Tiffany's Birthday- Slovenia!

(Sat. Dec. 12th- Sun. Dec. 13th)

Aaaaaaaaand we arrived in Tiffany's second (or third?) home- Slovenia! Ljubljana, to be exact- the capital of Slovenia. They have their name stamped into the grates of the sewer, which I guess many cities do.

Here was the sign for the bus station- my first bit of Slovene language.

I think when we arrive it was 2am or so. We had checked before to make sure that someone would be working at our hostel and that we could get in that late. Luckily, it was pretty close by, and Tiffany (mostly) still remembered her way around the city. It wasn't in the best neighborhood but it wasn't too bad either, we were right on the edge of downtown (which wasn't very big).

Our hostel was Tiffany's pick, I don't remember if she knew about it from before or just read about it, but it was a converted jail, I think for political prisoners. It was quite small. Hostel Celica: http://www.souhostel.com/

The hallways were crowned with drainage on the sides obviously so they could hose down the floors.

Each hostel room used to be an individual cell, and they left the cell doors on the rooms, behind the actual normal door. So you could lock the cell door if you wanted to, too :)

It was kind of a fun place! It was one of the highest rated hostels on HostelWorld.com. And wasn't terribly expensive, as hostels go, though it was more than many of the ones in Ljubljana. Worth it though. They even had decent breakfast, which means they had more than toast and watered down juice, like many places.

Also, each room was designed by a different architect or firm, and their names were on the outside of the rooms. Sometimes they give tours of the hostel and show other rooms- I of course was dying to see in all the rooms, cause I saw in one and it was totally different from ours.

But here was our room- walls on the left and right, with the bed diagonal across the middle (yeah, TINY rooms) and another bed above it going the opposite diagonal. Pretty cool. Tiny, but lots of little cubbies and stuff. Hey, at least it had a window...and there was another that tipped open, up by the top bed for when I got hot :)

Here's the outside, the next morning. This is the entrance on one end. I liked the bright colors, mostly :) It was Tiffany's birthday that day, so hopefully it'd be a good one! I was glad we were in her favorite country (who she rooted for over the US in the World Cup, just fyi)

The hostel was in an artist's co-op kind of place- a small block that was fenced in, with a couple other buildings that must be studios, which also had small bars in the first floors. Lots of...art, everywhere...

These just speak for themselves. Maybe people live here too...

I don't even know where to begin with this stuff.

Here's the back of the hostel- the yellow and red windows are what was by the lower bed, and the caged-in window was up by my bed.

We started off on our day's adventure though, walking towards downtown, mostly by Tiffany's memory/intuition. She lived here for five years when she was in high school, and did quite a bit of walking, since its a pedestrian-friendly European city with everything pretty nearby.

Across the way, behind the train tracks we'd come in on, I could see this mountainous Dutch-looking building, and requested that we explore it later on.

This was the side of a building. Dunno why there were circular recesses in the concrete, but someone decided to decorate them. It was funny.

The mountainous building.

A glassy building- we're right on the edge of downtown now. The building up ahead is the tallest in Ljubljana, and is where Tiffany's parents used to work (if my memory serves me :)

Just around the corner was the main north-south street that cut through Ljubljana.

These boxes were interesting to me because they held advertisements on all four sides- and yet they were boxes, with interiors, so what was in them? Weird. The second box back you can kinda see actually is uncovered and they used the inside for a display, which makes more sense. But maybe they've been getting robbed or something...

I like cool shaped buildings, I like cantilevers.

Dunno what we were talking about, but Tiffany got frustrated with me and made her annoyed-slightly-angry face. I made it back to lighten the mood and show her what she looked like and disarm her a bit. Sometimes it works :) I thought twice, or five times, about posting this picture cause I look supremely gay.

Apparently I succeeded in disarming her since she decided to take a picture, thinking it was funny...

Another cool cantilever, though this one is pretty easy, structurally.

All these pictures were really from the same plaza, around in circles. This was some art piece or something. Tiffany decided to lay down and have a little rest.

We made our way from the more modern section of downtown (this sounds big, but we're talking about a few blocks) into the older part of the city- narrow pedestrian streets, with cobblestones. More my style :) We were gonna go find the place Tiffany lived, and some of her other favorite places.

Here is one of my favorite places- any place in any city November and December that is selling hot spiced wine :) (kuhano vino).

