According to Rick Steves, Krakow is "the next Prague" and Ljubljana is "the next next Prague." Well, Mary and her parents enjoyed both Prague and Krakow quite a bit back in 1993, so Ljubljana seemed like a destination not to be missed!
On our first day, after a picnic lunch up at the castle, we joined a walking tour that took us around downtown Ljubljana that we booked at the TI. He walked us all around the historic old town of Ljubljana, starting at the courthouse, showing us the bridges (cobblers, triple, and dragon), the original baroque church in Ljubljana that a lot of other Ljubljana churches are modeled after, the cathedral with it's fancy bronze door made in celebration of Pope John Paul II's visit and a fantastic ceiling, a library with windows made to look like open books, and ended the trip with a boat ride. There was more, but we were pretty tired, hot, and unfortunately more than a little out-of-it.
Not long after the tour, it was time to say goodbye to Mary's parents. There were some Cappoeira performers on the bridge outside our hostel as we walked them to the rental car and said our goodbyes. They drove off and left us to rest up in Ljubljana.
In the evening, we decided to attend a free concert of classical music that the tour guide mentioned. It was performed in St. Jakob's church. The music was excellent, but we were tired, so we darted out at intermission. Afterward, we decided to walk about for a while, and listened to some street performers.
At the center of town, we heard some drummers performing some sort of African (we think) drumming that was pretty sweet, and then there was a modern dance performance in the same square on a stage nearby (the big temporary eye-sore in front of a nice church). Did I mention the Cappoiera dancers from earlier in the day? This town sure loves to perform.
The following two days were mostly spent relaxing and planning the next segment of our trip. We thought about heading down toward Dubrovnik and then overland to Greece, but further research showed that to be a poor idea (either around 20 hours of buses through the mountains, or longer on ferries by way of Italy) that brought back memories of long overland travel that was unpleasant in Southeast Asia, so we decided to head North through Austria and Bavaria to Vienna and then fly to Athens. One of these nights we had a lovely picnic up on our balcony. Did we mention our hostel room in down town Ljubljana was a large corner room with a window overlooking the river and a balcony overlooking the square, where we could sit and listen to live music from the cafés below? And a steal at only 52 Euros per night. We could hardly drag ourselves away from it!
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Good trip report :)
ReplyDeleteWhat was your hostel by the way? Alibi?