Slovenia and Slovakia are two different countries.

Before we went on this trip, I must confess that I really knew absolutely nothing about Slovenia.  For some unknown reason, I just assumed it was some provincial country in Eastern Europe and I never could keep it straight with Slovakia.

Apparently I am not the only one.  We’re from the United States, I told the very friendly and chatty receptionist at one of our hotels.  This is our first time in Slovenia.  We didn’t know much about it before we came, but we really like it. She smiled and said, Oh, I am so glad you like it.  Most people from the United States do not know the difference between Slovenia and Slovakia. Um, guilty, as charged.  I guess it is all good though because when we told her we were from Pennsylvania, she asked if that was where Dracula was from.

Most of you are probably smarter than me, but in the off chance you have not kept up with your world geography since elementary school, let me introduce you to Slovenia.  It became a country when it dissolved from Yugoslavia in 1991.  I am not sure where I got the provincial idea from, especially considering Slovenia had the strongest economy in Yugoslavia, obtained membership in the E.U. in 2004, and in 2007, was the first former communist country to adopt the the euro.  Slovenia borders Austria, Italy, and Croatia.  Its landscape includes mountains (the Julian Alps in the northeast), lakes, caves, and a small coastline on the Adriatic Sea.  Slovenia is a tiny country – most destinations can be reached from the capital, Ljubjlana, in a couple of hours.  Yet even though we spent a week there, we didn’t see any of the eastern part of the country.  For such a small country, Slovenia has a lot to offer.

Part One: Ljubjlana

For starters, the capital, Ljubjlana, is an adorable city made all the more easy to enjoy because of its big, yet small, size.  It is by far the biggest city in Slovenia, but it only has about 300,000 people.  (By the way, best we can tell, it is pronounced something like Lube-blahn-ya.  Locals seemed to differ.  It took us the better part of the week to figure out how to say it, which made it interesting when we were trying to ask if we were at the right train station.  Is this Lub…um, where are we?)  Lively bars and cafes lined the river.  In the center of town, a trio of bridges crossed the river.  There was some sort of festival going on when we were there, so every night you could take in a free outdoor ballet performance of Madame Butterfly.  It has a large fruit market, which we heard expands on Saturdays.  There are still some relics of communist buildings (such as the hotel in which we stayed our second night), but for the most part, Ljubjlana is an attractive city that definitely warrants a visit.

If you go, do check out Compa, which serves homemade beer and a mean platter of grilled meat, vegetables and cheese.  Don’t check out Hostel Most until their renovations are finished.  For some crazy reason, we took a room there and we even saw it first.  Located along the river, it will be very nice when it is finished.  They are actually renting out unfinished rooms.  And people are actually stupid enough to pay for them (albeit getting a discount).  I guess it didn’t occur to us to keep looking because prior to the trip, we grew accustomed to living in a state of disarray.  It didn’t take long to start having flashbacks to our four years of renovations, most of which were spent living much like Hostel Most: dirty floors, no baseboard or casing, wires sticking out of walls, plastic sheeting hanging from the walls, and drywall dust everywhere.  Sean says I was starry eyed over the magic words: private bath, free wifi, and discount.  When we realized we had no place to hang our laundry to dry in fear that it would touch the floors, and that we were constantly wearing shoes in the room, we moved to a drab, communist looking hotel.  We sold our house for a reason, after all.

Whirlwind Weekend in Munich

Even though I had only seen her once since we graduated from college, my friend Abbie generously hosted us at her apartment for a weekend in Munich.  Thanks to the wonders of Facebook, I knew that Abbie moved to Munich a year ago to work as a scientist. (Isn’t it fun to say that someone is a scientist?  And she really is).  I thought it would be fun to see her and to take a little foray into Germany en route from the Czech Republic to Slovenia.  The whole weekend was a whirlwind, starting with us blowing into Munich Friday afternoon and ending with us blowing out of Munich Monday morning, complete with a mad dash to jump on the train only seconds before it started moving.

From Munchen

In between those times, we had a lot of fun hanging out with Abbie and hearing about her new German lifestyle.  She passed on some of the insights about Germany that can only be gained from living there instead of just passing through.  It was nice to have our own personal tour guide.  She made sure that we got a proper tour of Munich, which included visiting a beer garden, walking through Englischer Gardens, seeing Munich’s may pole (a giant pole neighboring towns used to steal from each other), and rubbing the well worn noses of three lions outside a palace for good luck.  On Saturday, we hit the autobahn in Abbie’s car to visit the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site (more on that later) and a monastery with tasty beers brewed by monks.  (We learned, by the way, that there is no such thing as The Autobahn, just many autobahns).

As we walked around Friday evening, it seemed the whole city was abuzz.  The late day sun was still shining, and apparently it had been the first really nice day in ages.

Hailing from Pittsburgh, of course I love rivers.  One of my favorite things about Munich was the river was so accessible to everyone.  It ran right through Englishcher Gardens (what we would call a park) and was almost like a big stream.  Although Germans apparently have a lot of rules, we learned that they don’t always follow them, as demonstrated by the groups of teenagers frolicking in the water close to a sign forbidding swimming in the river.  (Including one group of three boys signing Take Me Home, Country Roads by John Denver, despite being a long, long way from West Virginia).