Here was a purely pedestrian street with some very contemporary buildings stuck in between the old ones. I like seeing something different like that.

You can't quite tell here, but this is a place where three bridges cross the river, right next to each other, fanning out from the center of the old city center. You can see one bridge in the middle and one off to the left. All pedestrian. This is where the Christmas market was, and the Christmas tree, and lots of decoration. Triple bridges is weird, but was cool.

Just a cool decorated building.

An old church, also right on the main city center area.

Church in the background. We were walking down the river, down the row of temporary booths, selling mostly handmade Slovene things, from artists and other people- jewelry, clothing, candles and other trinkets, candy, etc. Lots of fun. Festive. Christmasy. Tiffany liked to say that Slovenes were so crafty :)

Here's a little booth of honey liquor. We got a little bottle of it for my dad- and some for me too :) It was spensive though! Cool little bottles though.

Another view of the river, past the booths, with all the apartmenty buildings on the other shore. Probably another "for my mom" picture :)

And here's a landmark. Tiffany's favorite coffee/tea shop. "Caj" means tea in Slovene, and it was called Cajna Hisa. With some little hats over some letters...I could give you a language lesson but I won't bother. But basically "caj" is pronounced "chai" (like the TEA) because the c has a hat over it and j's are pronounced as y's- like in Ljubljana.

Here was where Tiffany used to live. Took her a couple looks to get it right- she was a little confused at first. (Geez, I thought you lived there for a couple years, right ;)

This was the street her family's place was on- the main shopping street- yes, pedestrian only. Lots of little cafes, chocolate shops, restaurants, etc. The blue shop is apparently where she used to like going to get gyros (I think). So we went there and got a gyro later one night. She was hungry. That happens a lot :)

Here's a little chocolate shop. They had a tiny sleigh outside full of little chocolates, that we presumed were free, since other people were taking them. I uh, stocked up with a few of em :) And we went inside and bought some kinda expensive, kinda delicious dark chocolate squares. They had different spices like curry, poppy, etc. in them. They were Christmas presents for my family. And then I ate most of them cause no one else did...

These I liked. In a few places in the city. Bins hooked to the ground, for recycling different stuff, and it looks like the ground around them opens up, so there must be bigger storage spaces underneath them.

Walking further down the street, we found a Spanish bar. Cupiterija (spelled in Slovene, would be called a Chupiteria). Chupitos are shots. And next to it is the name- Hijo de Puta. Which I found hiLARious, because probably most people had no idea what it meant...and it means Son of a Bitch. That was the name of the little bar!

Aaaaaand the bar had a cow on the ceiling. Upside down. No explanation for that one really.

The menus. They say Son of a Bitch on them. Hysterical.

Tiffany was uh, hungry, so she had some pasta and wine (I guess the wine helps with the hunger?). And we had a chance to warm up which was nice.

In the bathroom there I found something somewhat unexpected. This is a person. They have one leg because the other is crossed over the first, as if the sculpture was sitting down with its leg over one knee...before it got a sink carved into its back.

Ah, the best time in Ljubljana- the evening. The sky turned a cool blue, all the Christmas lights came on, all the booths lit up. Pink church in the background again.

One of Tiffany's favorite booths. Where she bought some gifts- including earrings for her friend Diana (we won't say what happened to those).

Funny thing is when we approached the booths, many people would initially speak Italian to us, assuming we were Italian- the eastern coast of Italy borders Slovenia, and there were a lot of Italian tourists there, so many Slovenes spoke Italian. Tiffany said tourism had changed a lot since she lived there, before their country was on the euro. Didn't used to be all these Italians!

Here was the main square (which was a circle) and some of the Christmas lights. They were very non-Christmasy, but they were cool. There was a outer space theme in the foreground, and in the background was a reproduction theme that you'll see later...you can see the X and Y chromosome in the bottom right though.

Bottom right here you can see a winding strand of DNA...

Dunno what this stuff was but it looked cool.

In this photo (thank you, sweet camera) you can see Ljubljana castle up on the hill, lit in blue. There's a tram car that goes up there, but its not far to walk. So we were gonna walk. But not tonight.

This was just a building I liked. It looked very...early Modernist, or something. Tried to look it up online by the address and figure out who designed it...I failed.

