Ljubljana's Brnik airport is small and at first sight almost cute, but brutal efficiency is, alas, not a hallmark. There was a mob at the luggage reclaim (thank you, stupid British regulations) and, in order to keep people guessing, bags tumbled randomly (and slowly) out of one conveyor belt or the other, with the one of the left blinking "BELGRADE" and the other "PRISTINA". I eventually got mine and then headed out to collect my onward Air France ticket, but the Malev guy handling their ops spent the better part of half an hour with the couple in front of me, who had the effrontery to request the unusual, highly complex and downright dastardly task of issuing a ticket. This involved typing on two PCs, printing out bits and bobs on two printers (one dot-matrix and with a tendency to jam), getting carbon copies of a credit card (ker-CHUNK) and finally writing the thing out by hand. But I was thankful for small mercies: perhaps suspecting as much, the kind folks at AF had already prepared my ticket and Mr. Malev's job was limited to pulling it out of the safe and checking my ID.

I then headed out to exchange me some tolarje, only to find that the only ATM in the terminal was broken. No matter, as due to the country's imminent accession into the euro (January 1st, 2007 to be precise) the future currency is near-universally accepted. After having ascertained a ballpark estimate, I clambered aboard a fancy Merc taxi and instructed my balding monoglot cabbie to head for the nearby village of Kamnik, which he did at warp speed, violating numerous laws of traffic and physics in the process. The lush scenery was again beautiful, with mountains in the background, green forests, and yellow fields dotted with churches and kozolec hayracks, but alas, I was soon distracted by the increasingly worrisome antics of my frustrated driver. Having to wait 10 seconds at a traffic light caused steam to come out of his ears, being stuck behind a slow driver for 20 seconds made him apoplectic, and then he really lost it when I informed him that no, the Penzion Špenko he drove me to is not the same as Penzion Kamrica I had reservation at. But he was not to type to give up easily: in between slalom driving through the medieval alleyways of old Kamnik and spouting a constant stream of Slovene invective involving many bad things about somebody's mat, he interrogated passersby as to the pension's location and, half at random, finally managed to stumble on it. He greeted the sight with only English word he knew -- "F*cking!" -- and, when the bewildered pension owner popped her head in the door, loudly notified her that her miserable fleapit was impossible to find, as clearly she and her family were regularly sodomized by goats. The owner retorted that there's a honking big sign on the road pointing the way, and only a blind bat like the driver, with hairy palms caused by excessive masturbation, could possibly miss it. (The above freely translated from the original Slovene, a language I don't actually speak.) But before this escalated into the next Balkan War, I slipped the cabbie 25 euros and he careened off in reverse, hopefully in search of blood pressure medication.