In the grassy areas next to the river banks, kids were taking advantage of Germany’s lax alcohol laws to throw a riverside party.

Further on down the river, we watched the river surfers navigate the rushing waters on their surfboards.

Bikes are prevalent everywhere in Europe, but it seemed everyone had a bike in Munich.  People sailed past us on their bicycles, dinging their bells so we would get out of their way.  No matter how many times I accidentally walk in the bike path, much to the chagrin of bikers worldwide, I always have a delayed reaction to the dinging bells.

We had visited a beer garden in Prague, but it felt more like we were crashing someone’s backyard cookout than a public gathering place.  Munich’s beer gardens are notorious places, always situated under big chestnut trees, with big crowds drinking giant 1 liter beers.  We ate pretzels, currywurst, and a cheese dip at what Abbie said was a proper beer garden: one with long benches and shared tables, covered with chestnut trees, where you could bring your own food if you choose to do so.

And of course we drank giant beers (we are both German, after all), and learned the proper way to cheers someone.

Besides the good weather, we suspected that everyone’s good moods had something to do with it being the opening weekend of the World Cup.  The soccer fever was everywhere.

Most of the cars and houses proudly displayed German flags.  We watched the United States tie England at a cookout at Abbie’s apartment with her group of friends, a fun crowd hailing everywhere from Germany to Portugal to New Zealand.  Their excitement over the World Cup was contagious.  There was a mixed group in terms of who was rooting for and against the United States, mostly due to whether a US win would benefit their fantasy soccer teams or not.

Being avid American football fans, it wasn’t hard for us to get into the World Cup, so we tried to learn as much as we could from Abbie and her friends to prepare us for the next month.  Like most Americans, we know very little about professional soccer.  I think Abbie’s friend Katrin is right: without commercial breaks, soccer will never make it big in the United States.  I will say, although the commercial breaks during football games at home border on the absurd at times, it is nice to have one now and again for a bathroom break, particularly when drinking giant beers.  (Seriously, it is easy to get quite tipsy when you are drinking beers by the half liter, as many of the German beers come.  I find it amusing that when Germans feel they have had too much to drink, they don’t stop drinking or start drinking less.  Instead, they just water down their beers with lemonade – a tasty drink known as a Radler).  The next night, we watched Germany beat Australia 4-0.  Even to our novice eyes, we could tell that the German players had much fancier footwork than the American players.

And of course I would be remiss to mention three other favorite aspects of the weekend: Abbie’s homemade chocolate chip cookies, Floyd, and Mr. Monk.

Thanks, Abbie, for giving us a window into life in Munich and for sharing your stash of imported chocolate chips and your kitties.

Exploration

Spending eight days in Prague meant that we had a fair amount of time to explore the city.  As it was, there were still more we could have done.  I never quite was able to talk Sean into going paddle boating in the river, for instance.  The holy grail for any traveler is finding places where you are the only tourist in the room, without feeling like you are invading the local people’s secret place.  Of course, being that you are a tourist yourself, you never can quite achieve this all of the time.  Not that you necessarily would want to – there is a reason why there are hundreds of people walking across the Charles Bridge or touring Prague’s two castles.  (Which, by the way, are more fortifications rather than castles.  I have yet to fulfill seeing the Disney-like image of a castle I have in my head in real life).  But sitting in a restaurant surrounded by people who are from anywhere but the present location, eating food that someone deemed tourists would like and pay money for, is typically not our cup of tea.

So to help us find interesting places outside our guidebook, we relied heavily upon the website Spotted by Locals.  A friend of our friends in Paris told us about it while we were there, but Prague was the first time we checked it out in a more in depth fashion.  The whole premise of the website is to spread the spotter’s love of their cities with visitors by sharing their favorite places.  You can read the entries online for various cities across Europe, or download a city guide to use offline.

Some of the places are ones that we already knew about or would have found anyway, such as the walkway by the river with views of the Castle, or Lennon’s wall, but the suggestions often gave us a different perspective when visiting.

Others overlapped with recommendations from our hotel, such as Bio Zaharda, a cool organic coffee shop, or Clear Head, one of the best vegetarian restaurants we have been to any where in the world.

Many of them were things we may not have known about otherwise: the French patisserie St. Tropez, tucked away in a shopping complex; the intimate coffee shop Al Cafetero, where we had delicious small meals and coffee from a vacuum pot; or the little Italian cucina Osteria da Clara, where we had our anniversary dinner.  (Incidentally, I am convinced that Italian is better the closer you get to Italy; must eat my way through Italy someday).

Of course, nothing beats wandering across a funky or cool place all on your own.  Maybe it is something undiscovered by tourists, maybe it is something you just happened to miss when reading about the city.  Either way, you never know what you might find: a chill neighborhood bar; a vineyard with surprisingly good wine and excellent views of the city; or a peaceful park with meandering peacocks.