Another "cool building".

We continued walking (always something to see somewhere, never enough time) and we found an art installation down the river, hanging from trees- hand painted, Chinese lantern-type things.

The river in general looked great- lots of Christmas lights. Good job, you crafty Slovenes.

We found another little park, which had some other art installation in it. These little columns, with platforms in them...what the heck were they?

Yeah, they were iron castings of peoples' hands. Weird. Lots of them. All different. One you could even tell was like holding and clicking a computer mouse :)

One more shot of the city center and the lights. Nice. Blue.

We stopped somewhere to finally get dinner, for her birthday, wherever she wanted, and this place looked nice, festive, warm, etc...aaaaaaand they weren't serving food anymore. It was a little French restaurant that reminded me of Paris. So Tiffany got a Coke. I don't remember why :)

We warmed up a bit and found a nice pizza place. Got some delicious pizza. And the drink you can see next to it is something Tiffany enlightened me about- Bitter Lemon. What a tasty soda. We had it a few more times, here and there- its lemon soda, but with a strong bitter finish. Just like my little Italian sodas that my dad got me hooked on :)

I liked the strong verticality of this building. That is all.

This was a parking garage. And nicely designed, a fun building that could have been boring. Good work, someone.

This looks like pineapples. Dunno what its made out of.

End of the night. Relaxing time. Internetting time. Lucky for us, our hostel had a hookah room. Sweet. For those of you who are thinking we were smoking hashish or something, its just flavored tobacco. It goes through water in the vase and is cooled before you inhale it. I don't remember what the flavor was, but we had smoked some in Morocco too. Its fun.

Sorta like smoking a pipe or something. You can get lots of smoke though! Tiffany was enjoying taking pictures of me cause she wasn't feeling like smoking it much.

Dunno what this picture was for exactly. But it was the closing moments of Tiffany's birthday. Happy birthday :)

Rome...More Ruins, Leaving Town...(Venice)

(Thur. Dec. 10th- Sat. Dec. 12th)

Pushing forward...more buildings. I honestly do not remember which church this was. Sad. Let's ask iPhoto where it was taken...ah ha, it says I took it near the Colosseum. So yeah, this was a small, very old church built on top of a previous church. (Photos weren't allowed inside- you can see how well I listen). Looks pretty big, but on the scale of Roman churches it was pretty modest.

We got to go to the crypt where all the walls and columns and stuff from the old church were. And below that was more, even older stuff. Tiffany didn't come with us this morning, don't remember why, but I went back after this little morning journey to retrieve her from the hotel.

This building was right across the street- I liked it every time. The rough concrete, the popped-out boxes, and then at the bottom, that reddish glassy box at the corner- was just a totally glass-enclosed room, and I thought it was awesome. Like a fishbowl.

Here is a good Smart car picture. Three parked back at the curb, one (obscured) turning left, and one just entering the photo at the left. That's six! We'll hafta see what my record was...

Tiffany and I schlepped back over to the Colosseum (right near where I had been, but I didn't know how long our morning trip was gonna be so didn't know when to meet up- the life of no cell phones). Here's the "take a picture of me for my mom" photo that I got take quite a few times here and there :) In the background is some filthy old building they used to use for watching people kill each other...

That old stone doesn't deal well with the fumes from the automobile age. Why they decided to run the road so close to the Colosseum is beyond me, except that across the street is like Nero's Domus Aurea (golden house) so they didn't really have any fudge room. When I was in Rome in 2002, I thought I had heard that they were cleaning/renovating this, but apparently not yet...

Here is a cool cross section, because it shows how many layers there are/were to the building, and you can start to see more how it was constructed, and also deconstructed. Mostly brick, but it all used to be faced with stone that was hung on iron that was fixed into the brick. The stone and the iron were pulled off centuries ago and reused, and all that's left is the holes in the brick!

A good shot of the inside. Doesn't really convey the vastness. It apparently held over 100,000 people- quite a lot considering Notre Dame Stadium holds like 80some thousand. But of course it helps that they were probably a *little* more packed together...All these used to be covered by the seating areas. And of course the bottom used to be a flat floor with all the tunnels underneath- but there's no more floor. Wish I could explore down there...I kept wanting to jump down there.

