Every now and then, when I flipped through my Lonely Planet Slovenia, I found myself wondering if somebody has substituted extracts of Jetlag Travel's Molvania spoof into some of the lesser-visited places. Consider this actual extract from page 157 (4th ed.), in the section entitled "Snežnik Castle", in itself a rather dubious-sounding location:
Either truth is stranger than fiction, or the local žganje firewater played some tricks on the author... then again, I've often found myself pondering the same thing when considering the Slovene (or Slovenian) language, especially its delightful orthography. Consider, for example, the fact that the letter "r" is considered a vowel, leading to wonderful words like trg (square), vrt (garden), smrt (death) and cmrlj (bumblebee), or that s (with), v (to) and z (with) are all common prepositions. Strings of four or five consonants are commonplace, so a srpska krčma is a Serbian bar and in your zajtrk vključen (included breakfast) you may find srhljivih ocvrti prtljažnik, namely a terrible deep-fried something.

And the real fun begins when you start practicing pronunciation. An informal way to say "Hi!" is "Pozdravljeni!" and, to ask where somebody is from, you can say "Od kot ste?". Signs are handy for finding what you need, as an okrepčevalnica is a fast food grill, a prenočišče offers accommodation and a slaščičarna offers sweets and ice cream. "Nationality" on application forms is the blindingly obvious državljanstvo and condoms are easy to find, just flush bright red and stammer the terse moniker kontracepcijsko sredstvo. If hit by a dump truck and lying bleeding in a gutter, you will surely find it easy to ask passersby to guide you to the nearest doctor by requesting "Dovolite mi, prosim, kje je najbližji zdravnik?". Perhaps my favorite Slovene word, though, has neither consonant clusters nor Slavic sibilants: it's kikiriki, which means "peanuts".

On the upside, though, it is a rather phonetic language (although some vowels are a bit messy) and quite compact at that. Why not revise English too so that we count distances in mitrs, worship at a čurč and slurp at enrž drinks? Ińliš speliń wud bi sow izi en ložikal đen!


I spent the next three nights in a military prison on the outskirts of Ljubljana, in the former Yugoslav army barracks, present squatter settlement and future cultural center of Metelkova. Hostel Celica, dubbed no less than the best hostel in the world by Lonely Planet, is one of the cheapest places in town to stay and I considered myself lucky to snag the last bed in the house when I showed up. Or so I thought -- I'd forgotten why I'd sworn off communal living after a year in the army. My cellmates were an elderly Norwegian gentleman with a remarkable talent for intermittent sleep apnea and spontaneous self-resuscitation with an array of very loud porcine snorts, and a beefy English hiker who'd made the cardinal mistake of eating a Slovenian hamburger and spent most of the night practising the 50-meter sprint to the toaleta. Inebriated backpackers yelled at each other over loud rap music in the bar until 1 AM and, when I'd finally managed to fall asleep despite it all, there was a fire alarm in the middle of the night. Twice.


In the past ten years Ljubljana, always a pretty city to start with, has gentrified at a near-alarming pace and the Old Town area around Tromostovje and the Ljubljanica River was now chock-a-block with touristy street cafes and bric-a-brac stores. The advent of local disposable income was equally clear though, with plenty of hip little fashion boutiques, art galleries, record stores and tattoo parlours for idle youth (half of whom seem to sport nose rings and dyed hair) and way more graffiti than there was 10 years ago. This is not a bad thing, mind you; the total absence of flyers, scribbled tags and street art is one of the reasons why Singapore feels so sterile and Ljubljana doesn't. On the outskirts of town, change was even more apparent, with Commie-era monstrosities being pulled down and replaced with modern (if somewhat anonymous) edifices of glass and steel. The main street, Slovenska cesta, does still look as horrible as ever though and I continue to await the day when some farsighted developer realizes that the subterranean shopping monstrosity of Trg ajdovščina would look so much better after a judicious application of dynamite.


Up on the hill above the city sits Ljubljana Castle, which has been under renovation since 1964, was under renovation during my last visit in 1996 and, as of 2006, is still under renovation. To give them some credit, the castle was now looking considerably more patched up than before, the only problem is that they were busily ripping apart what they had already done to make way for the new funicular that is supposed to start running up the hill in 2007 or so. I sampled a horsemeat burger at the uniquely Slovene-Molvanian local fast food chain Hot-Horse, washed it down with a kava (small, black and jolting like a good espresso should be) and stomped back to my barracks.