Slovenia is apparently the size of my "home state", NJ, but with only one quarter of NJ's population. (NJ is supposedly the densest US state in terms of population though.) We've come to realize what helps Slovenes with their English -- American music and Slovene-subbed American T.V. shows are quite prevalent.
Today we day-tripped to Ljubljana, Slovenia's capital, which has a small population (for a city) of a quarter million. Our impression was a walkable city with a laid-back feel.
Ljubljana had one of the most spread out markets we've seen, meaning each 'stand' had a decent amount of space. It was also the tidiest market we've come across. Unfortunately, I read that touching the fruit and veges is rude here -_-
We did our usual walk all over the city, up to the castle, and back down the really steep path. We were looking for the less-steep of the paths down, but because of conflicting information we're not sure we actually found it. If it was the less-steep, it makes us wonder what the other paths are like!
In the town hall courtyard, we were surprised to find this Tongue Sucker. K and I couldn't help cracking up over it. It was before we read the description of why it's ingenious -- to help open the airway of an unconscious person before CPR, etc. Wow! Apparently we had walked in on an exhibition of some highlights from last year's Index Awards, a set of design awards with the theme of "improving life". Very cool. The low-cost Solar Water Disinfection idea was one of my favorites. One sixth of the world's population has no access to safe drinking water!
I tried to communicate with the landlord's mother today. The laundry room was open when we returned to our room today and it occurred to me that I should do our laundry here before leaving. I somehow managed to get our point across in German that we would like to do our laundry, but we didn't understand her response, which was not a straight "yes" or "no". Eventually, I got the funny idea to switch to Italian. It's strange -- I had a really difficult time producing any Italian at all, but entirely understood her. It turns out that the dryer was broken, so we'd have to hang our clothes up to dry after the washer. And since it was already late in the day, she wasn't sure that our clothes would have enough time to dry. Ah. We see.
Our final adventure of the day was in trying to pay. She actually had to call her son for this one. Absolutely none of the ATMs in Bled nor Ljubljana have worked for us. We'd tried every ATM in Bled to no success and were banking on Ljubljana to be different since it was the capital. Even though these ATMs displayed the Plus network logo, our Plus-network ATM card still didn't work. We must have tried nearly twenty ATMs in the last three days! Our backup was to do a cash advance on our VISA card and pay it off right away. But, in the end, our host was gracious enough to let us pay in half euros, half swiss francs ^-^
The path to our pension, in daylight ^-^...
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