NOT the Arch of Constantine, but another one just south of it, also pretty big, but actually part of the original aqueduct. Yeah like 2,000 years old. Or much older. Also held together by steel cables... We were walking down past the Forum to the Circus Maximus and other things.

The Circus Maximus. Pretty underwhelming, yeah? I had expected like a small stadium of some kind, but its just a large round dirt path with grass in the middle...though I'm sure tens of thousands of people could sit on those grass hills, and the track is actually pretty huge. Just not that exciting.

Down at the end was a church, and on its backside was some sort of protest- and a TON of riot police. I was gonna take a picture, but I was not in the US, so you never really know about that stuff :) Lots of paddy-wagon vans for hauling people away too.

We went to the church, a small very old one called the Basilica di Santa Maria in Cosmedin (I had to look that up to remember). This is the "Bocca di Verita" or Mouth of Truth- if you stick your hand in it, and tell a lie, it'll bite your hand off. Yeah, silly superstition, but it still felt a little weird sticking your hand in there, cause imagining that thing biting my hand, well that would kinda hurt.

We walked west-ish, towards a small island in the middle of the river that has/had a hospital/school/church on it- somewhat like the island in Paris I guess. Here was an old support for a road or bridge that doesn't exist anymore.

And then we saw a car accident. With the smallest car ever. I'm not sure if the second car was involved, or just a friendly passerby, or a friend. But also, why is it facing the opposite direction? And how did the car roll? It doesn't have any impact damage on it. I thought maybe it went up on the curb but if anything that would have caused it to roll the opposite direction.

Not only that, but this road was a pretty low-speed road with lots of traffic. So I ruled out high-speed swerve sudden-rollover. My last question was why they didn't just roll the thing back over...considering it probably only weight like 1,200 pounds. I mean four of us picked UP a car that size in Holland. I almost offered to help roll it over, but they were on the phone, looked like they had it under control...

it was starting to get late in the afternoon, so the flocking birds were everywhere in the sky. Which after seeing the cars parked by the river, we realized meant LOTS OF POOP. And you could actually occasionally see or hear it splat around you. So we ran for cover, cause we were far from home, and not too interested in being shat on. We were on the island, and found the church, hid under the entry way, watched the birds. Pretty cool, as long as you're not standing under them.

We decided to peek in the church while we were there. Small, quiet, ornate.

After that, Tiffany and I split off from (I think) Britta Jessica and maybe Shawna. We headed into Trastevere, because I wanted to wander up the roads/paths up this large hill that I had climbed before with Chris and my dad- I remember there was a St. Peter on the Hill church or something up there. The map we had included all the roads and some paths, but they were super wind-y (as in, not straight) and it took us a while of wandering to get all the way to the top, as well as to see a couple other landmarks labeled on the map. And we were distracted a bit because I remember that evening somehow we ended up having a very long very unhappy argument/discussion. I'll definitely remember that next time I'm standing in front of the large lit fountain at the top of the hill, overlooking the city.

We did find the St. Peter church though. It was small but really pretty, and quite unusual that it had carpet. Blue. Nice. They were setting up for a wedding, which is funny because last time I was there, in 2002, a wedding had just finished, and I thought wow, how magical. The top of a hill overlooking Rome.

The next day was a group trip to the Baths of Caracalla. I hadn't been there when I was in Rome before, so I was excited to see them, since they're pretty huge (and I had no IDEA how BIG!) and pretty well known, and as old as all the other millennia old stuff around there.

And yeah, they were huge. Not only really tall, but also tons of rooms, and just covering so much space. Unbelievable.

This was a "picture for my mom".

And a "picture with you in it!" that I clearly didn't really care about being in :)

Tiffany was taking more control over photos since at this point, and for a few days, we were using her camera because my memory card had suddenly and inexplicably gone down the toilet (no not literally) and I thought I was gonna lose like 3 days of photos (which in Europe is a lot of photos!). It had been occasionally turning parts of my photos gray all semester though, so I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, but still. After a lot of screwing around with multiple cameras and computers, trying to read or write to the card with varied success, I finally got all the photos off, but then something else happened and I couldn't wipe it clean to have it hopefully useable. So it was rubbish.

After quite a bit of time at the Baths (hadta get our money's worth, it was like 7 euro each (or maybe more?) Tiffany and I went up to the Forum- we had bought package tickets for Colosseum and Forum and hadta go use it within the next day. So off we went, leaving the group behind.

