The travels of Tim and Megan: Ljubljana, Slovenia

Sunday

Our flight from Moscow arrived in Ljubljana at around 5.45pm and, while it was much warmer than it had been in Russia, it was actually raining on and off. Not what we had hoped for. We had been to Ljubljana before, at Christmas time in 2008, and we decided to spend a couple of days there to re-visit the place where we got engaged. It also seemed like a great chance to have a couple of quiet, lazy days after some full-on travelling.

We caught a taxi in to the city, to Marta Studio Apartments (B&B), where we were staying. The room was excellent, much better than we had expected. The friendly man who owned the place, showed us to our room and gave us a city map and some information, before explaining that he would not be in tomorrow, but if we had any more questions, his "woman chief" (aka wife) would be happy to help. We were exhausted, but we wandered (in the rain) down the road towards the town centre and we had an excellent dinner at a nice little restaurant, before calling it a night.

Monday

We had an awesome sleep in on Monday morning. When we eventually woke, it was raining pretty heavily. We picked up some breakfast and groceries at the supermarket just along the road from the B&B and then walked into the town centre. It was still raining quite heavily, so we sheltered in Cafe Romeo and had a cup of tea, while we waited for the rain to clear. It didn't clear much, so after that we headed for an internet cafe, where we spent a couple of hours catching up on world events.

We also took the opportunity to purchase some train tickets to Italy for Wednesday. By mid-afternoon, it had actually stopped raining and the sky started to clear. So we went for a big walk through the town centre, past many of our old haunts from our last trip to Ljubljana. It was nice to see that very little had changed and it was just as we remembered it.

We had a drink at a bar by the river and then had dinner at a restaurant called Sokol, which is where we had dinner the night after we got engaged. That, too, was just as we had remembered it and dinner was great. The service was brilliant, a nice change from Russia. A smile goes a long way! We walked back to the B&B after dinner and had another massive sleep.

Tuesday

Thankfully, Tuesday was a beautiful day. We had originally planned to travel to Italy on the Tuesday night, but we were only able to get train tickets on Wednesday morning. Our B&B had no room for us to stay the additional night, so we had to check out and find a new place to stay for Tuesday night. This proved a lot harder than expected. A very helpful girl in the tourist information office managed to find us a great room in the end, but it seemed that the entire town was booked out - no idea why, being so late in the summer and a Tuesday night. Very odd.

We dropped our packs off at the new place, the Pod Lipo pension apartments. The place was brilliant - the manager was extremely friendly and helpful, the room was spacious and clean (with its own bathroom), fridge, TV and it even had a PC with free internet in the room. Awesome.

We walked to Tivoli Park and re-visited the spot where we had got engaged in 2008. It was a lot warmer this time round but, again, the spot looked exactly the same. We took a few photos and since there was loads of graffiti and carvings on the old wooden picnic table, we naughtily scratched out own graffiti into the table with our initials and the date of the engagement! Such vandals!

Back in the town centre, we wandered around enjoying the hot sunny weather, snapping some photos of beautiful Ljubljana. We had some gelato on the famous Triple Bridge and watched the people pass by. We noticed that there was a new bridge across the river that had not been there in 2008 and it had followed the lead of various other bridges we had seen throughout Europe (Budapest, St Petersburg, Vilnius and others), in that it had hundreds of padlocks attached to its railings. The idea is that couples attach their padlock to the bridge railings and then throw the keys into the river, to symbolise their unbroken love, or something equally cheesy.

Anyway, we bought a shiny purple padlock from a nearby shop, scratched our initials into it, Megan locked it to the bridge and Tim threw the keys into the river. Now our little padlock sits happily alongside many other padlocks on the bridge in Ljubljana! Awsome.

Later in the afternoon, we had a couple of drinks outside a bar by the river and then moved on to a wine bar, called Vinoteka Movia, the place where we had celebrated our engagement with some champagne on our last visit. This time we had a bottle of red wine and a meat and cheese platter, which was delicious. We rounded out the day with dinner at the Pod Lipo restaurant (just beneath our new accommodation). The food was good, servings big and service excellent.

Wednesday

We got up pretty early, checked out and headed to the train station to catch the 9.15am train to Italy. Actually, it was a train from Ljubljana to Villach (in Austria), followed by a bus from Villach to Venice, and then another train from Venice to Bologna. Big day of travel, but still better than work. It was a lovely, relaxing couple of days in Ljubljana - just what we needed after some full on travel - and it was nice being able to re-visit some of our favourite spots from our 2008 trip.

Franciscan
Church and
Triple
Bridge

Pretty
Old Town