First off a big hello to Marko and Mitja, two very friendly police officers who we met in Maribor, but more about that later.
Plans. As Rabbie Burns once said, they often "gang a-glay" (I'm sure that my non-English readers are going to have fun looking that one up!) and it's no different for us. The original idea was to do Croatia and Slovenia. After a rather disheartening day at Bratislava coach station and the local internet cafe, where we were franticly looking up different possibilities and combinations of getting to Croatia and back, we are now well into Plan D. I won't bore you with all the various permutations of the other Plans, but suffice to say that one involved taking a coach from Bratislava to Budapest, staying the night (somewhere), getting the (very) early train to Zagreb and then, finally, getting a coach to the coast. Now we are taking the car to Ljubljana, hopefully leaving it there, and then going the rest of the way by bus.
All that hassle took up the best part of the day and so we left Bratislava at 5pm and drove through Austria to Slovenia. We didn't really have time to stop in Austria, but I must say, that when it comes to being environmentally friendly, our teutonic co-europeans put us Brits (and the French too) to shame. Just over from the Slovakian border there's a huge wind farm with probably more turbines than in the whole of the UK, even though we have a much greater potential for them. All we do is talk incessantly and bomb other countries, rather than doing something constructive. Then you've got all those bloody NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard) who say "we're all in favour in principle, but here it would spoil the view / be too loud / insert excuse here." People have to realise that it's the least worst option and that doing nothing is NOT an option. Oh my god, I'm ranting again, so I'd better get back to the story.
So we get to Maribor (Slovenia's second city with a population of around 150 thousand) at 9pm, it's dark, it's raining and we haven't the foggiest idea as to where to stay. So we start asking around for youth hostels and campings (by the way, even though Czech and Slovenian are similar, and I can understand written Slovenian quite well, it's best to communicate in either English or German as most people speak one or the other). After about 1 hour of getting several different directions and getting hopelessly lost in the process, we were about to give up when we ran into two (slightly tipsy) guys coming out of an internet cafe. We thought we'd give it one last chance and asked them and they said: "yeah yeah yeah, no problems, we know the way. We drive there and you follow us, but first we got to bar and have a few drinks, OK?"
We promptly agreed (as we had nothing better to do, and so started our adventure with Mitja and Marko. We got the bar and had a beer and started talking. They turned out to be off-duty police officers and brothers as well and were very friendly. We finished our beers and they then drove us to the youth hostel, which in the meantime had shut for the night. That only left us with one option: to go to another bar. When we finally left the last bar (after 1am) Mitja drove us back to ours in his car. Even though he had clearly had a few, he said "no problems, I have a permit to drive drunk" and it seemed to be true because we passed several police cars and they all honked in acknowledgement. Upon returning to the car we could only really sleep there, which, looking positively on it, at least didn't cost us anything!
Anyway, must go now, as internet cafes in Slovenia are not as cheap as they are in Slovakia.
Plans. As Rabbie Burns once said, they often "gang a-glay" (I'm sure that my non-English readers are going to have fun looking that one up!) and it's no different for us. The original idea was to do Croatia and Slovenia. After a rather disheartening day at Bratislava coach station and the local internet cafe, where we were franticly looking up different possibilities and combinations of getting to Croatia and back, we are now well into Plan D. I won't bore you with all the various permutations of the other Plans, but suffice to say that one involved taking a coach from Bratislava to Budapest, staying the night (somewhere), getting the (very) early train to Zagreb and then, finally, getting a coach to the coast. Now we are taking the car to Ljubljana, hopefully leaving it there, and then going the rest of the way by bus.
All that hassle took up the best part of the day and so we left Bratislava at 5pm and drove through Austria to Slovenia. We didn't really have time to stop in Austria, but I must say, that when it comes to being environmentally friendly, our teutonic co-europeans put us Brits (and the French too) to shame. Just over from the Slovakian border there's a huge wind farm with probably more turbines than in the whole of the UK, even though we have a much greater potential for them. All we do is talk incessantly and bomb other countries, rather than doing something constructive. Then you've got all those bloody NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard) who say "we're all in favour in principle, but here it would spoil the view / be too loud / insert excuse here." People have to realise that it's the least worst option and that doing nothing is NOT an option. Oh my god, I'm ranting again, so I'd better get back to the story.
So we get to Maribor (Slovenia's second city with a population of around 150 thousand) at 9pm, it's dark, it's raining and we haven't the foggiest idea as to where to stay. So we start asking around for youth hostels and campings (by the way, even though Czech and Slovenian are similar, and I can understand written Slovenian quite well, it's best to communicate in either English or German as most people speak one or the other). After about 1 hour of getting several different directions and getting hopelessly lost in the process, we were about to give up when we ran into two (slightly tipsy) guys coming out of an internet cafe. We thought we'd give it one last chance and asked them and they said: "yeah yeah yeah, no problems, we know the way. We drive there and you follow us, but first we got to bar and have a few drinks, OK?"
We promptly agreed (as we had nothing better to do, and so started our adventure with Mitja and Marko. We got the bar and had a beer and started talking. They turned out to be off-duty police officers and brothers as well and were very friendly. We finished our beers and they then drove us to the youth hostel, which in the meantime had shut for the night. That only left us with one option: to go to another bar. When we finally left the last bar (after 1am) Mitja drove us back to ours in his car. Even though he had clearly had a few, he said "no problems, I have a permit to drive drunk" and it seemed to be true because we passed several police cars and they all honked in acknowledgement. Upon returning to the car we could only really sleep there, which, looking positively on it, at least didn't cost us anything!
Anyway, must go now, as internet cafes in Slovenia are not as cheap as they are in Slovakia.
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