We started at the back, which lead us to the top, another place I'd never been before- Palatine Hill. Here's a big temple or something.

Here's the very top, the front edge of Palatine Hill overlooking the Forum. Great view! Of lots of ruins :) Makes it easier to sit there and imagine when it was an active city, real buildings, bustling people, etc...

This was some little temple-y thing and we couldn't figure out what happened here- these half circles looked like little walkways through the building, and its all sunken in that square area. Maybe it was full of water or something?

You can see Vittorio Emmanuelle II monument behind the Forum.

Another moment where I didn't really feel the need to be in the picture. So I made a face. Not bad if you ask me.

After a couple hours around here, we made our way northeast to Termini, the main Rome train station. We hadta buy our tickets from Venice to Slovenia, but we had a flight from Rome to Venice. I remembered enough Italian to go buy the ticket, though I kept saying Florence instead of Venice- luckily TIFFANY had known enough Italian that she kept correcting me saying "Firenze" when I should have been saying Venezia :)

The train station was cool looking though, despite the fact that there were huge lines and we hadta stand there for awhile. But we couldn't figure out the ticket business online and everything we found was bloody insane expensive, so we went to the station.

Afterwards we walked around more. Since we were leaving Rome soon, there were a lot of little icons on our tourist map that acted like they were worth seeing, so we tried to track a few more of em down :) Here was a place called Quattro Fontani (four fountains) that was just an uninteresting intersection of two streets, except each of the four buildings on the corners had cut corners filled in with fountains. Pretty cool, though kind of odd- no piazza or anything, so not really a place you could hang out.

Another large piazza, on the north side of Rome, a fountain of Triton. Not as touristy, for whatever reason, but a decent spot nonetheless.

At the end of the evening of Tiffany and I walking around, we met back up with all my classmates, at a restaurant around the corner from the hotel, where we were meeting our professor. The owner knew the owner of our hotel, who knew our professor. We got a per-person cost for a family-style dinner, with salad and appetizers and dessert and wine and stuff. A bit expensive, but tasty, and fun, a good way to end our semester together.

Here was just our last remaining snacks from our room that would come with Tiffany and I tomorrow. The little bitter Italian sodas, some small pre-wrapped desserts that came with our breakfasts each morning.

The door to our hotel- actually leads into a small interior courtyard, and then we'd get on another old service elevator up to our floor. Cool door :) During much of the day the large doors were open but in the morning and at the end of the day we went in and out this small door that made it look like a castle. It took a ginormous key too!

The rest of the day (after we slept in and took our time getting out of the hotel) we had planned for travel- getting to Venice by plane and then Slovenia by train. By the time we got to the airport in Venice, it was dark and we weren't really sure where the airport was relative to the city. Of course we assumed it was relatively inland, as we assumed about the train station. We got a shuttle to the train station, and after getting dropped off and told we had to cross a bridge over a CANAL to get there, we realized the train station was RIGHT IN THE CITY! So, it was lucky that we had two hours to kill before our train left.

Here I was standing outside of the train station, the same station I came into with my dad and Chris from Rome- I remembered it as soon as I saw it, right there on the water.

Too bad it was kinda chilly and we had all our bags, but we walked as much as we could, dragging bags over the cobblestone :/ We did take some time to get some coffees, though we didn't end up getting gelato, because the places were closing so we got some coffee to go (to keep us warm).

A dark photo of Tiffany crossing one of the many bridges over canals- most of them had steps, that we had to drag wheeled bags up and down and up and down. It was uh, Tiffany's bag :) I just had all my bags strapped to me, though that much weigh for a couple hours of walking wasn't much better.

Then we went and got on our train. The unfortunate part of going to Eastern Europe is that at some stop the conductors switched over, so we got a bunch of conductors speaking Hungarian I think, because the train ended in Budapest. They spoke a bit of English, and definitely Italian too. We managed.

Here was our train car. Those facing seats. We were lucky enough to have it alone for a couple hours to nap.

Here we were enjoying our last bit of Italian food, some sandwiches made of salami and fresh mozarella :) After someone else joined our car and laying-down-on-the-seats time was over.

It was a relatively painless train journey, only a few hours, and not that late- we would still be getting in early enough to get a full night's sleep before starting adventures in a new country.