

The light is fading, it’s time to start navigating back to our hotel, we have to be on time. We leave the bridge and follow our sketched tourist map, cross the railroad tracks, there may be road signs but we can’t read them its all consonant soup, I should set up a business to import vowels to this country I’d make a killing. Looking from map and then up and around, trying to make sure we’re on the right heading, and look up there! There are hot air balloons floating over the city, three or four of them, its so unexpected and delightful that I’m jumping up and down with glee, pointing to show Steve the balloons. I haven’t seen anything like that since I lived in Louisville, Kentucky, where every spring the sky would fill with gas-filled colorful canvases, moving somehow solemnly and gravely across the sky in all of their inherent awkward absurdity.

I want to follow the balloons, but they’re already going out of sight and Steve reminds me that we need to meet up with Maggie. We keep on our heading, me turning back every few seconds to see if I can catch one last glimpse of my minor balloon miracle. Our tourist map leads us right to where we need to go, and at 7pm we walk into the hotel bar and find Maggie there waiting for us.

We compare notes, she had a nice time at the castle, there are great views over the city from the top it seems. I bet I wouldn’t trade my balloons and dragons for it, though. The hotel owner doesn’t speak much English, but we manage to muddle along through our business transaction just fine, we’re out of tolars but she’ll take Euros so it works out. She’s pleased that we like her city, the way locals often are when their hometown is validated by foreign visitors. “Llubjana means beautiful,” she tells us.