Ljubljana

As a native if of the United Kingdom, I’m not really used to the concept of being able to just hop into a car and be in another country. But that’s what we did and in under half an hour were in Slovenia – the small industrial town of Sežana from where our train to Ljubljana would depart.

Its driver curiously chose to keep the glass door to his cockpit wide open (something which would never happen in London), but compared to some of my previous rail journeys this wasn’t such a long one: we arrived a little after 11.30. Unfortunately this was too late to meet someone I knew from the conference in Vilnius – she was waiting at 11, but then had to rush off and do other things. Two people is still a good number to explore a city though, so we ventured out into the cold – it had clearly snowed very recently and lots of it was piled up at roadsides.

Despite the fact it’s the capital of Slovenia, Ljubljana is a very small city and it has that atmosphere. At this time of year, so close to Christmas, the streets are decorated with glowing lights and there is a market in full swing.

One of the main landmarks is the castle, situated at the top of quite a large hill – it was a good thing I left my backpack in a locker at the station. From the top we had what would have been a spectacular view, had it not been for the cloudy and foggy weather conditions. On the way up we passed through a residential area, but it must be a real pest hiking to and fro every day.

Currency and language in Slovenia were both sources of great confusion for me. There is some kind of complicated equation to convert Slovenian “Tolarjev” into Euros and I then had to make another conversion into pounds to fully understand prices. And if my understanding of French is bad and Italian worse, Slovenian has to be the new rock bottom – somewhere down with Czech and Arabic.

Even though we can count the hours to Christmas day, for some reason I’m just not in the spirit of the occasion. Actually, I think it’s a combination of factors…

First, there’s the fact I won’t be really celebrating it anyway. Since the planning stages of this trip I’ve known about the differences in calendar between the UK and Serbia – their Christmas isn’t until January 7 because they use the Orthodox system.

Secondly, there was the conference in Campobasso. If at home during that time I wouldn’t have been working nearly as intensely. Xmas has just snuck up in all the busyness and now it’s just around the corner.

Finally, I still have the feeling there’s a lot more of 2005 yet to come. Everything has happened so quickly in the last few months and life has been hard to keep up with at times. I can’t quite believe this crazy year is about to end.

Maybe this will change in the next couple of days when I’ll be visiting another friend in Zagreb. The thing with Ljubljana was that I didn’t have enough time to form distinct impressions of the city. It doesn’t just “hit” you in the same way as Rome or Venice and I’d need longer to construct my views.

I should have this in Zagreb though, that will be another European capital crossed off the list. I’ve heard the weather can be quite random and unpredictable there, especially at this time of year, so am prepared for the worst. But surely it can’t be colder than Ljubljana…?