After Holland and France trip, I ended my trip in Slovenia, where Miss Y stayed for her internship. Honestly, I was quite and always confuse to differentiate Slovenia, Yugoslavia, Czech, Slovakia or even Croatia. Those all are small countries and they were came from a breakage of a big country, which I am not sure as well. And I also do not know where it is located.
But when I arrived in this small country, I was totally amazed! I was greeted by beautiful alps with snow! I could see them from the airport. And on the way to city center, I saw beautiful green pasture everywhere. We arrived on Saturday, and that time is the Easter week. So the local bus from airport and city operated only every 2 hours! But do not worry, we had other means of transportation, the shuttle bus, which cost around 5EUR pp.
The city is very quiet and all shops closed. This city had changed, from a communist to an orthodox Christian/Catholic country now. And on the easter week, you could see people went to churches, brought a basket of fresh breads and easter eggs.
And the transportation quality was really good! From the bus stop, you could buy directly an Urbana card from a machine, worked like OV chip / EZ link. And you could top up there too. The bus is new and clean.
And Miss Y's dorm is lovely, pretty and neat. Reminded me of NTU in Singapore and Slovenia is like mini Singapore to me! It is a save country, where you can walk everywhere at night safely and everything is so neat.
After putting our luggages in Miss Y's dorm, we decided to go to a shopping complex which the one still open, just to enjoy the rest of the day. So we took the bus from the dorm, it only cost 80p for 1hr journey (compare to Holland bus ticket which cost 1.60EUR for an hour). On the way, we stopped at the old city of Ljubljana to change the bus. And we went for a snack, called happy roll:
Interesting roll toast bread covered with chocolate and peanut. So we went to the mall to have a small shopping and saw cute easter decoration
And I tried Shark steak! They made it as Fish and chip form and it was so tasty. I could say that I love it.
These were a student package set meal for Miss Y, which was a lot for a person. In Slovenia, the government had a system to detect the student's diet. Whenever you bought a student meal, you would need to use some code from your hand phone, connected to a system to pay for your meal at the cashier. And the cashier would put into the system what you ordered and when. Interesting huh?
We went for a movie too, watching RIO! And I love RIO ... then we took a cab home, which cost only 3EUR, and it was a lady driver!
On the following day, we decided to go to Bled castle, a bit further from city to see a beautiful lake, a castle, and a church in the middle of the lake. But before that, we took a quick walk in the old city center (and everything is still close too, since it was Sunday)
Along the river, there were nice cafe just to sit and lazing around. And we found nice graffiti
The dragon bridge
It was so interesting and made you feel so mystify with the dragon as the icon of the city. And we walked to the central station to take a bus to Bled. We found interesting old rustic house with interesting architecture. Feel like a vampire mansion hehe
And we arrived at Bled! Found a nice cafe which we could see the beautiful lake and enjoying traditional Bled cream cake from there! It tasted ok, not too sweet and just nice.
And the pretty lake, with Bled castle on the top of the cliff
The boats were heading to the church in the middle of the lake. It cost 8EUR to ride the boat, so we decided to give it a miss, instead walked up to the cliff for free (but had to pay to enter the castle still)
And we tried to reach the castle without any map. Was led to a wrong direction by the crowds. It seems most of people just walked along the lake without intention to climb the castle. After asking around, we headed back and went to the other direction, heading up! A small hiking up to the castle, and we arrived there with large parking place for buses and cars, sigh! There was certainly a better way to reach there rather than our hiking way.
Pretty alps!
View from the castle, the church in the middle
And from then, suddenly the weather went really really bad. Strong wind, heavy rain, like a mini storm. And we were confused. How to go back to the bus station from this castle. And we realized, we could call a taxi to the castle! So we did it and went to the bus station which scheduled to come 1 hr later. So we took a break in a cafe nearby, waiting for bus.
Safe and sound and warm in brown bear cafe!
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